Apr 21, 2011

A departed friend

Chuck Brugman was too young to enlist. So he told a patriotic lie and became a decorated Marine veteran of the Pacific War, a dive-bomber gunner.

In 1946 he mastered the brass hard hat and earned an international reputation as the man to call when things went bad under the seas. He early took to the crazy  Gagnon/Cousteau inventions, moved to  American Samoa, and was THE diver and divemaster of   those Polynesian islands from 1970s through the1990s.  Chuck died in Tutuila last week at 86, depriving us of a gentle friend, a  bona fide hero who had every justification for macho boasting but who never did.

He was my personal connection to sanity for one long  island-bound, office-chained year. Whether aboard his stout  little catamaran Manu Sina, or too deep off Step Rock, or at the Pago Pago Yacht Club after the dives, he was a man with much to teach. Which he did, quietly and gently; if any Chuck tale had a butt, he made very sure it was Chuck.

May there be there be untouched reefs in your new home.

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