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I was one of the divers who searched for Steve Feldman on the recovery mission Steve Bielenda organized in 1991. In Robert Kurson's Shadow Divers you will see this recovery mission portrayed as a thinly veiled attempt to "claim jump" the U-869. This assertion is only one of Kurson's many errors of fact. In the several hours it took to reach the U-869 aboard the Eagle's Nest that astringently cool morning, nobody talked about going inside the wreck to recover china. What we talked about, mainly, were the conditions we might encounter on the wreck and the various ways of pulling off an effective search. A month had passed since Feldman's death, and the currents over the wreck were reportedly strong. We all knew that our chances of recovering Feldman were slim. Yet, the night before, I had received a call from a friend, a former Special Forces Combat Swimmer who now specializes in search and recovery. "A drowning victim's lungs will often fill with water and weigh the body down," he had told me. "If that happened to Feldman, he'll still be near the U-boat, despite the current." Aboard the Eagle's Nest, Bielenda assigned each dive team a quadrant to search. These quadrants lay outside the wreck. Hank Garvin and I made the first dive and set the hook, lifting it off the sand at 230 feet and shackling it to the pressure hull forward of the hole where the conning tower had stood. In the grey light we swam thirty feet beyond the starboard hull and began our partial circumnavigation of the wreck. We moved forward, not examining the U-Boat, as we were tempted to do, but keeping our vision focused on the outlying sand. We rounded the bow and searched a short section along the port hull. Then, low on air and having found no trace of Feldman, we headed up the anchor line. Back on board the Eagle's Nest, we were debriefed to insure that the next dive team covered new territory. This debriefing was captured on videotape. In successive debriefings not a single diver said anything about venturing inside the U-869. What they said was that all ambient light around the wreck had disappeared, making a dangerous search even more difficult in dark water. After the dive, I wanted nothing more to do with the U-869, well aware, as we all were, of the frightful desecration taking place inside another German submarine, the U-853. No bone left unturned there. I felt at the time, as I feel today, that the Seeker's claim to the U-869 was morally indefensible. As with the Titanic, Lusitania, Empress of Ireland, U-853, and other shipwrecks where loss of life has been vast and catastrophic and where the wrecks themselves serve as tombs that should not be disturbed for any reason, the U-869 belongs only to the dead. The motivation behind this recovery mission was to provide solace to Feldman's family, who dearly wanted his body back. What kind of person would quarrel with that? That this humane effort aroused such ire among the Seeker's crew proves only how easy it is, for even brave and honorable men, to succumb to the twin seductions of glory and loot--a complex truth Kurson misses.