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Robert Ballard
Discoverer of the Titanic
Robert Ballard: I had to wait an entire year before I could go back. The longest year of my life waiting to go back for the weather window to open up. We got back out there. We went out with ALVIN and our little JJ, the vehicle I wanted to send inside to investigate the Titanic. Beautiful weather -- gosh, it was gorgeous. It was the summer season, the perfect time to dive. We went out. We had satellite navigation. We knew exactly where the Titanic was. We put in our tracking network, and I got into ALVIN, buttoned up, put it over the side, pulled the valves, to vent it, and down we went. We now began to fall like a big rock for two and a half hours, we're falling towards the titanic with all this great anticipation. For the first time seeing it, landing on its deck, tasting it, having it pop into reality from the myth that it was living in, to make it real. Falling throught total darkness, and then everything started to go to hell. Everything. We started to have our maiden voyage. The first thing that started to happen was the sonar stopped working, so we couldn't sweep out and find the ship. Well, that's okay, because I've got my tracking, and I know where I am, and I'll just drive over there. Then the tracking went out. So now I don't know where I am. I can't reach out. All I am is a ball somewhere in the ocean, with a little window. Am I a mile from the Titanic? Is it behind me? Is it in front of me? Is it right or left? Then the submarine starts to take on water into the battery systems, and the alarms start coming on. And, the pilot's looking at me. We haven't got sonar, we haven't got tracking, we are becoming deaf, dumb, and blind down there, and on top of that, the submarine is taking on water and it's penetrating into the batteries, and it's starting to short circuit the batteries. It's just turning into disaster, and the pilot says, "Look, we are going to have to abort." "No! No, no, no. Come on, I've waited so long for this moment. Don't abort the dive."
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Robert Ballard
Discoverer of the Titanic
Like the space shuttle, you could never lose sight of the fact that you were doing something dangerous. It may be apparently routine, but if you mess up, it will bite you, and it has over the years. I had a fire once -- not in ALVIN, in a French bathyscaphe -- at 9,000 feet, and almost died. I crashed into the side of a volcano at 20,000 feet and almost died. I got stuck in a crack for hours and almost died. Now I don't mean that it's really risky. It's probably safer than flying from here to La Guardia. Those planes fall out of the sky, and they crash and burn, and I suspect more people per hours have actually died in airplanes than in deep submergence. Only one person has ever died in a deep submersible, only one.
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Sir Roger Bannister
Track and Field Legend
When I decided that the weather [was right], I had to take the chance. The real thought in my mind -- and by then I did have a coach, Franz Stampfl, we met by chance in the train -- I hadn't plan to do it. He said, "If the weather is bad, what you have to remember is that (a), I think you can run it in 3:56," which is what a coach would say, so I didn't pay too much attention to that. The second thing he said is that, "If you have the opportunity -- not a perfect opportunity -- and you don't take it, you may never have another chance." It was that thought, I think, which eventually led me to attempt it.
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Sir Roger Bannister
Track and Field Legend
I wanted to go rowing on the River Severn near Bewdley, and the person who hired out the boats said, "No, it's too rough." You know, "It's not safe to go out." And I made such a pest of myself that my father said, "All right. You know, we will go out." And it proved to be dangerous and frightening but that's an instance of the determination I had to try to do things, and later on if there was any opportunity to climb a mountain, or to go ballooning, or some adventurous activity, I would always be keen to do it. And, it's perhaps fortunate that nothing ever went wrong, but my discovery in Bath was of the countryside. I loved the countryside. I cycled, from the age of sort of 10 to 15, all around Bath and Somerset and Cheddar Gorge, and the sites of castles and country houses. And I remember that as a time of freedom, often perhaps a bit solitary, but great excitement of discovery and exploration.
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Ehud Barak
Former Prime Minister of Israel
There was in the unit an emergency need to spread convoys of ammunition to maybe a dozen different points along the border, some of them 50 miles away from the boot camp. And as a result of the need to prepare at the same time all the units, there was a shortage of officers or NCOs that could lead an ammunition convoy to some desert place. The boot camp trainees were asked whether someone of us know how to read a map and can lead convoy a dark night to a certain position 50 miles from here. No one responded, and it seemed to be a kind of real emergency and I thought I can. So I raised my hand and I said simply, "I can do it." I had some experience in reading a map from summer camps and summer treks where I made the point of always knowing exactly where I was. So I get acquainted to looking at the map and it seemed to me that I understand it. I can read it. I still to this day remember the eyes of the battalion commander when he released me into the darkness kind of contemplating what will happen. If I cross the border with the convoy or something else, who will be responsible? But in a way he didn't have an alternative at the moment and he sent me.
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Ehud Barak
Former Prime Minister of Israel
In the Six Day War, I commanded a small reconnaissance unit, and it took us just four days to reach the Canal and immediately I asked myself, okay, nothing is going to happen here anymore so we jumped a few hundred miles to the other side. Maybe something will happen in the Golan Heights, and it happened that we came at the last hours of preparation for climbing on the Golan Heights, so we joined the Golan Heights battle as well, beginning at the northern edge and ending at Quneitra . But, you know, I'm smiling kind of recalling it now, but I should admit the first battles were quite a devastating -- kind of revealing -- experience.
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Ehud Barak
Former Prime Minister of Israel
My first real battle experience was in the Six Days War. A few operations before then, but on a small scale. And the real experience, the memories of tough, demanding psychological environment where most people are tending to lose their sense of direction and cohesion of action. The vehicles exploding around you, people killed, the bitter, sweet smell of human burned bodies all around, the feeling of being not in full control.
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Ehud Barak
Former Prime Minister of Israel
I still remember an operation where we had some of our pilots taken by the Egyptians during the war of attrition. They intercepted some of those with SAM missiles and we decided that the only way to convince the Egyptians to release them is by taking some Egyptian pilots and bring them to Israel and then suggest that we will kind of exchange them. And the only way that we found was to stop at a road leading to an Egyptian Air Force (base), back deep in the Nile Valley, by appearing as an Egyptian military police to move them from the road and to take over some pilots. I initiated such a raid and I was one of the two policemen with the motorcycles, fully dressed as an Egyptian MP with someone who talked Baladic -- kind of a street Egyptian -- much better than I could, in a much more convincing way, and we really made it. And we established a kind of check post on the road to an Egyptian Air Force base and we began to take vehicles at midnight. There was not a lot of transportation. We ended up with 40 people in some six or eight trucks and vehicles, and not a single man in uniform.
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