U.S. NAVY

Charles McKay

For Bar Harbor native Charles McKay, World War II ended in 1978. That was the year he battled colon cancer — a cancer he firmly believes was a result of his exposure to atomic radiation as a Navy deep-sea diver.

“There’s no doubt in my mind,” he told a visitor to his Hadley Point summer home in Bar Harbor.

He didn’t set out to be an activist “working the Hill,” but circumstances and his sense of justice made him one.

One of seven children, McKay went to Portland after graduating from the former Bar Harbor High School in 1943. Having learned a couple of handy trades from his tinsmith/roofer father, he got a job with a Portland roofing company.

He was just 17 when he joined the Navy. He started his training in Newport, R.I., before being sent to deep-sea diving school in Washington, D.C.

Now a seasoned hand of 18, he was assigned to a sub tender and taught to operate a diving bell for underwater rescue.

He served at Pearl Harbor, Australia, Borneo and, significantly, in October of 1945, Hiroshima. He, along with thousands of other service personnel, was exposed to atomic radiation in the ruined Japanese city.

“Our ship got heavily radiated,” he said.

More memorable was his mission to the Bikini Atoll in the South Pacific where, in July of 1946, he took part in Operation Crossroads, later dubbed “America’s Chernobyl.”

On July 1, a uranium bomb was dropped from 500 feet. The target was an unmanned Japanese cruiser. But the bomb missed the target by 2,000 feet and sank five unmanned vessels fitted with monitoring devices.

“We dove on the ships to recover the monitoring equipment,” McKay said.

In so doing, the Navy divers spent hours in an underwater Ground Zero, handling heavily radiated equipment hours after the blast. On July 25, a plutonium bomb was exploded 90 feet under water, sending up a huge mushroom-shaped column of boiling water. Nine vessels — captured warships and other unmanned ships carrying monitoring equipment — sank to the bottom due to the terrific force of the blast.

Again, Navy divers, swimming in radioactive water, went down to recover monitoring equipment.

He left the service in 1946 and ran a diving and salvage business along the Maine coast. He and two partners repaired underwater pipelines, inspected pilings, recovered lost valuables and, in two cases, recovered drowning victims.

McKay was a Bar Harbor motorcycle cop for three years, from 1948 to 1951.

He married in 1952; he and wife Venessa had four children. He attended the University of Maine, earning a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering, and went on to graduate study before starting a 38-year career with DuPont as an aerospace engineering manager.

At age 52 he was diagnosed with colon cancer. The 32-year interval between radiation exposure, latency and full-blown cancer was exactly what Japanese researchers in the 1980s had predicted, McKay said.

While wounded and ailing veterans of World War II received medical services from a grateful nation, servicemen exposed to radiation, whose cancer rates were much higher than those of the general public, went unacknowledged and, often, untreated.

McKay went to work with and on behalf of other veterans who had been exposed while bivouacking in radioactive wastelands in the Nevada desert or scrubbing contaminated decks in the Pacific.

Organized as the national Association for Atomic Veterans, he labored as an unpaid lobbyist in Washington, trying to raise awareness of the plight of this large but ignored constituency.

He experienced stall tactics, denials and run-arounds.

“The Navy’s position was if you couldn’t smell it, taste it or see it, you were OK.”

McKay and the members of his organization eventually persuaded the Veterans Administration to acknowledge “presumptive diseases” — cancers presumed connected to exposure to radiation during military service.

“They’re doing a better job of taking care of veterans who have been exposed,” he said.

McKay will not criticize his government. But he noted, ominously, that to this day, U.S. forces are using potentially toxic depleted uranium for armor-piercing munitions and enhanced armor protection.

— Stephen Fay