The pelicans are damned. They are damned in that they are doomed — doomed, many of them, to wear viscous brown cowls of oil until they die. They are damned as individual creatures struggling to survive and reproduce, and they are damned as a species, their habitats befouled and destroyed. From television screens, from Internet slide shows and the pages of magazines, they look at us, their round eyes peering out of their grotesque vestments, until we can't look at them. Their dignity is both utterly violated and implacably intact. Entirely mute, they still manage to say, You did this. You did this. You did this.

But the pelicans are also damned in that they are damned pelicans. As in, "those damned pelicans." As in, "Every time they show that damned fire, they have to show those damned pelicans." As in, "I'm sorry, but eleven human beings died out there, not just a bunch of damned pelicans." As in, "My husband is more important than some damned pelican."

The people who say these things are not lacking in sympathy or pity. They like pelicans. But they loved their husbands and they loved their sons and they loved their fathers and they loved their fiancés and they loved their friends, and they have suffered the experience of having them taken away. They were taken away when the oil rig they were working on fifty miles from shore in the Gulf of Mexico exploded on the night of April 20, and then they were taken away again when the tragedy of the environmental apocalypse — the environmental judgment — unleashed by the explosion outstripped the tragedy of their loss. They were taken away when our loss, as a nation whose health is dependent on the health of our oceans, was deemed greater than the loss of those whose individual worlds were obliterated. They have been taken away every time the story has been told, and the story has been told endlessly. There were eleven of them who died on the Deepwater Horizon. They died on the black ocean, in the black night, far away from our eyes or our interest, in untrammeled obscurity. They died as privately as men working on a crew possibly can, and then they died again as publicly as the availability of videotape would allow. Many people knew they were dead before their families did; now their families have to watch what killed them, have to watch the immediate aftermath of their deaths over and over, as every story about the damned spill leads with footage of the damning fire.

"We've had to turn the TV off," says Tracy Kleppinger, whose husband, Karl, was one of the eleven. "They show it all the time. They call it the fire that started the oil spill. But that's not what it is to me and my son and to the other wives and families. To us, it's the fire that killed our husbands. And that rig is not just a rig. That ocean is not just an ocean. It's the graveyard where Karl is buried."

It is their story. They are at the heart of it, just as all but one of the eleven men who died on the rig were at the heart of the rig, members of a drilling team charged with drilling a two-and-a-half-mile hole into the bottom of the ocean. And yet their story is not the story. The story that begins with the men does not end with them, because the story is like the spill itself: Nobody knows how far it will go and nobody knows its final political, financial, ecological, or spiritual cost. It is the most open-ended American story since the Iranian hostage crisis thirty years ago, and it left the men behind as soon as it began. The footage of the fire doesn't lead to recognition of the men whose lives it destroyed; it leads away from them. It leads, instead, to those damned pelicans, whose eyes stare in double reproach. The pelicans have won by losing, and every time the families of the eleven see them, they feel that America's mourning is misplaced. Indeed, they feel that America is being told to mourn for nature instead of for man — being told that nature is more important than man. They believe the opposite, fervently. They have lived the opposite, each time the men they loved left home to go to work in the middle of the ocean. They have chosen the opposite, and so has an America that lives on the oil that their men took from the ground at unimaginable cost. Now their men are dead, and they feel that America has chosen to forget them. They would like them to be remembered. No, more than that: They would like us to know them and the lives they led and the choices they made, so that we can once and for all answer the question that they ask themselves every time they turn on the television:

What's more important, the lives of eleven good men or a bunch of damned pelicans?

They're all good men. Let's start there. They're good men in that they are Christian men, family men, Southern men. Two live in Texas, four in Mississippi, five in Louisiana; except for one who lives in Baton Rouge, they all live in small towns. Most of them live where they were born and where they grew up. They didn't leave, and they work on the Deepwater Horizon so that they don't have to. By the iron rhythm of three weeks on, three weeks off, they spend half the year far from home so that they can spend the other half at home, in towns like Newellton, Louisiana; or Natchez, Mississippi; or Midfield, Texas. They leave so they can stay, and their story — this story — is the story of how the men who never left become the men who have never come back.

They're all the same kind of men. Though they will die as seamen — as mariners, in the eyes of the law, since the Deepwater Horizon, though called a rig, is really a damned boat — they live on land and are very much of it. They want nothing more from the ocean than the opportunity to get paid punching holes in its floor, and one of them, when asked to go on a deep-sea fishing trip, answers, "Why would I want to do that for? I'm on vacation. I don't want to go to the office." Where they fish is where they hunt: In the woods near their homes or in camps and ranches set aside for the purpose, and if they have boats, they keep them in their backyards, near their trucks and four-wheelers. A couple of them are farmers who lost or left their farms and who first went to the rigs because they like working outside.

They range in age from twenty-two to fifty-six. They are big old boys, most of them, beefy but strong as hell. They like country music and metal, Nascar and college football, and they mostly vote Republican, when they vote at all. They drink beer instead of whiskey and submit to random drug tests before they are allowed to step on the helicopters that bring them to work. The days when men used to go out on the rigs to hide or to run away — the days of so-called oil-field trash — have given way to weeks when the men take classes necessary for professional advancement, and bring along their wives. All but one are married or engaged to be so; all but one have children and devote themselves to them with the special ardor of men who know what it is to have someone missing from their life. The young ones are often the children of divorce; the older ones are as likely as not to be in their second marriage. Several have deaths in their families — a brother, a sister, a sister's baby, all taken away — and two of them, at least, found women in dire circumstances, in what the women called living hells, and succeeded in rescuing them, at least for a while. They are the kind of men who like being saviors. They are not the kind of men who like being saved, except by the Savior himself.

What the men have in common most of all, however, is the central ritual of their lives and the lives of their families: the hitch. At the end of every two or three weeks at home, their moods change. They start visiting friends and family members and saying goodbye. They start grilling out for their children. They take their wives out to dinner. And then, late at night or early in the morning, they're gone. They get in their trucks and start making their way from land to air to sea. If they work for Transocean, as nine of the eleven do, they make their way either to Houma, Louisiana, or, along with workers for the drilling contractor M-I Swaco, to Port Fourchon. They get tested and hand in their paperwork, and then climb onto one of the helicopters chartered to take them out to the rig. Though 50 miles from the closest shoreline, the Deepwater Horizon is nearly 175 miles from Houma and 125 miles from Port Fourchon, and it would seem a long, long way from home for the men if it weren't already their home six months out of the year, and if the men they meet once they get out there weren't already their second families. There are 126 workers out on the rig, and some of them have known one another since the rig was commissioned in a South Korean shipyard ten years ago and a crew was sent to learn the thing as it was being built, and then to bring it through the Indian Ocean and around the Cape of Good Hope and into the Gulf, at five knots an hour. Several members of that original crew are now the senior members of the Deepwater Horizon's drilling team, which is known as one of the most experienced in the business and which has recently gotten substantial bonuses for drilling the deepest well in the world and which, since February 2010, has been drilling in the underwater Mississippi Canyon an intransigent well officially known as Macondo but known to them as the Well from Hell.

Jason Anderson is the tool pusher. At thirty-five, he is the leader of the drilling team and has considerable authority on the rig, which means that he is something of a prodigy. He is serious about work, ambitious as hell, but when the men say he'd give you the shirt off his back, they mean it literally. Back in Korea, there was a guy who must have skipped geography — he didn't know that it snows there. Jason saw him shivering and gave him his heavy coveralls. That's why he's the tool pusher.

Dewey Revette's the driller. From Mississippi. He's forty-eight. He's quiet, but he's always grinning. You can see him every day taking a walk around the deck of the rig before his shift starts — before, in the language of the rig, he goes "on tour." Talks to people. Asks questions. Checks everything out. Careful. If Dewey says it's okay, it probably is. If he says it ain't, well then ...

The two assistant drillers are Stephen Curtis and Don Clark. Stephen's the deer hunter, a slayer of beasts — he got married in formal camo. He's forty and also an ex-marine, so if you're lazy he'll ride you like a mule. He's the coolest of cool, if he likes you, but if he doesn't, he's hard. Don's not like that. At forty-eight, he's the only black man on the drilling team, and he's extremely religious. His son has asked whether he could work on the rig, and he's said no. "Too dangerous."

Karl Kleppinger is one of the floor hands. His nickname is Big Poppa. He's the biggest of the big old boys, thirty-eight, quiet but a prankster. And strong. A few years ago, the rig almost sank when someone up on the bridge opened a valve in the pontoon and it filled with water. The rig listed badly and was evacuated. They put out a call for volunteers to go into the pontoon — into the water — and turn the valve by hand. Karl is one of the guys who did it. Rig would've sunk otherwise. Big Poppa.

There's some young guys, too. You know what's funny about the young guys? They worry more than the old guys. They worry about their kids, they worry about their wives. Shane Roshto, for example, is twenty-two, but every time you see him, he's in the smoke shack. Guys get on him about it a little — Hey, Shane, what the hell? It's three in the morning, why ain't you sleeping? But Shane's got a young wife at home, and though she can change the oil in a truck and skin a deer, she's afraid of the dark. There's a crane operator named Dale Burkeen who's thirty-seven and has sort of taken Shane under his wing. Smoke shack's got a lot of wise men, and he's one of them.

Roy Kemp is another young one. He's twenty-seven. A little brash but funny. He loves to give you a little shit, and what you think about him depends on what you think about getting it. Adam Weise is the only one of the drilling team who's not married. But he's got a girlfriend who's twenty years older than he is. Adam's twenty-four, but he's given his old truck to his girlfriend's son on the grounds that what every boy needs when he turns sixteen is a damned truck. He's endured his family's initial disapproval, and he's in love.

The last two men on the rig floor are the two who don't work for Transocean. They work for M-I Swaco, the contractor that provides the drilling fluid for the well, the so-called mud that does everything from lubricating the drill bit to keeping the oil down in the ground with its weight. They're off to the side a little and kind of quiet, except when the conversation turns to LSU. Blair Manuel is Cajun and, at fifty-six, one of the oldest guys on the rig. "Poppa Bear" he's called. In a few months he's going to get married for the second time, to a woman who lost her husband and fell into a depression that Blair rescued her from. Gordon Jones is a golfer who brings a putter with him every time he comes out. He's twenty-eight, and in a few weeks, maybe even a few days, his wife back home in Baton Rouge will deliver him a second son.

Yes, they are all the same kind of men in that they are all good men. To their families, however, they are all the same kind of men only in that they are all unique, all one of a kind, and all irreplaceable. "I could search the whole world over and never find another Stephen Curtis," his wife, Nancy, says, and in this insistence on singularity she speaks collectively. It is their final commonality. Not only are all eleven working at the very center of the Deepwater Horizon, around what is known as the "drill floor" or the "rig floor," on the night of April 20, they have all chosen to be there for reasons that defy any attempt to understand them as a group. They have all chosen to be there for reasons that only their families can understand. Or, put another way, they have all chosen to be there for reasons we can all understand, because they have chosen to be there out of love.

They are leaving now. One by one, they are making their way to the door, to the truck, to the helicopter, to the rig, to the drill floor. Don Clark is the first to go, because he always seems to be leaving anyway. He is both the most firmly rooted and the most restless. He lives in Newellton, Louisiana. He has always lived in Newellton, Louisiana. He will never leave Newellton, Louisiana. And yet he is always leaving. It happens all the time: His wife, Sheila, looks for him and he's gone. His daughter looks for him and he's gone. They ask each other, "Where Daddy at?" and then they look at the door. Daddy's gone for a walk, in Newellton.

Now, you have to understand something about Newellton: It is small, and it's getting smaller. It is a dying town in what used to be cotton country, right off U. S. Highway 65. More than twenty years ago, it lost its sawmill, followed by its hospital. It lost the stores in its one-block downtown, and it lost the white students in its schools when its schools were consolidated by Tensas Parish. Over the past few years, it has even lost its nursing home. "Newellton was never rich," Sheila Clark says, "but Newellton used to be happier." And yet Don Clark was happy in Newellton. He was born there, one of eleven children who grew up on his parents' farm. They had ninety acres of soybeans. They had the land that their people had when there were no black landowners in Newellton, and in case the children ever forgot it, they had their grandparents living on the property in a two-room house covered in asbestos shingles. Don didn't forget it. He wanted to farm. He went to school in Newellton. He played high school basketball in Newellton. He stayed in Newellton when half his brothers and sisters scattered. But you can't make a living off ninety acres of soybeans in Newellton. The land was leased out, and Don earned a living as a municipal worker. Then he met Sheila in Newellton, and she, who might have been another man's reason for leaving, became his reason to stay.

She was twenty-five, and she was not from Newellton. She was from the city. She was from St. Louis. She was fleeing a bad marriage. She had a young son and she was five months pregnant. Her grandparents lived in Newellton, and she moved in with them. She met Don at a card game arranged by an aunt. She was tall and she was regal, with a face like the faces of the African art she and Don later collected and skin the color of something you had to go into a mine for, lustrous and nearly gold. As soon as she met Don, she called her mother and said, "There's a crazy man here. I think he's courting me." She was a woman on the run, but Don took them all in, and what her son remembered at Don's memorial service was the inexplicable surprise of his mother's smile. He was not used to his mother smiling. She never smiled in St. Louis. But she smiled in Newellton.

Don never went away until he got the job on the rig. Sheila did not want him to take it. She wanted him to stay where he meant to stay, in Newellton. But Don always had an answer for her: "You work in Newellton, you work for people," he said. It was different on the rig. On the rig if you did your job, you could go as far as you wanted to. And they paid you. One day he told her about an old farmhouse he'd seen and took her out to visit it. Oh Lord, he was crazy. The house was so overgrown, it was invisible. "This?" she said. But he persisted, as he always did, and when he found the original wood floor, it was like finding gold, because it was like finding Sheila. You could stare at that floor. But the best part of the house was where it was and where it remains. It's in the middle of the fields. It has a cornfield for a side yard, a soybean field out back, and a pecan grove facing the front entrance. They own none of it; white people do, just as white people own all the rest of the big farms in Newellton. But Don loves living out in the waving green. It calls to him. He opens that front door facing the pecan grove and he's gone. He's taking a walk in Newellton, talking to everyone he meets. Sheila sometimes thinks he's holding Newellton together by walking in it. She sometimes even thinks that Donald Clark is Newellton. Then one day he goes out the door and does not come back. She is used to him leaving. She is used to him being gone. But it's been months now. Don should be coming home.

Blair Manuel loved the farm, and then he loved a woman. He worked on the farm with his daddy, L. D., in Eunice, Louisiana. They worked side by side. But he lost the farm at around the same time he lost his marriage, and he went to work on the rigs. "How else is a forty-year-old farmer going to reinvent himself?" asks Melinda Becnel, his fiancée. Blair met Melinda four years ago on the beach at Gulf Shores. She'd lost her husband four years earlier and was in, she says, "a bad place, a very bad place." Blair walked right up to her and said hello. He wound up moving in with her. They set a date: July 9. It's very important to set dates when you work offshore, because the company sets dates for you in the form of the hitch and you have to work around them. You want to get married? You better set a date. You want to be there when your baby is born? You better set a date. Your child is having a first-birthday party? Set a date. But the rig that Blair was working on was undergoing some changes and the company reassigned him to the Deepwater Horizon.



Karl Kleppinger and his wife, Tracy, in a wedding photo.

Karl Kleppinger takes his truck to Houma. It's a loud truck, and he makes no apologies for it. He loves revving it loud, not only for himself but also for his son, Aaron. Aaron is seventeen. Karl has always known that Aaron loves that truck, wants that truck. But Karl doesn't know if Aaron is ready for that truck. He doesn't know if he ever will be. So he revs it up and he makes it roar, and he watches Aaron's big open face break into a smile.

Karl lives in Natchez, Mississippi. He lives with Aaron and his wife, Tracy. He lives just a couple of doors down from Tracy's parents. He lives near Tracy's sisters. Tracy's family is his family, and has been his family for a long time. "Karl had abandonment issues," Tracy says. "His mother left him when he was a baby. For the rest of his life he went around thinking he wasn't a good enough man. There never was a better one."

Tracy's mother, Kathleen Sills, picked Karl out before Tracy did. He was at a church meeting and after an early life of thinking he was nothing, he met a woman who thought he was something — a woman who came home and told Tracy she'd met the man Tracy was going to marry and then invited him over for dinner. He came and he stayed. After high school he served in the first Gulf war. When he was over there, he wrote Tracy a letter that ended with a PS: "Will you marry me?" She played it cool in her response, until she ended with her answer: "By the way, yes." One day after he came home, he was wondering aloud how a veteran with no degree and no specialized training was ever going to make any money, and a friend said, "I know a job that pays good money and all you need is a pair of steel-toed boots." Karl had to borrow the boots, but he was working on land rigs within a year after Aaron was born.

Was it the fever Aaron had when he was an infant? Karl and Tracy never knew. They just knew that he was out of step with the parade. He has special needs, and they feared that they were going to have to take care of him the rest of their lives. At the very least, Tracy needed to quit her job and stay home with Aaron, and when Karl began working offshore, she could afford to. It's not an easy life, and, in the beginning, Tracy says, "It wasn't easy and it wasn't great. But then something happened. Karl almost died out there. He never told me what it was but he never raised his voice again."

He is so quiet around people he doesn't know that they often think they've offended him. In the manner of quiet men, however, he has shared his love for Aaron by sharing his likes with Aaron, and when you ask Aaron about his father, he provides an instant litany of what they are: "He liked World of Warcraft. He hated Halo. He liked Marvel comics and especially the Mighty Thor. Thor was my favorite, too. He was going to get a tattoo of Thor on his shoulder but then he died on the rig. He liked Nascar. His driver was Tony Stewart. He liked Jesse James and took me to see him. I got his autograph. He liked cooking. Mmm, he made the best pork chops. He liked beating me in chiliburger-eating contests, but he always cheated. And Kiss. He loved Kiss."

Karl doesn't like talking about the rig much. And Tracy doesn't like him talking about it, because the only time he does is when he's worried. It is a bad sign that before the hitch he is talking about it incessantly. He's losing sleep over it, because not only is it a "bad hole," his drilling team is getting pushed to drill it. They are way over budget and way behind schedule. The Well from Hell.

Still, he goes. He is one of the men who drives. It's three or four hours from Natchez to Houma and he takes his truck. He revs it up and then he leaves. A few weeks later, Tracy and Aaron have to go down and pick it up. Aaron opens it up and finds, in the cab, two Kiss CDs, Destroyer and Alive! His father used to bring a lot of CDs on the rig, and Aaron knew they were consumed in the fire that consumed him. But these were his favorites, and he left them behind as a message to his son: "I knew then that he wanted me to have the truck."

Gordon Jones loves his father, Keith, and he loves to play golf. Keith is the one who got him into golf. His brother was a baseball star and Gordon played in his shadow. Keith suggested that Gordon play golf instead. He did, and not only did he become a very good golfer, he was able to play with his father even after Keith divorced his mom and the rest of the family had hard feelings. One night Keith went to visit a fraternity buddy who worked for the drilling-services company M-I Swaco. The fraternity buddy was looking to hire someone who could play a little golf. See, that's how you make sales, when you're selling drilling mud to the oil companies — you take an oilman out to the golf course and you flatter him by playing well but by letting him take your money. Keith mentioned Gordon, and Gordon became a mud engineer. Now — still a few weeks before Keith will turn his grief into a family-unifying crusade to change archaic laws regarding death at sea — he cannot stop weeping when he thinks of Gordon, because he got him the job: "Of all the people why did they have to take sweet Gordon? Why did they have to take the only one of my children who still loves me?"

Jason Anderson flies to New Orleans from Houston and then takes the Transocean shuttle to Port Fourchon. He does it for his wife, Shelley. It's one of the deals they have. She wants his miles. He gets plenty of them, because of how much he travels.

He is a happy, heavyset man in a Hawaiian shirt, with a red goatee framing his face, and he likes his job. Oh, hell yes. He has always liked his job. It discovered him as much as he discovered it. His daddy, Billy Anderson, used to be a high school football coach down there in Matagorda County, Texas, that wide flat live-oak country feeding into the Gulf under great roiling skies, but back in those days football coach wasn't a year-round job even in Texas, and he worked summers to help make ends meet. One of those summers, he started working in the oil business, and that was it: He got out of the veer offense and made oil his life. He didn't work on the rigs, but he sold what the rigs needed and made enough money for his wife and his two kids and something else besides. They lived on a river between Bay City and Blessing, and they took their fishing and hunting so seriously that when Jason lost two of his fingers as a little boy — he grabbed the chain of the bicycle his sister was riding and she kept pedaling — they took the one stub they found from his middle finger and sewed it onto the finger next to it, because his granddaddy told the doctor: "The boy's going to need a trigger finger." And then, when he was ten, he learned what never really means when his fourteen-year-old sister died in an automobile accident. She didn't come back, and neither did his parents' marriage. He stayed with his daddy in the divorce and started living as he would keep on living even when he was living on the rig: taking care of people. In high school the house burned down and Jason left all his valuables in the fire because he had to save the fireman who fell in the swimming pool. It was as if he had double copies of the responsibility gene, and Billy used to wonder if he gained what he got by what was taken away.

Still, Jason was kind of kicking around at community college when Billy had a talk with a neighbor who was a human-resources executive for Transocean. Would Jason like to work on a rig? Both men figured that a couple of hitches chipping paint would put money in his pocket and make a student out of him. Instead, he took to it. He liked everything about it. You get on a rig, you don't have to wonder about what you're going to do — you just have to do it. You just have to shut your mouth and listen and do your job and someone else's besides. The disparities of rank are ruthlessly observed but at the same time so is the idea that everybody eats in the same galley and has the same opportunity. And the galley is like a damned Golden Corral. One day the HR man who got Jason the job received a call from the rig. It was the tool pusher from Jason's crew. "You got any more like him?" he asked. "He's the best chipper I've had in fifteen years."

People who don't know the rigs don't know the role of ambition on them. And people who don't know ambition don't know the role of love in it. But Jason knew both. He had already advanced to floor hand when his roommate Bubba picked him to marry his sister Shelley. Hell, Bubba dressed Jason for his first date with Shelley, because Bubba knew what Shelley liked, and he didn't want to take any chances. Of course, Shelley liked Jason; he was a likable guy. But she saw something different than just another country boy trying to impress her with a long-sleeved button-down shirt and a pair of 20X jeans and a big belt buckle. She saw a man who when he said he was going to do something, did it. And Jason was going to be OIM — the offshore installation manager, who is the rig's ultimate authority. And Shelley said, early on, that wherever he went, she would go with him, as long as it was in Texas. Shelley was Texas, the way that Don Clark was Newellton. She was Texas blond, with a handshake like a field hand's. She'd say things like, "I'm from Texas, I like being from Texas, I like saying I'm from Texas, I want my children to be from Texas." She had these amazing eyes, wide-open and unblinking and blue as paint, eyes you couldn't lie to. And Jason never did. Bubba moved out, Shelley moved in, and that's where they stayed, on a farm road in Midfield, and no matter how far Jason went, or how long he stayed, he always came back to Shelley and to Texas.

Jason went through every job on the drilling team and made tool pusher at an age when most men are still floor hands. This year Jason got offered a "land job" in Houston: well control instructor for Transocean, specializing in blowout prevention. A land job is a good job to get if you want to be rig manager — if you want to be the man who sits in an office building in Houston and tells the OIM what to do. And Jason does. He wants to be rig manager. But he hasn't been senior tool pusher yet, and he wants to be senior tool pusher. He wants to be OIM. He wants every job there is to get on a rig. That way nobody can say boo if one day he has to go to work wearing loafers.

He doesn't take the land job. He doesn't want to live in Houston, and neither does Shelley. They want to stay in the country, in the real Texas, in the house they started in and had two kids in and are now expanding with some of Jason's bonus money, with a kitchen island as big as Cowboys Stadium. He takes the job as senior tool pusher instead, on the Discoverer Spirit, a drill ship. He's supposed to start on April 14. Then he gets a call from the Horizon's rig manager, asking him to stay on as the Horizon's tool pusher for one more week. It's in the interest of a smooth transition, the rig manager says, though Jason wonders if he just wants an experienced hand to help complete the Well from Hell. He says yes, because he always has. He tells Shelley that it'll work out fine, that he'll get a chance to unpack his own locker and say goodbye to guys like Karl Kleppinger. Then, as they're pulling out of the driveway on the way to the airport, he asks, "If anything happens to me, will you and the kids stay in the house?" She looks at him with those unblinking eyes and says yes. Because she can see by the look on his face that it's important to him. And because she always has.

It's an unnatural thing, the Deepwater Horizon. It is, indeed, the very embodiment of the needs it's supposed to serve, a monster continually bestirred. It is a boat, a ship, that floats on top of an ocean drilling an oil well a mile below the surface, and it does not move, despite currents and waves and weather. It does not move, very simply, by always moving: by never stopping. It has eight engines called thrusters, two to a corner, that interact through computers with global-positioning satellites, and they can never stop firing, adjusting, thrusting. As a result, the monster has its own needs, too. To drill for oil, it needs frequent and massive deliveries of diesel fuel, a hundred thousand to two hundred thousand gallons at a time. It needs supply ships to continually circle it and make deliveries not only of fuel and drilling mud but also of food and especially water, because in order to keep the crews in clean coveralls and clean sheets it has four enormous washing machines that wash clothes twenty-four hours a day. And mostly, it needs to justify its own expense — BP pays Transocean a half million dollars a day for the privilege of leasing it — and so the need it serves by never stopping is the need never to stop: to keep working. It is never dark, and it is never silent. Its lights are always burning, and though often compared to a city unto itself, it is more like a casino in the middle of the ocean.

It comes as no surprise, then, that there is pressure to produce — to strike oil. The Deepwater Horizon is the second Transocean rig to drill the well known to the Minerals Management Service as Mississippi Canyon block 252, to BP as Macondo, and to the drilling team as the Well from Hell. The first rig, the Marianas, tried drilling it in the fall of 2009, until it was damaged in a hurricane and had to be repaired. The Deepwater Horizon resumed drilling in February and promptly had to "cut pipe" in March, when the drill bit got stuck and a few thousand feet of drill pipe had to be left in the hole, and the well was attacked from a different direction. The Well from Hell is as gassy as a colicky baby. Men get used to feeling "kickbacks" — the burps of methane gas that are sometimes strong enough to force the drill pipe back up the well — and to seeing the warning lights on deck that prohibit chipping and other deck work that might cause sparks and also lighting a damned cigarette. The Well from Hell has cost BP weeks of added rig time and is at least $20 million over budget. By April 20, however, drilling has been completed. All that is required is for the well to be plugged with cement and for seawater to displace the drilling mud that BP is paying M-I Swaco millions of dollars for. It is not an uncomplicated process, but once it is done, the Deepwater Horizon can move on to new holes, and a production rig can begin tapping the vast and strangely vehement reservoir of oil and gas secreted two and a half miles beneath Macondo's wellhead.

No, it is no surprise that BP pushes for the completion of the well, nor that the push comes from one of the BP managers assigned to the rig — one of its so-called company men. It is the company man's job to push. It is not his job to be part of the so-called Transocean family of crew members. The company man eats in the same galley as the crew members but not at the same tables. The company man does not have the same quarters as the crew members, and he does not wear the same clothes. The crew members wear Transocean-issued magenta coveralls when they're on tour, blue coveralls when they're off. The company man wears, in the words of one Deepwater Horizon survivor, "jeans, a BP shirt, and a nice shiny white hard hat." There is no surprise when a company man proposes changes in certain procedures and objectives because the company man is, in another survivor's words, "always trying to change things." There is not even any surprise when, at a preshift meeting on April 20, the company man challenges the authority of Transocean's OIM. What does surprise the crew members of Deepwater Horizon, however, is how the OIM responds.

The OIM's name is Jimmy Wayne Harrell. The company man's name is Robert Kaluza. The meeting is the standard "pre-tour" meeting held twice a day, at 11:00 A.M. and 11:00 P.M., before the start of each twelve-hour shift at noon and midnight. At most pre-tours, the lines of authority are clear, if contested: The BP company man tells the OIM and the driller what he wants accomplished, and the driller tells the various crews how they're going to accomplish it. At the 11:00 A.M. meeting on April 20, however, Robert Kaluza tells the drilling team how they're going to displace the mud from the well and replace it with seawater. When he proposes a procedure that runs counter to the procedures the drilling team has in place, Dewey Revette, the driller, fresh from his circuit around the deck, begins to argue with him. Revette thinks that what Kaluza is proposing is reckless and premature, and when the argument grows heated, what the various crew members witnessing it remember is the passion and anger of an inherently careful man. "Dewey got pretty hot," one says. Finally, the company man invokes his own sense of authority and says, "Well, that's how it's going to be." And now it is up to Jimmy Wayne Harrell. BP leases the rig, but Transocean owns it and employs the workers gathered at the pre-tour meeting. They have always understood the Transocean OIM to be the ultimate authority on the rig, the one man who has the power to override the interests of the company man in favor of the interests of the Transocean workers and their safety. And what Jimmy Wayne Harrell says, in response to Robert Kaluza's dictum, is, according to sworn testimony offered in the Coast Guard investigation of the Deepwater Horizon disaster: "Well, I guess that's what we have those pinchers for."

Those pinchers: the blowout preventer.

Those pinchers: the massive mechanical shears that are supposed to cut the pipe and seal the well in the event of catastrophe.

Those pinchers: what you rely on when you're already dead but just haven't gotten to heaven yet.

Now, it should be understood that probably neither Jimmy Wayne Harrell nor Robert Kaluza is a bad man. Indeed, they're probably good men, in the same way that the eleven men who died less than twelve hours after the pre-tour are good men, in the same way that most of us can claim to be good men: They probably love their families and have families that love them.

They probably have reasons for being on the Deepwater Horizon that are a complicated calculus of human need and human want and terrible human vulnerability, just like virtually every single member of Deepwater Horizon's doomed drilling team. But the tragedy of the Deepwater Horizon and the Well from Hell is not a human tragedy; it is a tragedy set in motion by humans. There has been, from the beginning, the possibility of criminal charges being filed in connection with what happened on the rig, and Kaluza pleaded the Fifth during the Coast Guard investigation while Harrell's testimony was at variance with the sworn testimony of several survivors. But what is the crime, exactly, and who or what is it against? Is it against the men? Are they innocent victims of something like negligent homicide? Or is it against something larger — the ocean, creation, God — in which case the men's role is far more complicated? The stories that each family tells about each man are stories of innocence, even blamelessness. But the story about the Deepwater Horizon is not about innocence or anything even close. It is about culpability. It is about everyone's role as an accomplice, from Robert Kaluza to Tony Hayward to the soccer mom filling up the SUV — to us. Why should the eleven men who died so close to the tragedy be the only ones spared?

"The way I look at it," Tracy Kleppinger says, "the only reason that 115 men got off that rig alive is because Karl and everybody else on that rig floor were doing their jobs. They died doing their jobs. They died fighting that well. They were the first to fight that well. The way I look at them — the only way I can look at them — is as American heroes."

But of course, if they died doing their jobs, they died drilling and completing the well, not fighting it. Does that make them any less heroic? Any less sympathetic? Any less tragic? It does not. It makes them men who died because they were willing to do dirty work — our dirty work. It makes them men who need to be forgiven as well as mourned. And it makes them the only men involved in this whole gruesome tale who deserve not just our anger, not just our judgment, but our apologies.

Sheila goes to the door of the white house in the green fields and walks outside. Don is still not home. She walks to the field across the street, a sea of corn seven feet tall. It moves in the hot breeze like water and she touches it. "Did Don like his job?" she asks. "I don't know. Does anyone like that job? I don't think I'd like that job."

She gets in the car and drives to the Dixie Dandy. Don would have walked. The Dixie Dandy is a grocery store combined with a gas station and a barbecue shack. It is the last big business in Newellton, and Don went there — wound up there — every day. Sheila drives, and when she gets there, she meets one of Don's brothers. He looks just like him, trim and contained, one of the remaining Clarks of Newellton. He explains that the Dixie Dandy is the last skin on Newellton's bones, the last thing that permits Newellton to call itself a town. "When it goes, it's all gone," he says, and when Sheila backs out of the parking lot, he calls to her: "Don't forget us."

"I wonder if Alonzo is home," Sheila says once she's back on the road. "I think I'll go see Alonzo." Alonzo is Alonzo Petty. He and his brother were the first Newellton men to work on the rigs and gave Don his application. He was on the Deepwater Horizon when Don died. After Don's memorial service in the gymnasium of Newellton's elementary school — the bodiless service of a cremated man — he came over to talk to Sheila, but he couldn't get the words out. He wanted to tell Sheila what happened, and Sheila wanted to know, because no one had told her. Transocean has never told any of the families what happened to their men. And BP has never contacted them to offer explanation or sympathy or apology. Sheila was desperate to know. But when Alonzo opened his mouth, no words came out.

Alonzo is home when Sheila gets there. He should be out on the rig, but his rig was the Deepwater Horizon. He went to Korea to see it being built. Now he is rigless, and he is mowing his lawn on a riding mower. He is wearing faded red Halliburton coveralls, the name NICK stitched on the breast, and a black skullcap. He is a wiry man with hollows in his face and a jet-black goatee. He gets off the mower and takes a seat against the garage, bringing his knees up and shooing his grandkids inside. "How you been doing, Sheila?" he asks.

She sits across from him, hunched over, hands folded between her knees, fingertips pointed to the ground. She's very quiet, and he looks at her now, slowly, his body untangling itself in his seat. "I hate it to death what happened to Don," he finally says. "I still hate it, because it could have been avoided. It was a bad hole. But it wasn't the worst hole. Anybody who says it was the worst hole just ain't been working offshore long enough. And it was finished. We were displacing it. Ain't no big deal, what we were doing. We displace holes in hurricanes. We had procedures for displacing holes. But they changed the procedures. They cut corners. Ain't no mystery what happened. They put everything on the cement job and it was a bad cement job. They started getting mud back out of the hole. That ain't supposed to happen. You ain't supposed to get nothing back. They should have shut down that hole then." He's looking at her now, with a transfixed and transfixing glare. "The first thing I asked the fellas when we got to the lifeboat was 'Where Don at? Where Don at?' I knew Don. I talked to Don every night out there. Nothing going to bring him back, Sheila. But you need to know it didn't have to happen. Now you got to look out for Number One. You know what I'm saying? You got to make them remember your name. You got to make them remember Don's name. You know what I'm saying, Sheila?"

"I know what you're saying," Sheila says quietly. "But why didn't you tell me this before?"

His face changes, as if he's been slapped. But he holds her eye. "Because after what happened out there," he says, "I couldn't even look at you."

The ocean is always there. They can smell it. During the day, it's blue, it's green, depending on its mood, and it shimmers with wonders: pods of dolphins and whales. Flashing schools of barracuda. Flying fish. Pelicans. At night, it's different: It's black, and its annihilating prospect merges with a sky robbed of stars by the rig's frantic light. The men don't look at the ocean at night, because there's nothing to see.

Still, even if they're working at the heart of the rig — the complex of workstations and machines surrounding and servicing the drill — they can't get away from it. At the bottom of the complex is the moon pool, and the moon pool is the ocean, the hole through which the drill leaves the rig. Up one floor is the floor containing the pump room and the pit room, where the drilling mud is pumped in and out of the well. Up another floor is the shaker shack, where the circulating mud is shaken through filters, and the mud hut where it's analyzed. At the top is the drill floor, where the driller and the two assistant drillers control the drill from the drill shack. The drill floor is cramped, loud, and bright, and it's where the drilling team works.

The drilling team that's working the night of April 20 is on the last shift of its hitch. Each man working is hours away from getting on a helicopter and getting off the rig. But they've been too busy to think about it. Though the well has been sealed by Halliburton with a cement plug, it's been returning mud all shift, and the mud's been gassy and impure. They're not wearing the usual Transocean coveralls but rather white ones meant to be worn around the mud. Here is where they all are:

At around 8:30, Karl Kleppinger is in the shaker shack. It's been a tough day but there's no sense of emergency, because when a floor hand comes to see Karl, he finds Big Poppa about to nod off. He nudges him alert. That's the last time the floor hand remembers seeing him. It's also the last time he remembers seeing Gordon Jones and Blair Manuel in the mud hut. Gordon Jones does not have to be there for another three hours, but he relieves another mud engineer who looks tired. Get some sleep, he says.

Adam Weise and Shane Roshto are standing at a workbench in the pump room, trying to fix a valve. They're giving each other shit, as always. At around 8:45, though, Adam calls two floor hands into the pump room and asks them to clean two pollution pans that have filled up with sludge. This is the second time during the shift the pollution pans have required cleaning. This has never happened before. It's never even happened once. "This is weird," Adam says. "I wonder what's going on."

Upstairs, on the drill floor, there are three men in the drill shack: Jason Anderson, Dewey Revette, and Stephen Curtis. Don Clark is the only one who isn't there. Though an assistant driller, he went out through the open door and is doing work out on the deck. The rest of them are doing what Dewey Revette said they'd do when he lost the argument at pre-tour. He'd said, "We'll work it out on the drill floor." That's what's happening now. The drill shack is about the size of a bedroom, with blackened windows and a mesh roof. Inside are screens and monitors and two big reclining chairs, each with a joystick. When Jason Anderson became a driller, he was so proud that the chairs were made by the company that makes the seats for Porsche. Now he's in one, in the fight of — and for — his life.

Do they know this? They know that there is a "situation": Stephen Curtis sends out a call for help from the drill shack. Jason Anderson is talking about shutting the well down. That it isn't shut down leads Jason's wife, Shelley, to believe he is not aware of the peril they're in: "I know Jason. If he knew that the situation was as serious as it was, he would have shut down the well. All he wanted to do — all any one of them wanted to do — was survive and come home to their families."

An hour after they started, the two floor hands, Dan Barron and Caleb Holloway, finish cleaning the pollution pans. They are standing on the drill floor, next to a door to the deck. They are used to "kicks," the little belches of the deep earth below the deep water. But what happens now is the earth's groaning vengeance: A methane bubble rises up through the well and what it produces when it hits looks for all the world like something from the movies: a gusher. It blows mud and seawater out of the hole, up through the derrick, and into the sky, whence it falls as black rain. Everybody on the rig floor is painted black. Everybody on the deck, too. Even people in the supply boats surrounding the rig are spattered in mud. There is an unimaginable moment of shock, panic, and crazed relief as something impossible happens on the Deepwater Horizon: Its lights burn even brighter. Its generators, force-fed methane, go crazy until the lights finally explode and go out. In that moment, Caleb Holloway says to Dan Barron: "I smell gas. Run." They go out through the door, and Don Clark is running in. Alonzo Petty says that he's heard that Don is responding to an urgent page from the drill floor; the floor hands figure he's just running instinctively toward the drill floor to help. He goes through the open door and is greeted, immediately, by the second blast, one that rips steel doors from their hinges and knocks the crane operator, Dale Burkeen, to his death. For a second, there is only the sound of gas in the darkness — the sound of a gas jet magnified to inhuman scale, the aaaaaaah amplified to a terrible roar — and for a second the ocean is restored to what it has always been, black and vast and as dismissive of human intrusion as it is of human hopes and human fears. Maybe even the stars come out.

Then, the fire.

Published in the September 2010 issue.

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