What Trump’s Navy Secretary Nominee Cao Pulled From the Bottom of the Ocean Will Leave You Speechless!

By George Magazine

Before his ascent into the highest civilian offices of the Pentagon, Hung Cao spent a quarter century performing the grueling, high-stakes military work that rarely makes prime-time television. That relative anonymity vanished when he launched high-profile political bids in Virginia and subsequently climbed the ranks of the Department of the Navy. President Donald Trump nominated Cao, who had been serving in an acting capacity, to take over permanently as Secretary of the Navy. With that nomination came intense national scrutiny, and internet sleuths quickly unearthed an extraordinary entry on his military record: his direct involvement in the aftermath of one of the late twentieth century’s most heartbreaking tragedies, the loss of John F. Kennedy Jr.

At the time, Cao was a young officer in Navy Special Operations, qualified as a deep-sea diver and salvage specialist. When Kennedy’s aircraft failed to arrive at its destination, an anxious nation watched a massive search-and-rescue operation rapidly evolve into a grim recovery mission. Naval assets mobilized to the waters off Massachusetts, including the salvage and rescue ship USS Grasp. Cao was thrust into the center of the effort as the mission’s operations officer, tasked with coordinating the salvage teams and overseeing logistics in the open ocean.

The pressure on the recovery crew was immense. The entire country, the media, and the Kennedy family were desperately waiting for answers. Operating in murky, cold coastal waters with sophisticated side-scan sonar, the naval team located the scattered wreckage sitting more than one hundred feet down on the ocean floor within roughly twelve hours of beginning their grid search.

Locating the aircraft was only half the battle. Deep-sea diving under heavy salvage conditions is physically taxing and hazardous. Divers absorb nitrogen under pressure, requiring strict limits on underwater exposure to prevent decompression sickness. As the operation progressed, all primary divers became what the Navy terms “dirty,” meaning their saturation levels had hit safety thresholds, requiring mandatory surface decompression and a twenty-four-hour rest period before they could dive again.

With ocean weather threatening to turn and the mission hanging in the balance, Cao chose to gear up and dive into the depths himself, accompanied by another salvage diver. Down in the gloom of the Atlantic seabed, Cao personally rigged lifting straps to the mangled aluminum fuselage so the salvage ship’s crane could haul the wreckage to the surface. Even more somber was the task of recovering the bodies of Kennedy, his wife, and her sister, ensuring they could be returned home.

Cao later described the recovery as one of the most emotionally profound missions of his life. He reflected on how surreal it was to lay “America’s son” to rest, invoking the iconic image etched into the American psyche of a three-year-old JFK Jr. saluting his assassinated father’s casket in 1963. For Cao, who had arrived on American soil in 1975 as a refugee fleeing the fall of Saigon, the salvage was a solemn duty to bring closure to a family and a country that had provided his own family freedom and opportunity.

Cao went on to complete a distinguished twenty-five-year naval career, deploying to combat zones across Iraq, Afghanistan, and Somalia. From the depths of the Atlantic salvage operations to the helm of the United States Navy, his career reflects the silent, heavy burdens borne by military divers when history calls them into the deep.

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