When the USS Monitor sank off Cape Hatteras in 1862, the 16 men she took with her were listed as missing in action. Last summer, Navy Cmdr. Barbara Scholley brought two of them home.

One of the Navy's top diving officers, Scholley led last summer's recovery mission that raised the Monitor's turret. Bringing the soldiers home was one highlight from the effort that she shared with students at Monterey High School on Wednesday.

An early armored ship, the Monitor was the first to use a revolving turret and the first to put the engine below the waterline. The Civil War battle between the Monitor and the Merrimac marked a turning point in ocean warfare.

The Monitor sank while being towed to its second battle and was lost to the Navy until 1973, when a group of Duke University scientists located her off Cape Hatteras.

The ship is now protected in the Monitor National Marine Sanctuary, and officials from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Navy are collaborating to bring pieces to the surface.

Scholley was in town this week to speak at the Navy Postgraduate School, or NPS, and was excited to hear that Monterey High had two oceanography classes that also wanted to hear about her work.

"I just want the kids to see what kind of cool jobs are available in the sciences," she said. "It's a wonderful career, just fascinating."

Scholley's visit to the school was "great," said oceanography teacher Kelly Kiefer. She'd just finished a deep ocean unit with her students when she heard from the Naval Postgraduate School that Scholley was available to visit her classes.

Scholley described diving as "pretty physically demanding work" and gave students a glimpse of the expertise needed to work at depths. Some divers involved in raising the Monitor lived in an enclosed chamber that kept the pressure on their bodies equivalent to what they'd experience at 180 feet, allowing them to dive for 12 hours at a time without decompressing.

For the chance to perform these extended dives, four divers at a time shared a tiny room for two weeks. Under high pressures, the nitrogen in normal air causes a drunken-like state called nitrogen narcosis, so the divers breathed a helium-oxygen mixture that Scholley said made them sound like Mickey Mouse.

When they were finished, these divers had to undergo a 66-hour decompression before they could return to the main ship. When divers decompress too quickly, gas that has dissolved in their blood and tissues forms bubbles in the body, causing a potentially deadly condition commonly called the bends.

The rest of the dives were "regular" deep sea dives. For these, divers, including Scholley, worked for about 40 minutes at time, and then spent 3 hours and 15 minutes decompressing.

The divers worked for six weeks examining, cleaning and excavating the Monitor's turret. The boat turned over when it sank, so they had to get

the turret out from underneath. On Aug. 5, the work paid off when they brought the Monitor's turret to the surface, intact.

"The only nicks you're going to see in that turret when it goes on display are from cannonballs in 1862," said Scholley.

Students were as interested in the diver's work as in the Monitor itself, asking what the divers found - along with two Monitor sailors, they found artifacts such as lanterns and buttons - and what the divers did during the long decompression periods - read books and watched movies like Black Hawk Down and Road Trip. When Scholley described the warm-water suit divers use at great depths, someone in the student audience said, "That's awesome."

Another student asked how many Navy SEALs were involved. Noting that she can tease the SEALs because she's married to one, Scholley explained that the elite Navy divers actually aren't certified for the depths the recovery team worked at. They're trained for active combat, a different mission from her divers, who focus on salvage and recovery.

One girl noticed that Navy diving looked like a male-dominated world, which Scholley confirmed: "I need more women divers." More than 100 people made their home on a barge, the Wotan, for the duration of the 45-day recovery project. Scholley was one of three women on board.

As a woman, Scholley is a minority in the Navy diving program, but she has excelled there. In addition to leading the Monitor recovery mission, Scholley led the Navy's entire deep sea diving program a few years ago. Now she's preparing for a new assignment running a weapons installation.