Flying at 400 miles an hour 400 feet above the aircraft carrier Saratoga, he helped his fellow Navy pilot avoid crashing their S-3 jet into the Red Sea. Dizzy from vertigo while scuba diving in a black underground Florida cavern, he grabbed a rock and regained his balance and breath. On site visits in southwestern deserts, he high-stepped away from rattlesnakes and pulled deer ticks off his legs.

Mark Sudol, the new chief of the Corps’ Regulatory Branch, comes well equipped to handle the stress and emergencies of the job. After only 20 months as chief of the L.A. District’s Regulatory Branch, the New Jersey native heads to Washington facing unprecedented challenges but armed with a formidable blend of academic, military and professional experience. “My primary responsibility will be policy,” he says. “I want to improve consistency across different branches, enhance communication among branches and improve the public’s perception of the Corps.”

L.A.’s loss clearly is D.C.’s gain. The ruggedly built Sudol is far more of a field man than an ivory tower bureaucrat, although his doctorate from UCLA in environmental science and engineering shows an exceptional intellectual side. Besides two graduate diplomas from the California school and an undergraduate degree from the University of Rochester, he worked two years in the private sector for two environmental consultancies and for a year with his own start-up environmental services firm. Off and on since 1991, he’s held several posts in the L.A. Regulatory Branch.

“We have excellent people in Regulatory across the country,” Sudol says. “But because we have difficult jobs, we don’t get the recognition we should.” He explains that because Corps regulators must deal with thousands of permit applications each year, the workload doesn’t allow for much beating of their own drums or blowing of their own horns. “We’re working on the sidelines, making the tough decisions,” he adds, “instead of showing people that we’re protecting wetlands. People are upset with us because they don’t see the big picture—that we’re working for the good of the environment and the nation.”

Sudol says one of his biggest tasks in the new assignment “will be to show the nation how well we do our job.” In addition to giving guidance on policy and other issues to all the Corps districts, he’ll also be responsible for dealing with Congress, the Presidential staff, EPA, Fish & Wildlife, the Dept. of Justice, state agencies—“you name it.”

Competition for the high-profile Corps post was intense, with candidates applying from within the Beltway itself, several Districts and from outside agencies. Now, only months after Sudol and his wife Karleen bought a house in San Pedro (site of the Port of L.A., arguably the District’s busiest project area), they’re headed for a brand-new life on the East Coast.

For the boyishly bespectacled engineer, however, it will be something of a homecoming. Growing up in New Jersey, Sudol was a swamp rat. His family had a rowboat on a creek at the end of their road, and he used it to catch snakes, turtles and frogs. At age 14 he took his first water sample. He recalls passage of the 1972 Clean Water Act and how it got him interested in “water quality, pollution, wetlands—all that.”

As an undergrad, he familiarized himself with the ecology of upstate New York, the glacially formed peat bogs and fens of the region, and he toured the Great Lakes. His wetlands immersion program continued when he became a Navy officer and was marched into Florida marshes for survival training.

As a Naval flight officer and later as an instructor for six years, Sudol flew S-3A aircraft in air antisubmarine squadrons. He landed on aircraft carriers 198 times, and one of his several brushes with mortality came on his last day on the Saratoga off the coast of Aden. After chasing an unidentified “bogey” in their subsonic plane at 20,000 feet (which turned out to be a “friendly” sent to test their defenses), Sudol and his fellow pilot were preparing to land. Because he was the most senior flight officer, Sudol had the least experienced flier with him in the cockpit. As they conducted a 180-degree high-G turn around the ship to slow their airspeed, Sudol noticed that the plane wasn’t level but descending rapidly from 800 feet. He quickly alerted the other pilot who pulled up the jet in time to avoid catastrophe. “At that speed, you don’t have a lot of time,” says Sudol with an understated grin.

His military experience has proved invaluable to the Corps. “Serving on an aircraft carrier is not like the day-to-day grind of the bureaucracy,” he says. “Someone can die if you don’t do your job right. You understand the importance of your job, but you learn to relax after your job is over. This has helped me in Regulatory to understand that people are the most important part of this job—you take care of your people and they’ll take care of you.” The grueling process of considering permit applications, for example, isn’t a life-or-death issue for Sudol, and he takes pains to encourage his team members “to take your job seriously but don’t take it home.”

(Sudol was late for the interview about himself because, he said, “I had to take care of a personnel issue.” A team member had approached him in the lobby of the District building, and Sudol spent the next 30 minutes helping resolve the problem.)

As a flight instructor, he also learned to gauge how his students handled stress—another tool he used in managing the L.A. branch. Sudol believes that, after only a couple of weeks, he can tell how a new team member deals with the stresses of the job: “Then I can help that person handle it better.”

Since 15 he’s been scuba diving and has submerged himself all over the world. The Florida cavern incident, when he was diving with five others, also became a management-training template for Sudol. The bulb on his flashlight broke and suddenly Sudol literally didn’t know up from down. All he could see were the phantasmagoric lights of his fellow divers, whose beams confused him. Vertigo ensued. Sudol realized bubbles from his air tank were gurgling in the opposite direction from where he thought they should. He found the closest outcrop, grabbed it and held on. “I caught my breath and thought for a few seconds,” he remembers. “I learned that before you make decisions, think for a few seconds and get your bearings. That’s helped me in Regulatory.”

During his tenure in L.A., the Regulatory Branch dealt with several highly publicized and sharply politicized projects. The Port of L.A.’s expansion, a proposed 3,000-home development at Ahmanson Ranch, a Home Depot in San Luis Obispo, a study of the critical habitat of an Arizona pygmy owl. In each of these and other deliberations, Sudol has applied in practice what LTG Robert Flowers declared in his June address at the annual conference of U.S. Mayors: “Today we are more aware of the consequences of our actions, and we’re taking steps to correct the mistakes of the past. As members of your communities, we share the same concerns as you—the desire for economic development while balancing the need for environmental sustainability.”

Sudol has been on both sides of the permitting process—as an applicant and as a regulator. He’s met a budget and hired people for his own company. He’s led military officers and enlisted personnel. As an academic, his UCLA dissertation evaluated the success of Corps mitigation actions in Orange County. “The Corps wanted to see the results,” he says. “It was a public test, and we changed our mitigation guidelines to address the concerns in my dissertation. We are critical of ourselves—we want to do things better. You’re not going to find too many agencies willing to do that.”

Besides the adventure of moving to a new city and new job, the Sudols also face another challenge: Their son Alec just turned 2, and they’re discovering that there’s a reason “the Terrible Twos” are called same. Karleen, a Cerritos, Calif., native who just earned her own marine biology doctorate from UCLA in June, is looking forward to experiencing her first real winter. Her research focused on nutrient dynamics in bays and estuaries, something of great interest in the Chesapeake region.

In Sudol’s preternaturally neat Los Angeles office, atop a bookcase, sit two objects. One is a wooden sculpture of two killer whales. The other is a model of the S-3 antisubmarine jet. “Animals and airplanes,” observes Sudol. “That’s me.”

But as L.A. District team members know—and as Corps people in Washington and all over the U.S. will soon learn—with Mark Sudol, there’s a lot more.