Soul Survivor (16 page)

“Can you tell me anything about a guy named Jack Larsen?”

He didn’t even pause.

“Oh, yeah. I remember Jack. We never saw him again.”

“How do you mean?”

“He flew off one day and we never saw him again.”

This was wrong! This was evidence for the other side—something confirming. He knew the name. How could James have dreamed
up the name of a real member of the air group? It was another revelation that made him shiver.

To Bruce, this conversation did clarify, in some oblique fashion, that Jack Larsen was a real person and was, in fact, the
person James was dreaming about. Not that any of it made any sense. Bruce felt painfully confused, bewildered. But perhaps
the mystery of just who James was dreaming about now was solved, even if the how and why of it all remained impenetrable.

Still, it was only a dream, and the fact that James got something wrong—the Corsairs—made me feel reassured in a strange sort
of way. The Corsairs were crucial to my skepticism. James insisted on the Corsair, and I insisted on consistency. It was my
one strong grip on reality.

We spoke some more, and finally, when Leo had begun to feel comfortable with me, he told me about the forthcoming reunion
of the
Natoma Bay
crew members in San Diego in 2002. If I really wanted to learn about the “Naty Maru”—that’s what the men affectionately called
Natoma Bay
—he would get me an invitation. That would be the place to find out about
Natoma Bay.

Of course, Bruce had to wait almost two years until the reunion, and a lot happened before he even got there. For one thing,
he read Carol Bowman’s book
Children’s Past Lives
. In that winter of 2000, he sneaked it out of the house while Andrea wasn’t looking, and read it in his office during his
lunch hour. He didn’t believe the stories of the kids she’d written about—they made his teeth sore—but he read the damn thing,
and he didn’t object when Andrea got in touch with Carol Bowman. Andrea actually read it
after
Bruce—the Christmas of 2000 was too hectic, with Jen and Greg visiting—and she saved the book for her luxurious bathtub sessions,
late at night, lubricated by wine, when she didn’t have to listen for the nightmares. The book couldn’t help but ring a bell
with her, and she sent the author an e-mail.

Dear Carol Bowman:

I am not a crackpot. I ran a bookkeeping operation in a large firm, and my husband is vice president of an oil field services
company. My mother gave me your book, and I believe that my son is experiencing a past life. He is obsessed with airplanes—World
War II airplanes—and can identify them, for example the P-51 Mustang…

Bruce snarled about “the reincarnation bullshit,” but in his own grudging way, he was curious, too. After all, this was the
first time they had gone outside the family, consulted an “expert.” Bowman was a recognized authority in the field of reincarnation
studies. She had credentials.

And Andrea’s e-mail struck a familiar note.

“They weren’t crackpots,” Bowman concluded after a series of e-mails in which she had tried to help the Leiningers control
James’s nightmares in the winter of 2001:

“You listen for the tone. They seemed like sane and sober people. And the common threads were there: the age when the nightmares
began—two—the violence, the remembered death, all that energy surrounding the trauma. These are all crucial and consistent
with children who are experiencing past lives.”

Carol advised Andrea to tell James that what he was experiencing were things that had happened to him before, that it was
now over, and that he was now safe. She said that she had used these techniques before, and they seemed to have a powerful
healing effect on children. She had another strong piece of advice, something she told all of the parents whose children might
be experiencing past life memories: Don’t ask questions that would suggest an answer. For example, don’t ask “Did you fly
a Corsair?” It was something that Andrea knew instinctively—she never prompted James. She would, as Carol Bowman suggested,
ask open-ended questions to which he alone would supply the factual information. Questions such as “And then what happened?”
Thus there was never any inadvertent feeding of detail. Carol’s approach—telling James that what was happening to him was
something that happened to him before but is now over—seemed to work. It took the pressure off, and as soon as Andrea talked
to James, told him that he was sleeping in his own bed and that he was not in an airplane on fire, the nightmares started
to taper off from several times a week to once every other week.

And during his waking hours James began to talk rationally from time to time, about his so-called past life experiences—a
phenomenon that Carol Bowman called “joining his reality.”

In March 2001, Andrea wrote Carol, telling her that her tactics worked, thanking her. And then life got in the way; they lost
touch for about a year.

J
AMES TURNED THREE in April 2001, and the nightmares—thanks to the advice of Carol Bowman—grew less violent and less frequent.
But the obsession with airplanes did not lose steam. James wore out two Blue Angel videos in that year. He even wangled a
meeting with a few of the pilots when the Blue Angel flight demonstration team came to Lafayette for the Sertoma Air Show.

One Halloween, James had a school assignment to decorate a pumpkin. Unlike Cinderella, James insisted on turning the pumpkin
into an airplane. So off Andrea and James went to Hobby Lobby, where they picked up a foam glider and attached the wings and
fuselage with wooden kabob skewers to the painted pumpkin. In the end, it actually bore some resemblance to an F-16 Thunderbird.
In fact, some of the Thunderbird pilots who happened to be on a visit to Lafayette came to James’s school for a talk and spotted
the pumpkin plane. They borrowed it to show to the other pilots.

Of course, in the life of any child, there were the usual bumps and tribulations. James came down with a bad throat infection,
a parapharyngeal abcess, and it landed him in the hospital for a few days. It was tougher on the family than on James; he
handled the tests and needles and minor surgery like a trouper and bounced back with youthful resilience. It was Bruce and
Andrea who were rattled.

For the most part, James was an ordinary child leading an ordinary life—or so it then began to seem. There were calm, uneventful
intervals when everything seemed perfectly normal. Inevitably, as in the life of any tyke, there were also playfully mischievous
moments. Nobody in the family would forget the sight of him at age three climbing to the landing of the guesthouse, dropping
his pants, and peeing down into the backyard, marking his territory. Certainly the next-door neighbor would bear it mind,
as he immediately built an eight-foot wooden fence blocking that particular view.

It was roughly the same time that Bruce had to endure one of James’s more creative pranks. One day, when he was running late
for a business trip to Houston, he came to the car and found that James had been fooling with the positioning levers on the
driver’s backrest, hopelessly jamming it. Bruce had no time to fix it, so he had to drive to Houston and back with the backrest
locked in the prone position.

Just a kid’s shenanigans, and neither Bruce nor Andrea ever punished James with anything more severe than a tiny time-out
or “the hairy eyeball.”

However, whenever the Leiningers let down their guard, whenever the nightmares subsided or when James’s creepy remarks seemed
merely the flare-up of a hyperimaginative child—that is, whenever the hackles were lowered and life seemed to go along without
the possibilities of a supernatural, heart-stopping moment—they were sharply reminded that theirs was not an ordinary passage.
And they never knew what would trigger another weird disclosure.

Meanwhile, enigmatic things kept popping up. For instance, by this time, James had been given two GI Joe dolls, and he gave
them curious names: Billy and Leon. Not the glamorous, heroic names you might expect a three-year-old to bestow on his frontline
soldiers. The Leiningers dismissed the names as quirky—James had a penchant for odd names. One stuffed dog was named Balthazar.
No one could push him for an explanation that he probably didn’t have. When asked, he simply shrugged.

There were other peculiar moments—for instance, when James was alone in the sunroom and, as Andrea watched from a distance,
he pulled himself to attention and saluted. Then he said, “I salute you and I’ll never forget. Now here goes my neck.”

What did it mean? A child’s melodramatic game? Something connected to his recurrent flaming crash? So many mysterious corners
and crannies in a child who finally had just been toilet trained.

And now along came the furious pictures. Sometime in that summer of 2001, James began to draw. The pictures were invariably
scenes of battle, with bullets and bombs exploding all over the page. Typically, it was a naval battle, and always there were
aircraft overhead. The drawings were clearly violent, and the details of the weaponry and the tactics were accurate in their
fashion. That is, there was something uncannily retro about the battles—they suggested a World War II environment. No jets,
no missiles. Propeller-driven aircraft in combat in a naval engagement.

And James could name the aircraft in the pictures. He told Bruce and Andrea that he had drawn Wildcats and Corsairs, and he
even named the Japanese planes with the red sun on their fuselages: Zekes or Bettys. Why, asked Bruce, was he giving the Japanese
planes boys’ and girls’ names?

James replied, “The boy planes were fighters and the girl planes were bombers.”

Bruce went on the Internet and checked, and James was right. According to U.S. naval personnel at the time, the Americans
assigned boy names to fighter planes and girl names to bombers.

But there was something else about the drawings that was even more curious: James signed some of his drawings “James 3.” When
he was asked why he signed them “James 3,” he said simply, “Because I am the third James. I am James Three.” Yet again, he
had no further explanation. And no amount of prodding produced a different response. It was as if he himself didn’t have the
answers to these troublesome questions.

In March 2002, on the eve of James’s fourth birthday, Carol Bowman called. Andrea answered the phone.

She called one evening around dinnertime. She said it was Carol Bowman, but the name didn’t register at all, and there was
one of those long, awkward pauses while I wracked my brain. Then she said she was the author of
Children’s Past Lives,
and I felt so stupid for not recognizing her name. We talked for about an hour, catching up, and she said that a producer
from the television program
20/20
contacted her about doing a show. The producer was Shalini Sharma, a woman of Indian heritage who had an interest in spiritual
mysteries. She also believed in reincarnation.

They wanted to do a show on children who remembered a past life. They were particularly interested in a child who had a past
life memory of a military nature. I understood why. This was, after all, barely six months after the attack on the World Trade
Center, and just five months after our troops had been sent into Afghanistan, on October 7, 2001—which was Bruce’s birthday
and why I remember it so clearly. So the military and death were on everyone’s mind.

Carol asked if we would be interested, and I told her I didn’t know. I’d have to think about it. I’d never considered going
public with James’s story. Frankly, I worried about what the neighbors would think. We live in a small Southern town that
is heavily Catholic. I did not want to be ostracized. I did not want parents to tell their children not to play with James
because he was weird. I didn’t want to be written off as insane or crazy.

My first instinct was to say no. But I had to talk to Bruce—and, of course, the panel. When Bruce got home from work, we talked
about it for a long time, and, surprisingly, he was all for it. Bruce thought that the resources that a producer for
20/20
could bring to bear would inevitably dig up some legitimate help in researching James’s story. Maybe we’d get some answers
that didn’t involve reincarnation. That was always his intention: to pour water on the reincarnation theory.