Soul Survivor (32 page)

The chitchat was brief. Richardson said he wanted to tell Bruce something before he got too tired. He seemed to struggle with
his emotions as they sat down in the living room.

“This mission turned out to be a real hairy one. We had gotten the word about Chichi-Jima and just how dangerous a place it
was. But we were full of piss and vinegar in those days. When you’re nineteen years old, nothing scares you. I felt different
after that day.

“As we started to form up for our bombing run, we saw the fighters going in ahead of us. Being a gunner on a TBM was a great
spot, a real box seat. All hell was breaking loose. We could see shells falling into the sea below us. It looked like rain.

“The Japs began firing at us when we were well out of range. We formed up for the attack, and, of course, I could not really
see where I was going, because my job was to cover our rear in case of attack. But very quickly I began to see hundreds of
puffs of ugly black smoke all around me as my plane and another plane in my section to my left and behind us were smothered
in flak.

“A fourth plane startled me. It was a fighter. It was just off our left wing. He was firing his machine guns, strafing what
was below us. We were no more than thirty yards apart when the pilot deliberately turned his head and looked at me.

“I caught his eyes and we connected with each other. No sooner had we connected than his plane was hit in the engine by what
seemed to be a fairly large shell.

“There was an instantaneous flash of flames that engulfed the plane. It did not disintegrate but almost immediately disappeared
below me.”

At this point, John Richardson began to sob. Slowly he regained his composure.

“Mr. Leininger, I have lived with that pilot’s face as his eyes fixed on me every day since it happened. I never knew who
he was. I was the last guy who saw him alive.”

He began to stammer, then finished, his voice drenched in emotion. “I was the last person he saw before he was killed. His
face has haunted me my whole life.”

He looked down at the photo in his trembling hands.

“I recognize his face in this photo. I could never forget it. Now I know who he was.”

He spoke again, softly. “As we retired from the harbor, I could see where Huston went in. The splash from the impact was rippling
across the harbor. He hit near a large rock right near the opening.”

Later, Bruce showed him a diagram of Futami-ko Harbor and the spot marked by the after-action report. He nodded. “That’s where
he went in.”

Later, he and Bruce hung James Huston’s photo in his den.

John Richardson called Anne Barron, James Huston’s sister, a few weeks later and told her what he had seen. She was grateful
for the call. “I’m relieved to know Jimmy didn’t suffer,” she told Bruce, “and a little sad that my father died before he
learned what happened.”

Richardson died soon afterward.

T
he operating theory—that I was mainly working on a book about
Natoma Bay
—was now lying on the bottom of Futami-ko Harbor. It was about James after all.

Not that I was completely unprepared for this conclusion. There had been the slow, relentless drip of proof—one challenge
falling after another—until only an idiot would hold out anymore. I was prepared to admit that my son, James, was living a
past life. Whatever the hell that meant.

One thing it did not mean was reincarnation. I am very uncomfortable with that word.

There was one more moment of bizarre “doubt,” requiring one more loony proof before Bruce was willing to toss in the towel
completely.

Why not go down to the sunken plane and examine it? It was his conclusion, after getting the stories of Durham and Richardson,
that Huston’s plane could be easily located at the bottom of Futami-ko Harbor. He had the spot pinpointed on the map; from
all of the eyewitness accounts, it was at the entrance to the harbor, near the big rock. Why couldn’t a diver go into the
water and confirm that the cockpit was jammed shut, as James insisted it was? He had the aircraft ID number—74037—which could
be seen without opening the cockpit. It seemed like a very straightforward test.

It was at that point that Andrea put her foot down.

If I had been at the mall when I was fifteen and was approached by someone doing a random poll on reincarnation—do you believe
or not believe—I would have said, “I believe.” I have no reason. It wasn’t a thought-out conclusion. It was a gut belief.

Reincarnation was not the initial conclusion I came to with James. It was just nightmares. It took about eight months for
me to come to the reincarnation theory. It took Bruce… well, he never did really come around.

“But that will seal the whole deal,” he argued. “Skeptics will have to end their skepticism.”

If he could, Bruce would take the DNA off the bones inside that cockpit and see if there was a match with the Huston family.

Bruce was becoming convinced about the past life thing, sort of, but if he couldn’t go down and
look
at the cockpit, he still wanted to check out a few loose ends. Talk to a few more guys.

The reunion of
Sargent Bay
’s VC-83 squadron was scheduled for September 12 through 15, 2003, in San Diego. Jack Durham asked Bruce to attend. A lot
of pilots and crewmen would be there—men who had seen James Huston’s plane go in.

It was too good a chance to pass up.

Once again Bruce found himself on a ghostly airplane on September 11—this time it was 2003—heading for California. It was
a time for him to reflect. Over the past few years, he had spent thousands of dollars, traveled thousands of miles, met and
won over complete strangers, developed an affection for a forgotten old ship, read dozens of books about World War II, accumulated
thousands of pages of documents, and come to feel at home among these unsung veterans. The wives, and even some of the children
and grandchildren, were always there at the reunions, standing in the background, smiling gamely as these old fliers folded
back into their wartime families, reviving all the old stories, eyes sparkling with distant, urgent memories, stirring old
bonds that time would eventually erase.

The reunions were always arranged for convenience—there were so many seniors who couldn’t get around too well. It was not
a large group in 2003 (every year the reunions shrank as veterans died or got sick), and it was only the one squadron, VC-83,
not like the reunions of
Natoma Bay
, when the whole ship’s crew and air groups came together.

Bruce checked into the hotel and found the ready room. About twenty men and their spouses were checking in, sniffing around,
seeing who was there, who was still alive. Bruce met John Provost, who had been Jack Durham’s pilot, and Bob “SBD” Skelton.
They had both seen Huston’s plane crash, although they did not get the full close-up view that John Richardson had had of
the plane hitting the water. Skelton was in a wheelchair, and Bruce bent down a little to hear better.

They saw the plane get hit, dive, then disappear. It was unusual. Air combat is usually a solitary, clinically distant event,
sanitized by space. But Huston had been no more than thirty yards away from the attacking TBMs when his plane blew up.

The description answered another question. The shell that hit Huston’s plane took off the propeller. It explained why James’s
toy aircraft were always left without propellers.

By now, Bruce knew the standard business of reunions: reading of minutes, visits to the Escort Carrier Memorial, speeches,
and reminders about the year’s triumphs and losses.
Sargent Bay
and
Natoma Bay
were part of the same task force. One night, Bruce made a PowerPoint presentation showing how the escort carriers had fought
together in the war. It was a photographer aboard
Sargent Bay
who had captured the kamikaze strike against
Natoma Bay
in the last months of the war.

But it was at a small breakfast meeting on the first day of the reunion that Bruce had his true epiphany.

He had gone to meet Jack Durham in the restaurant at the Holiday Inn on the Bay. It was one of those coffee shop–style places
where the waitresses come around filling your cup even before you’ve had a chance to taste it.

A nice old man came over to bring Bruce to the booth. “Hi, I’m Jack Durham. Are you Bruce?”

A “nice” old man, Bruce reminded himself, who once flew dangerous combat missions and bombed enemy positions.

At the table sat Ralph Clarbour and his wife, Mary. Ralph, once a gunner on a TBM, was the president of the VC-83 Association.
There were the usual introductions and the usual small talk, and the men found their common threads. In civilian life, Ralph
had been the president of the American Institute of Steel Erection Contractors and, as coincidence would have it, was familiar
with one of Bruce’s chief clients, Lafayette Steel Erector.

“Do you mind telling me how come you wanted to come to the reunion?” asked Ralph.

“Well, I’m trying to find as many eyewitnesses as possible to the death of James Huston on March third, 1945.…”

Ralph nodded. “I was there that day. I saw what happened.”

“Really? What did you see?”

The answer was not mechanical, but it was clinical. “I saw him getting hit. Huston’s plane was hit right in the engine. There
was an instantaneous flash of fire, and the plane immediately dove at a steeper angle and crashed into the harbor.”

The waitress was there with breakfast dishes crawling up her arm: eggs, grits, bacon. The interview would have to wait.

But Ralph was curious. “Why are you so interested in learning about men like Huston?” His fork was in midair.

By now I should have been prepared for this question. Veterans and their families always wanted to know why I was so interested
in James Huston. My answer had always been the same: I was doing research for a book. However, now, at this moment, I had
a large chunk of egg stuck in my throat, and I literally couldn’t swallow. I guess I choked on the idea of repeating that
same old lie. I gulped, then told them the truth.

I’m not entirely certain why I picked this moment. Maybe it was the fact that James’s story had become undeniable. Maybe it
was my shame at having wormed my way into their midst under false colors. Maybe it was simply the fact that I couldn’t start
out with another group of veterans without being completely honest. I wanted their acceptance, their approval. The truth is
that I wanted to do a book about them, but I wanted them to know how it all really got started.

We were in a booth. Jack was to my left, with Mary opposite. Ralph was directly opposite me. I pushed my plate of eggs away.

“Three years ago my son began to have nightmares…”

There was silence at the table. All three listened to Bruce’s story: the specific details that emerged from James’s nightmares,
the intimate knowledge about
Natoma Bay
and its pilots, the names that came out of thin air, the facts that had been checked and verified, the two-year-old who showed
his father on a map the place where James M. Huston’s plane had been shot down.