Soul Survivor (35 page)

Bruce rewound the tape and played it again. He couldn’t see the distinction. “What kind of a plane was a Tony?”

“The Tony was a Japanese fighter that was smaller and faster than a Zero.”

“Why was it called a ‘Tony’?” asked Andrea.

“The fighters were named after boys, and the bombers were named after girls.”

Bruce had heard this from James before: the boy-girl distinction in Japanese aircraft. He had even researched it and found
that it was true. But he didn’t remember the Tony. Somehow, that seemed important.

Back to his research. He discovered that the Tony was a knockoff of a German ME-109. The small fighter planes were disassembled
and smuggled to Japan by submarine. When Bruce went to the war diary of VC-81, he found that the squadron had destroyed one
Tony in the air. The pilot who spotted the aircraft and brought it down was James M. Huston Jr.

Soon after the
Primetime
broadcast, Bruce walked into the house one night and overheard Andrea talking on the phone. “Bruce will be so excited to
talk to you.”

Bruce gave her the fish eye. He was tired and didn’t want to listen to another crackpot. She turned to him and said, “Bob
Greenwalt is on the line—he knew James Huston.”

“I know who Bob Greenwalt is. He came aboard
Natoma Bay
with Jim Huston and Warren Hooper on October eighth, 1944.”

It was an accident that Greenwalt saw the program. His son, who lived in Houston, was watching the
Primetime
show and recognized the name
Natoma Bay
. He called his father, who lived in Albuquerque—an earlier time zone—and got him to tune in.

Bruce grabbed the phone, and he and Greenwalt spoke like old war buddies. Bruce already knew a lot about Bob Greenwalt, but
Bob added a few extra details. He had flown that last mission on March 3, 1945. He was, in fact, James Huston’s wingman. They
were close friends. He had packed Huston’s effects when Huston was killed—including the model Corsair that Anne had sent James.

From January until August 1944, Greenwalt and Huston served in VF-301, an elite squadron called “Devil’s Disciples.” Their
job was to test-fly the modified Corsair for carrier use. In April 1944, the Corsair was qualified for use on
Gamber Bay,
an escort carrier that was later sunk. The Corsair turned out to be a valuable weapon. The Japanese called the aircraft “Whistling
Death” because of the sound it made in a dive. But Corsairs always had problems when it came to the tricky business of landing
on an aircraft carrier. The engine was too big, and the high cockpit didn’t leave enough visibility for the pilot to control
the plane. He couldn’t see the deck. It landed rough and tended to blow out tires. It also tended to pull to the left on takeoff
because of the high engine torque. The way James had put it when describing the Corsair was that “it wanted to turn to the
left.”

The test pilots worked on it, and the engineers kept making adjustments to the ailerons; they positioned the pilot higher
in the cockpit, allowing for a better line of sight. They replaced the inflatable rear tire with a solid rubber tire and eventually
had an aircraft that became a standard for U.S. Naval carrier duty.

“Jim was a great pilot,” said Greenwalt. “And a great friend.”

There were a lot of coincidences—things that could have changed James Huston’s fate. Another pilot was supposed to go to
Natoma Bay
but got transferred, so Huston took his place. He was supposed to rotate out of combat by March 3, 1945, but volunteered
for that last mission over Chichi-Jima, where he was killed—on March 3.

So many “if’s” in war.

A telephone call was insufficient, and Bruce and Bob Greenwalt agreed to meet at the next
Natoma Bay
reunion.

T
HE
ABC PRIMETIME
program lifted the shadow that had hung over Bruce Leininger. The 2004
Natoma Bay
Association reunion in San Antonio, Texas, would be his coming-out party. No one would again question why he was so hot to
attend the reunions of the “Naty Maru” or why he was taking such a lopsided and emotional interest in one little ship. The
story of his son, James, and the boy’s nightmares was out in the open. Bruce was now the designated zealot for the
Natoma Bay
Association.

And so he was determined to make this gathering memorable. Not only for his own sake, but because of the inexorable grind
of time—the members were dying off or growing frail or, as happens late in life, losing much of their attachment to worldly
matters. Bruce wanted to contribute something to the group before it was too late.

At ten a.m. on the inevitable September 11—later than he had allowed in the attack plan—he loaded the old Volvo with Andrea
and James and made the six-hour drive to San Antonio. His mother-in-law, Bobbi, joined them there. He wanted a crowd. He had
lobbied all the veterans on the list of active members to attend. And James had spent more time on the phone with “Annie,”
convincing his “sister” to make the trip from California.

Bruce had spent months making twenty-one individual blue loose-leaf binders devoted to each of the
Natoma Bay
dead—complete with biography, war records, and pictures. Andrea spent weeks making a home video that was both specific (pictures
of each lost sailor) and general (pictures of the ship in action). It was a haunting nine-minute ode to the ship and the dead.

And Bruce found a fresh peg for the reunion—something to make it stand out, make it an event! At the time, there was only
one memorial for
Natoma Bay
. It was on the
Yorktown
in Charleston, South Carolina. And three of the men from
Natoma Bay
who were killed in the war were missing—not listed on the plaque: Billie Peeler, Lloyd Holton, and Ruben Goranson.

Well, that made me a little crazy. So I got in touch with John DeWitt, the ship historian, and a bunch of us decided to start
a small capital fund and have a new monument made. We decided that it should be dedicated at the reunion—we’d bring it to
the Nimitz Museum in Fredericksburg, Texas, which was only an hour and a half northwest of San Antonio. It would be a perfect
time and a perfect place.

The veterans and the surviving family members were drawn by the memorial service and the plaque—especially the three families
whose loved ones were left off the original plaque. And there was the extra incentive of seeing James. For many of them, the
ABC Primetime
report that their comrade, James Huston Jr., had returned from his last mission in the form of a child from Louisiana was
just too provocative to ignore.

And James himself, with all his innocent maturity, had the run of the place.

After the Leiningers checked into the Woodfield Suites, which were equipped with a kitchenette and a small living room, Andrea
and James went shopping for some snacks. Since the hotel served only breakfast, Andrea wanted to have something on hand for
James. They bought milk, juice, mini boxes of cereal, oranges and grapes, and some cookies and microwave popcorn. Once the
groceries were put away and Andrea had unpacked, they went down to the ready room, where James was an eye-catching presence.

Meanwhile, Bruce was busy setting up his displays in the ready room. He had the records and pictures and PowerPoint displays
for USS
Natoma Bay
(CVE-62), commissioned in October 1943 and sold for scrap in May 1959—to the Japanese.

John DeWitt had also arrived early. He and his wife, Dolores, had brought their own collection of photographs, along with
models of
Natoma Bay
and World War II aircraft.

On that first morning, as they were walking out of the ready room, Andrea and James were stopped by a handsome man in a polo
shirt. They had never seen him before.

The man looked down at James and asked in a hearty, robust voice, “Do you know who I am?”

James looked him in the eye, thought for a second, and replied, “You’re Bob Greenwalt.”

The man looked shocked. He laughed a little nervously and said, “That’s right.”

Andrea asked, “You’re really Bob Greenwalt?”

And he said yes.

Later, in their room, Bruce asked his son, “How did you know that?”

“I recognized his voice,” he told his father.

Even Greenwalt, who calls himself a “rational skeptic,” was impressed.

The whispers about James went through the reunion crowd like a wind:

“Did you see the program? It was on
Primetime
.”

“He looks just like Jimmy!”

“Such a nice kid.”

“I don’t know what to think!”

The Leiningers were caught up in the significance of the moment. For the first time, Andrea was meeting the family members
she had spent more than a year trying to locate, in the flesh. There was an immediate sympathy between them. In trying to
ease her own son’s pain, she had reopened old wounds. But Andrea also understood that it would soon be over; the confrontation
would put a lot of painful questions to rest.

Meanwhile, for Andrea, there was the business of motherhood. James had taken three days off from school, and she had collected
from his teachers the subjects that he was supposed to cover. She began working with him in the car, then moved to the hotel
coffee table in the room. The issue of homework settled forever any question of homeschooling—Andrea was not up to it, nor
was James.

A reunion was always a thrill for Bruce. The veterans invariably greeted each other at the reunion sign-ins with the exaggerated
gusto of men who had just returned from combat and were thrilled to find themselves still alive.

There were the usual dinners and speeches and the customary business of calling the roll, paying the dues, reading the minutes—and
looking around to see who had gotten older, who had lost a mate, and who was missing. They took care of all the conventional
things to which such meetings must attend. On days with a light schedule, the veterans sailed on the little canals in San
Antonio, visited the local museums, and just sat around trading lore and lies.

The veteran stories were handed down like oral history. Victor Claude Evans, a solid, bald man with a bawdy sense of humor,
was a 20-millimeter gunner on
Natoma Bay.
He is famous for the story of his attack on his own fleet off the Phillipines. The attackers came in low and were pressed
home by the Japanese pilots. Evans was so intent on firing at the attacking planes that he shot the tails off the American
planes parked on deck. He also superficially damaged a nearby U.S. battleship, USS
West Virginia
, which sent an urgent cease-fire orders: “We surrender!” He ignored the orders and shot down the Japanese plane, along with
two or three parked American TBMs, and he had raked the deck of an American warship.