Soul Survivor: The Reincarnation of a World War II Fighter Pilot

by Andrea Leininger

  He took the stroller for a test drive, with James lolling in the seat, his hand out catching the wind, while Bruce ran behind and pushed. Then it was back home for what he called “the Scoggin interrogation”:

  “How was it?”

  “Fine.”

  “Did James have fun?”

  “Yes.”

  “What did he do? What did he say? What did you do? How far did you go? What do you think? Was it hot?”

  She wanted to know every detail of the test drive; he felt pretty confident that he covered himself by saying it was “fine.”

  That was a principal difference between them: her open, out-loud demand for instant public accountability and his quiet, slow, withheld commitment. Andrea wasn’t just curious; she had to burrow into the meat and marrow of every little event. He wanted to savor it, think about it, find the exact spot for it among his hierarchy of experiences and opinions.

  It was the characteristic that made her settle for a quick answer to the nightmares and that made Bruce keep searching more deeply for proof.

  In the evening, they enjoyed a birthday dinner. They went to the Blue Dog Café, a Cajun restaurant that Andrea and James were eager to test. Andrea packed a diaper bag full of crayons and toys to keep James occupied, but the Blue Dog was well prepared for family crowds and had white butcher paper covering the tables, with a glass full of crayons as well. James had the guilty thrill of drawing on a tablecloth, and Bruce and Andrea had a taste of the Tabasco-driven sauces that caused the busboys to rush around the dining room to fill people’s water glasses.

  When they came home and lit the candles on the eight-layered chocolate doberge birthday cake, Bruce let James blow them out. They sang happy birthday, drank champagne (milk for James), then lit the candles again so that James could blow them out again… and again. He was, for that sweet moment, an untroubled two-year-old who couldn’t get enough of candles or cake. And Bruce and Andrea had their own respite of champagne and chocolate.

  Later, Bruce wound up in his office again, staring at the blank screen. In the year 2000, it was practically impossible to get on the Web during the rush hour—between seven and eleven p.m. But it was one o’clock in the morning.

  If I couldn’t get connected now, I was throwing this piece-of-shit computer out the window. I turned it on and crossed my fingers. I heard the familiar touch-tone dialing into the access network. I waited… and waited and waited with bated breath and crossed fingers. My signal moved up to the middle of the three dial-up icons.… There was a pickup on the dial and the familiar squawk of the computer searching for a signal. I couldn’t breathe. I watched the screen, hoping that once again I wouldn’t get the signal that all lines were busy and to try back later—hoping that when Andrea woke up in the morning she wouldn’t find the smoking remains of the computer in the leaf pile in the backyard. But I got the connection signal and I could finally exhale. I had been admitted to the Emerald City….

  Bruce typed in the name Larsen, with all its possible spellings and variations, including the first name Jack. But it was a wild shot in the dark. Google was still in its larval stage, and the use of such a powerful search engine was inevitably chaotic. You couldn’t expect to get any fast answers.

  The sites came up Jack and the sites came up Larsen, and there were all the variations, from LaMere to Lwoski. From Jack to Jake to John to Johann. Like so many stars in the sky. No one, he thought, could make sense of hundreds of names with so many hundreds of combinations. How to refine the search—that was the critical question.

  On Sunday morning, after feeding James with the clandestine bottle, he was back in his home office again, trying to find Jack Larsen.

  Now he’d thought of a starting point. Jack Larsen was a Navy pilot. Bruce assumed that if he had existed, he was dead. But there was the possibility that Jack Larsen was the name of the little man in James’s dreams. Jack Larsen, Navy pilot—the search links scattered Bruce everywhere. There were live Jack Larsens who were still Navy pilots; there were retired Jack Larsens—there were hundreds and hundreds of possibilities wrapped around the name Jack Larsen and all its phonetic variations.

  He was screening page after page of links, looking for a needle in a haystack. Even if, by some miracle, he found the right person, how would he know it?

  Bruce changed the search to war dead. That brought up a whole new unbroken code. They were, for the most part, listed by state, and they were incomplete and unorganized.

  He went out into the sunroom and had a martini. This was not something that he would crack with one blazing insight. This was a layered, textured puzzle that he would have to outthink, then work to the end.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  THERE WERE THE incessant demands of work. The oil field services firm that paid Bruce’s salary had more urgent claims on his time. They were in the burning business of going out of business. OSCA was always intended to be sold for an infusion of cash for the parent company. That meant a kind of corporate beautification in which the books had to be balanced, the workers handsomely (but not overly) compensated, the benefits package both alluring and cost effective. Bruce’s job was to help spruce up the bottom-line bride for a capital-heavy groom.

  It was a grueling job just obtaining all the payroll codes—sixty pages of requirements and routings—to match each of the workers’ slots. All day he pored over the infinite and tiny details of government codes and management requirements—a watchmaker in heavy industry.

  At night and on weekends, he remained bent over his computer, trying to pluck out the secrets of his son’s mystery.

  Bruce’s search had to be carried out as a part-time, staggered midnight-and-weekend sideline. In a way, that was good. It took his mind away from his obsessive pursuit of the nightmares and enabled him to come to the puzzle fresh, pick it up again each time he left his OSCA duties, and see the thing in a clean, clear light. And he also found that he was having useful thoughts that came out of nowhere—just going blank and letting his mind wander brought other possibilities. Why not look here or there, or concentrate on the military links?

  It was not as if he had no training in large-scale research. As an undergraduate at Fairleigh-Dickinson University in New Jersey, Bruce had double-majored in political science and Russian studies. This was in the early 1970s, and the Cold War was still a hot career field. At Columbia University, he did his graduate work in International Relations under Zbigniew Brzezinski, among others, and got excited by the prospect of big-time polisci. He looked into all the aspects of détente (and found that the Russians had a different and more aggressive interpretation of the word) and studied the Russian language, thinking that he would someday be moving in high diplomatic circles.

  Back in school, he had learned to be very systematic about solving problems and doing basic research:

  1.Define the problem;

  2.Develop a statement of purpose;

  3.Select a research method;

  4.Build a research design;

  5.Define the limits of the project;

  6.Spell out the methodology.

  And this is how he tried to approach James’s nightmare “project.” But his student days were, of course, precomputer. Modern software changed a lot of research techniques, sometimes speeding things up but often glutting the system with too much information. Sometimes the material simply couldn’t all be handled.

  He also developed a hardening of his tenacity when he began to research the family genealogy. His uncle Bill, the eldest of seven children born to Bruce’s grandparents, had always been curious about the family history. The family legend was that the Leiningers had come to America from Alsace-Lorraine, a long-disputed region between France and Germany, but the details of his ancestry were lost in the fog of myth and memory.

  Bruce had spent weekends in dusty, neglected stacks of reference books in a Texas library in the mid-nineties, trying to find the path of his family’s migration from the Palatinate to America. Finally, in an all-
but-hidden cranny, he came upon J. Daniel Rupp’s Collection of 30,000 Names 1727–1776. And on page 238, in a list of 338 passengers who arrived in Philadelphia aboard a ship named Phoenix on August 28, 1750, there was the name of Johan Jacob Leininger—an ancestor. He later found substantiation in the dusty stacks of the Philadelphia court archives.

  What that did—the discovery of that route to his past—was fill Bruce with a sense of power, the certainty that, with enough hard work and imagination, he could crack any riddle.

  Including the mystery of James’s nightmares.

  By mid-October, Bruce was on the American Battle Monuments Commission Web site, which provides the names of the dead and missing from both World Wars as well as the Korean War. He focused on World War II aircraft carrier combat deaths and found a Web site with eighty-seven pages of names, with up to two hundred names to a page. The printer ground out the pages, one by one. There were almost ten thousand names. It took two days to print the pages.

  There were 121 Larsons killed in World War II, and 49 more spelled “Larsen.” Of the 170 dead Larsons/Larsens, there were only ten buried abroad who had the first name Jack or James or John. It took numerous heroic midnight efforts to squeeze that much out of the Web site.

  Bruce would go to bed at two a.m. and be back online at six. Four hours of sleep was enough. But he was still groping his way through a dark room—he had no workable plan about how to trace the dead Larsons/Larsens, or what exactly to look for when he found one who seemed promising.

  But there were other facts that he did have, and he found himself in the triangulation business.

  He had the history of Natoma Bay, and he carried it around with him—took it to work with him—as if that could ignite some inspiration.

  In his office, scrutinizing the book, he learned that the ship had been commissioned on October 14, 1943, so the lost Larsons/Larsens would have to fit into that time frame—between October 1943 and the end of the war, in early August 1945.

  He had the aircraft: a Corsair—and those didn’t enter carrier service until 1944, so Bruce had yet another narrowing window through which to look for information.

  Three solid clues: Natoma Bay, Jack Larsen, the Corsair. Now all he had to do was link them together somehow.

  Sometimes in the middle of the night, when all the Web sites and the hyperlinks had driven him to the edge of a meltdown, he would go out on the porch and sit in the rocker. Leaves would drift down from the big river birches in the front yard, and the air smelled of sweet-acrid fire. Somewhere up north, in the distant canefields, they were burning the stumps of the sugarcane to get the land ready for next spring’s planting. Some days, flurries of burnt ash floated like snow onto the streets of Lafayette. It was not unusual to wake up and find a little dusting of sugarcane ash on the windshield.

  But just now, a Yankee in Cajun country, he would just sit there in the rocker, drinking in the seventy-degree autumn and cleansing the stress from his mind.

  In the middle of everything else, Bruce had to clean up the yard. His father, Ted, was coming for a visit, and Bruce wanted the place to pass inspection. A seventy-three-year-old China Marine (he served in China right after World War II), Ted had a distant and crusty relationship with his son. “I don’t remember him ever asking me anything personal,” recalled Bruce.

  Ted drove more than fifteen hundred miles from Pine Grove, Pennsylvania, in a minivan with his second wife, Mary Lou. They bought the minivan by cashing out Mary Lou’s fourteen-thousand-dollar 401(k) plan. Bruce called her “Sister Mary Lou” because of her saintlike forbearance over thirty years in dealing with his father.

  In a way, it was a small victory that Ted was coming at all. He had refused to visit when Bruce lived in San Francisco, which he called “the land of fruits and nuts.” But then, Ted had a lot of quick and quirky opinions. He wouldn’t fly, because he believed that all the airline mechanics “smoked dope.”

  He didn’t even want to go to visit the brand new D-day Museum—the grand attraction that Bruce had been urging him to see—because it was in New Orleans. Ted considered that city the epicenter of wicked temptation. Bruce had to assure him that they would avoid the fleshpots of Bourbon Street and go straight to the museum, which was in a warehouse section of town.

  Bruce and Ted made the two-hour drive to New Orleans while Mary Lou stayed behind and visited the Super Wal-Mart.

  On the way down, father and son were largely silent. But coming back, after the visit, they spoke. Usually they spoke at each other, never making emotional contact. “Like two anchormen on the evening news talking about things,” was the way Bruce described it; no one would ever describe their dialogue as a conversation. But this time it was different. Maybe it was the old World War II reminders, or maybe it was, finally, a recognition of their relationship, but stolid, silent Ted listened respectfully to the tale of the nightmares, and he didn’t mock or disparage, or dismiss his son’s worry.

  After a few days, Ted and Mary Lou drove off, on their way to St. Louis and a reunion of China Marines, leaving Bruce with his dilemma. Funny, he thought, how his father was receptive to the idea of his grandson having inexplicable dreams. He seemed to accept that James could actually know about things that he could not possibly know.

  If he had been asked to predict his father’s reaction, Bruce would have thought that Ted would make some brutal, sarcastic comment. But he didn’t.

  He was, astonishingly, something he almost never was: sympathetic. Even interested.

  Bruce went back into his home office and banged away on the computer. Focusing on the names of the dead pilots, he picked one: Charles T. Larson. It was a random shot among the casualties of the 1944–45 period. He plugged into the Web site of the National Archives and filled out a form asking for details about the dead pilot. He gave the pilot’s name, rank, serial number, and date of birth.

  But he was not a relative, and the Archives wrote back that it could not help him—only blood relatives had the right to such an inquiry.

  The next few weeks were a jumble of holiday preparations. Jen and Greg were coming for Thanksgiving again. Bruce was very fond of Jen’s husband, Greg, and he was looking forward to having a good old-fashioned bull session, man-to-man, where they could sit down and commiserate about the chaos of their professional lives.

  In the heat of all the holiday preparations, a book came from Bobbi. She had found it in an obscure section of a library devoted to the supernatural and paranormal and New Age phenomena. It was Children’s Past Lives: How Past Life Memories Affect Your Child, written by Carol Bowman, a recognized expert in the wildly untested and touchy new field of past life studies. Bowman was the mother of a son who was said to have experienced a past life on a Civil War battlefield. Bobbi sent the book to Andrea, who laid it down somewhere in the bedroom graveyard of unread books. Andrea meant to read it, but her hands were full of Thanksgiving preparations, and besides, she didn’t need convincing. She already took her mother’s word about the explanation for James’s nightmares—a kind of hearsay endorsement that her child was experiencing a past life.

  Another book arrived that holiday season, this one from the History Book Club: The Battle for Iwo Jima. Bruce had ordered it as a Christmas present for Ted, who cherished anything about the Marine Corps in World War II’s Pacific theater.

  On Saturday morning, bored with television cartoons, James jumped up on Bruce’s lap, and together they leafed through the book they were going to give to Poppy for Christmas. At some point they got to a page that contained a photo of Iwo Jima. James pointed to it and said, “Daddy, that’s when my plane was shot down.”

  “What?”

  “That’s when my plane was shot down.”

  “James, what do you mean?”

  “That’s when my plane got shot and crashed.”

  Bruce rushed into his office, where he had a copy of the Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships. Natoma Bay had been at Iwo Jima, had been in battle, had supported th
e

  U. S. Marines’ invasion of Iwo Jima in March 1945.

  It was another of those startling moments when Bruce was both baffled and infuriated by this blazing mystery. Something was going on, but he didn’t know what. He felt he was desperately groping his way in the dark, guided by little flashes of light that came out of the mouth of his two-year-old son.

  This was something way, way outside Bruce’s method of logical research skills and the known realms of experience. For this, he sure as hell would need innovation, inspiration… and luck.

  He was still thinking about his father’s visit. Ted had left for the reunion of his China Marines. And then something clicked. Maybe there was a reunion of World War II veterans. Bruce typed in “World War II War Veteran Reunions” on his computer, and a bunch of Web sites popped up. One of them contained a reference to an escort carrier Web site. Scrolling through it, he found a reference to a Natoma Bay Association reunion.

  Bingo!

  PART TWO

  The Ship

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  SEPTEMBER, 2002

  BRUCE LEININGER SAT in a window seat on Continental Airlines flight 1107, which was maneuvering for takeoff from San Diego International Airport’s Lindbergh Field. He preferred a window seat and this flight had plenty available. There was no one alongside him, no one in front, and no one in back. In fact, there were only 40 or so passengers for the 150 seats.

  He remembered that the airport had been strangely deserted. Wednesday—hump day—was never a slow travel day, yet this Wednesday it was so empty, it was spooky. But Bruce didn’t mind. He would pretty much have the plane to himself, all the way to the Houston hub. Three hours of undisturbed quiet.