Well, there were a lot of people who felt like Bruce. In fact, in the end, Shari Belafonte thought that the case was too weak to put on the air. Not that she didn’t believe it. Just that there was not enough proof. Not enough for prime time.
“At the time,” Carol Bowman would recall, “it was not a really great case. There were good indicators, but nothing compelling. It was, as I recall, just another kid with nightmares.”
It was, they all would discover, early in the game.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
IT WASN’T THE uncertain journalists or even the equivocating experts who moved Bruce to keep chasing after a solid explanation of his son’s nightmares. It was his own unwillingness to let it go. He had to know what was happening to his son. And he had to know by something sturdier than a hunch, intuition, or an ethereal, wishful theory.
And then, on April 30, 2002, something tangible arrived: a letter. Leo Pyatt had come through.
Dear Bruce,
I am pleased to inform you that VC-81 Natoma Bay CVE 62 reunion is firmed up. It will be held in San Diego, Calif. on the 8th, 9th, 10th and 11th at the Grant Hotel in September… Yes, our numbers are dwindling, but we can still enjoy these gatherings.
Leo Pyatt VC-81
CVE 62
And so there he was on September 8, flying two thousand miles to San Diego, feeling a little foolish—a fifty-three-year-old World War II groupie with secrets to try to uncover… and secrets to keep.
They didn’t have room for him at the U.S. Grant Hotel, where the reunion was being held, so Bruce stayed half a mile away at a Holiday Inn. He dropped off his luggage and grabbed his shoulder case loaded with his tape recorder, spare batteries, notepads, and a bunch of pens, along with his list of eighteen names gathered from all the memorial Web sites: the men of Natoma Bay who had been killed in action.
The U.S. Grant, with its majestic lobby and tasteful trimmings, belonged to another time. It was built in 1910 with all the splash and splendor of Edwardian fashion. During World War II, it was one of the smart retreats for sailors who would soon be off to war. There were plush memories at the Grant for the men of Natoma Bay who had all come through San Diego more than half a century ago. The hotel was a reminder of a stylish and comfortable world, as well as of their youth.
Bruce asked the concierge about the reunion, and he pointed to a sign: Natoma Bay Ready Room, Second Floor. It was in the ballroom.
I felt as if I was treading on sacred ground. They were, to be sure, old-timers—not one of them younger than seventy-five—but there was the unmistakable light of something exceptional in their eyes. It was the glow of men who knew exactly who they were and what they had done. They joked and teased each other with the easy familiarity of men who had been through some version of hell together. They had been tested.
There were a couple of frail veterans at the door, and they greeted me without any complicating misgivings. They accepted me as openly and innocently as they would a thirsty traveler.
The room was dotted with tables, and on them were posters and maps and photographs—all types of memorabilia and journals and documents—the tangible evidence of Natoma Bay. A friendly man with pure white hair came up to me as I leafed through the material on the table, and introduced himself.
“I’m John DeWitt,” he said, holding out a hand.
I smiled. I had been trying to get in touch with John DeWitt for months. He was the ship historian and the secretary of Natoma Bay Association. And, as it turned out, like so much in this makeshift ready room that I had only heard about—and doubted—he was real.
“I’ve been trying to reach you,” I said. A gentle reproach.
He nodded. He knew about people trying to get in touch with him. “I’m retired, you know. That means I don’t sit around waiting for someone to call.”
“So why not have an answering machine?”
He paused, weighing, I suppose, whether or not I was worth a real answer. “Well, Bruce”—he sighed, having decided in my favor—“when I retired, I told myself that I would never let a phone run my life. If someone really wants to talk to me, they’ll call back.”
It was an educational moment for me; it told me a lot about the values and priorities of that unsung segment of the greatest generation. Life was right there in front of them. They were not anxiously sitting around and waiting for someone to call.
“What brings you to our modest little gathering?” he asked.
And I told him the tall tale of the imaginary man in my hometown who talked about Natoma Bay, and repeated my white lie about considering writing a book about the ship—a lie that was beginning to burn my lips.
Not that I was completely bogus. I told John that I had a list of eighteen men who had been killed, who had served aboard the ship, and I wanted to learn more about them. (One, in particular. I had been advised by Shalini Sharma, the 20/20 producer, that a friend at the Center for Naval History had found a record of a John Larsen—a name that was close enough to Jack—who was a naval pilot.)
For obvious reasons, I did not mention my son and his nightmares and a father’s quest to put it all to rest. In this case, I thought that the end justified the means, although I saw no real harm in the means.
John DeWitt, whether he believed me or not, gave me the benefit of the doubt. The ship certainly was worth a book. He was, after all, the historian and knew about all the battles and casualties Natoma Bay had suffered.
Then I brought up the name of the person I was really interested in: Jack Larsen. I said I had been trying to track him down. I wanted to know what had become of him. Leo Pyatt had told me that he saw him fly off one day and he never came back. He seemed to have gone missing; I was not sure I would ever find out what finally happened after he left the ship. Only family members had access to the military and personal records.
DeWitt tilted his head and looked at me kind of quizzically. “Well, you know something, Bruce? I think he’s on our Association roster.”
He took me to one of the tables in the ready room and reached down into a pile of documents and pulled out an old, tattered sheaf of papers. He began flipping through it, and after several pages he stopped and grinned. “Yep, here he is.”
He showed me the page with Jack Larsen’s name on it.
Then he asked if something was wrong. Apparently, I had suddenly turned pale.
“Are you okay?”
I might have said yes—I don’t remember—I was in that momentary fog that clouds memory. And I was trying to come to terms with the fact that Jack Larsen, the elusive character whose death I had been trying to document, was not only still alive but residing in Springdale, Arkansas.
At that moment, while I was trying to absorb this latest twist, Leo Pyatt came over to the table and introduced himself. After the pleasantries, I said that John DeWitt had just hit me over the head with a mallet. He showed me Jack Larsen’s name on the association roster. He was still alive!
This didn’t seem to faze Leo. He wasn’t even surprised. I had apparently misunderstood his first comment, that Larsen flew off one day and no one ever saw him again. What he meant was that Larsen literally flew off Natoma Bay to head for another assignment. It didn’t necessarily mean he was killed.
It was almost too much to take in. I had been there for less than half an hour and I had found one big piece of the puzzle—something that had kept me awake for the past two years. It was right there on the table all along.
I had to force myself to try and adjust. There was also the matter of James M. Huston, the name on the list of eighteen dead that had always stuck out. A name I had always resisted. I had dismissed the possibility of Huston as a candidate for my search. I had reasons, none of which were very good when I come to think of it. I just didn’t want him to be the guy. But now I had to rethink that name….
It was actually a domestic problem. Andrea had latched on to Huston’s name long before the reunion. She saw the “James,” and for her that connection was decisiv
e. But she couldn’t make Bruce see it. He was committed to his first choice, Jack Larsen. He had heard it from Leo Pyatt’s own mouth—Larsen had flown off one day and never came back.
Bruce went through the rest of that first night of the reunion trying to get as much information as possible, trying to relaunch his search, but it was a waste of time. The place was crowded with old sailors and airmen who reminisced about what they had gone through in the Pacific, but this was not what Bruce sought. The veterans had vivid memories, all right, but they didn’t have the big picture. They, like all soldiers, viewed the war from the vantage point of a foxhole—even if that foxhole was on an aircraft carrier.
Natoma Bay, like all ships, was tightly compartmentalized. The air groups stayed with the air groups, and the ship’s company stayed with the ship’s company. There was little mixing. The members of VC-63 knew the other members of VC-63, but they didn’t know the members of VC-9 or VC-81. They were watertight boxes. They remembered guys in their section, but if they didn’t have business with somebody, they didn’t blend. That’s just the way it was.
Bruce found himself going over the records, looking for combat reports, and trying to coax relevant memories out of the veterans, and though they were willing, they just weren’t able to dig down deep enough to satisfy Bruce.
“Didn’t know him—he wasn’t in my squadron,” was the usual reply. Or “He doesn’t come to the reunions.”
That was Jack Larsen. Why didn’t he come to the reunions?
“Don’t know,” said DeWitt. “We always send him the invitation, but he never comes. Some guys don’t. Some guys don’t like to remember.”
So then he tried to follow this new thread, the one that led to James Huston. But he didn’t believe in it. Bruce would have had to sift through a thousand combat mission reports to find out exactly what had happened to Huston. And he would discover that Huston wasn’t even killed at Iwo Jima. He was killed on a mission a couple of hundred miles away, at a place called Chichi-Jima. And no one had seen him go down. But at this stage, Bruce was not inclined to follow that trail. For reasons both explicit and intuitive, he did not want to believe that James Huston was his man. Larsen—that was the name his son had given. That was the name that came out of the nightmares. James had never mentioned Huston—at least, that was the rationale that Bruce clung to. He remained lost in a fog with the name Jack Larsen as the one sure thing he could count on.
Chaperoned by his new friends, Leo Pyatt and John DeWitt, Bruce had helped assemble the veterans, got them talking, but before long it was midnight and these guys were tired and yawning, and they had to call it a night.
Bruce walked back to his hotel in a state of high excitement—and nervous confusion. The first thing he did was to call home.
Andrea was not surprised about Jack Larsen. Not even that he was alive and residing in Arkansas. She was happy that they might be able to get this thing straight—and, yes, even happy that the money for the trip wasn’t wasted.
“Boy, am I glad you went to the reunion,” she said.
And then Bruce told her about James M. Huston, and she almost jumped through the phone.
“Oh, my God!”
Bruce was less excited, not quick enough to catch her point. “Listen, we’ve come across this name before,” he said. “We never agreed about him. The case isn’t all that clear…”
“No!” Andrea practically screamed. “Tell me the name again.”
“James M. Huston Jr.”
“Don’t you see?”
“What?”
“Junior. Junior! We never saw that ‘Junior’ before. That makes our James… James Three.”
It was the signature at the bottom of every single one of little James Leininger’s drawings of the sea and air battles: “James 3.”
Andrea was crazy to get off the phone and convene the panel. But first she wanted to convince Bruce to stay on the trail, to gather as many documents as he could carry, and, for God’s sake, to call Jack Larsen now that they had found him.
“It’s too late tonight; I’ll call in the morning. Meanwhile, don’t get all crazy about Huston. He may not be the guy.”
“He’s the one,” she told Bruce, trying not to boil out of her skin with excitement.
“The records aren’t clear,” insisted Bruce.
“Bruce!”
Bruce fell back on the fact that no one at the reunion ever knew what happened to Huston. No one had actually seen him die.
And, the truth is, Bruce was stubborn. He had been blinded by Leo Pyatt’s early declaration that Larsen had flown off one day and no one ever saw him again. He had taken that as irrevocable deductive proof that the case was settled.
But he was weakening. His reservations were starting to get mushy, picked off by the past-life snipers. He was getting a little tired of his lonely holdout. Nevertheless, he still had one ace in the hole.
“What about the Corsair?” he all but shouted.
Andrea had no answer.
He went over that crucial item. No Corsair had ever flown off Natoma Bay—every veteran at the reunion agreed on that. Huston had been flying an FM-2 Wildcat the day he was killed. Not a Corsair, as James said.
And there were no eyewitnesses to his death, so they didn’t even know that he’d been shot down in the same way that James described it. He could have just run out of fuel.
As far as Bruce was concerned, the whole thing was still an open mystery.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
IWAS WORRIED about Bruce. He was flying home on the first anniversary of the terrorist attack—September eleventh. He didn’t mention it, so I didn’t mention it, but when his plane landed in Houston, I breathed a sigh of relief. A crazy fanatic might try to blow up a plane going from San Diego to Houston, but I figured no self-respecting terrorist would bother taking out a puddle jumper going from Houston to Lafayette.
Meanwhile, Bruce’s report from the reunion was big news among us girls. The panel took it all in, turned it around, gave it their own spin, their best thoughts, their own characteristically wild guesses, and then spoke… and spoke, and spoke. You couldn’t shut us up. The phone was never quiet; someone had another thought, another opinion. Oh, we all had plenty of thoughts and opinions! And there were a lot of “I told you so” moments. But most of all, we were insane with curiosity. We couldn’t wait to get our hands on Bruce.
The tingle of the news from San Diego set everything in Andrea’s world in motion. It was too much information. How can you accept the answer to something that shifts the ground under your feet—the solution to a tectonic mystery—without some thought, some digestive moment?
Was that all there was?
Jack Larsen was alive!
No, of course not; she had to postpone the explosive moment. She had to wait until she had Bruce sitting there in the living room, face-to-face, ready to be grilled. You couldn’t just catch the moon in your hands and then go out and set the table for dinner.
But that was exactly what she had to do. Andrea had a child and a life, and people depending upon her to perform her daily tasks.
And, as always, life was complicated. Andrea had the normal range of human weaknesses. She might seem like a tower of strength, but a mass of little character flaws were suppressed behind that bright smile.
In spite of the apparent fruits of having attended the reunion, Andrea felt a tinge of envy about being left behind. Why should Bruce get to go on a deluxe four-day “fact-finding” trip to California when she had to stay home and… cope? A small, nasty little grudge.
And so she turned to some nice little compensations—Andrea always managed to find a silver lining. When Bruce was gone, she had James all to herself. They were like a couple of kids in a conspiracy of play dates and junk food. They went out for Mexican lunch and saw Lilo and Stitch at the movies. And while Bruce insisted on the family ritual of a sit-down dinner with a thick main protein source, she could go a little wild when it was just James. She staged a “bre
akfast for dinner night” with scrambled eggs and toast. And she could prepare the unmanly quiche, which her son ate and actually liked. At night, James would crawl into the Dada bed with her, and—a small bonus—she had one less bed to make in the morning.
The whole routine at the house took a relaxed breath and underwent a kind of slackening, a loosening up.
James got to ask his best friend, Aaron Brown, over to play in the backyard. They were classmates at the Asbury United Methodist Church’s pre-K 4 class. Andrea loved the school; she was delighted right off the bat when she saw James jump out of the car, throw out both arms like wings, then run and skip and twist across the sidewalk, flying into the classroom.
He had made a lot of friends at the school, but no one closer than Aaron Brown, a fair-haired little cherub.
From time to time, Andrea also invited another classmate, Natalie St. Martin, a cute little brunette, to join them in the backyard playground. Natalie’s mom, Lynette, had become one of Andrea’s own grown-up playmates. The two moms would sit on the patio sipping coffee while the kids ran around the yard.
But it was when James was with Aaron that Andrea dreamed up the really hot little-guy games. The favorite was the precision bombing attack on wounded toys. Andrea would fill a bucket of little balloons with water, then haul it out to the yard. The boys were waiting on the stairway landing of the two-story garage. They would lug the bucket up to the platform, then drop the loaded balloons on the scattered remnants of designated toy targets at the base. Splash one cracked cruiser! It was a loud and thrilling game.
Andrea watched from a safe, dry distance as the boys went into their sloppy, squealing bombing runs—two happy four-year-olds at play.
It was all so innocent. Except that there was a sad undercurrent. Aaron’s mother, Carol, had been diagnosed with cancer and was undergoing a brutal round of chemotherapy at nearby Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital. Andrea made it her business to find Aaron a playful distraction from what was going on at the other end of West St. Mary Boulevard.
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