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

by Andrea Leininger

  When the boys had almost run out of balloons, Andrea fixed a hot lunch: pigs in blankets or macaroni and cheese, or grilled cheese sandwiches and soup; fruit and a vegetable were always part of the meal. They’d all hold hands and say grace and talk of school or kid stuff—whatever was on their minds. Then it was back to the bombing runs.

  By the end of the afternoon, the backyard was a rainbow of multicolored remnants, and James and Aaron were flushed and out of breath.

  They would come in and eat cookies and drink milk and watch cartoons on TV. It was always a soft, sweet, and successful diversion—until Aaron’s father came to pick him up and take him home. The Leininger house became a sanctuary for Aaron as, day after day, James and Andrea kept his mind off the hard reality down the boulevard.

  Aaron’s mother died three months after being diagnosed.

  The Leininger home front was Andrea’s business, and she maintained it with the eagle eye of an IRS auditor. She went shopping with a calculator and a bag full of grocery coupons. (The local papers didn’t carry the choice coupons, so she had Bobbi send a batch every week from the Dallas Morning News.) Bruce had already been out of work for three months, and the budget was tight. It cost them seven thousand dollars a month just for the basics—the mortgage, upkeep on the cars, COBRA health insurance, the support of his ex-wife and kids. It left Andrea seventy-five dollars a week for food. The buyout from OSCA would last only six months. When that ran out… well, there was no other choice—Bruce simply had to get another job. He planned to start a consulting business in the fall, but Andrea was dubious.

  The trip to San Diego was a big sacrifice. To attend the reunion, they had had to dip into their emergency reserve account. While Bruce was away, she pictured him staying at a swanky hotel, eating five-course dinners while she and James had to stay home eating Chef Boyardee ravioli.

  But the girls on the panel were adamant. These men from Natoma Bay weren’t getting any younger, and as they died off, the memories would die with them. And the possibility of solving James’s nightmares would shut down, too.

  Of course, they were right, and the practical-minded “tightwaddy” Andrea gave in. Bruce had to go. And, as it turned out, he struck gold. He found Jack Larsen!

  On the second morning of the reunion, after learning that the man was alive, Bruce called Jack Larsen from his room at the Holiday Inn. At the time, he was still under the spell of a possible link between Jack Larsen and James—his son. There had to be a connection, he reasoned. “Why else would James have given us his name?”

  On the phone, Bruce went through the usual routine about writing a book and wanting all the information he could get on Natoma Bay, and Jack Larsen was affable and agreeable—couldn’t be nicer. “Fine,” he said, “come to Arkansas. Whenever you’re in the neighborhood. Be glad to help out.”

  After he hung up, Bruce walked over to the Grant and found Al Alcorn, a sailor on Natoma Bay who had become an important mover and shaker in the association. They wandered down to the harbor. The veterans were all going on a tour, sailing past the North Island Naval Air Station, where so many Navy pilots had trained during World War II.

  John DeWitt and Leo Pyatt and Al Alcorn, who had appointed themselves Bruce’s wingmen for the reunion, asked Bruce to join them, but Bruce backed off. He said he wanted to spend some time in the ready room and take another crack at the documents.

  When he was alone with the sheaf of papers, he lost track of time. He skipped meals and bent over the tattered, incomplete, and frustrating records on display. There was just enough material there to whet his appetite, but not enough to answer his questions. But he was in his element. Records, paper trails—proofs!—were his métier. Not the New Age sensory speculations that came out of Dallas and Lafayette!

  The list of names of the casualties that he got from the Battle Monuments Commission was incomplete (there were, in fact, twenty-one dead from Natoma Bay, not eighteen), and they were scattered over three squadrons. Bruce hadn’t known which names belonged to which squadron—until he found the material in San Diego. There was also one member of the ship’s company who was killed: Loraine Sandberg. Of the fliers, four men from VC-63 were killed: Edmund Lange, Eldon Bailey, Eddie Barron, and Ruben Goranson; five men from VC-9: Clarence Davis, Peter Hazard, William Bird, Richard Quack, and Robert Washburg; and eleven from VC-81: Adrian Hunter, Leon Conner, Donald Bullis, Louis Hill, Walter Devlin, Edward Schrambeck, Billie Peeler, Lloyd Holton, John Sargent, George Neese, and James M. Huston Jr., the only man killed during the battle of Iwo Jima.

  James Huston Jr., the only man killed at Iwo Jima! That should have set off all the alarms.

  But there were times when Bruce’s mind froze. He saw something right before his eyes but could not grasp the meaning. The name James Huston registered only within the limits of what he had previously accepted as true. He needed evidence.

  His son had not mentioned Huston. James had said Jack Larsen. Bruce had heard it from James’s own lips: Jack Larsen. Corsair. He was stopped cold.

  Not Andrea. When he called—as he called every night to report on his day—she felt the icy chill of clarity of a complete answer to the search.

  I knew. I knew it in my bones. Even before he went to the reunion. When I first saw the name on the list of casualties—I always knew that it was James Huston.

  I’m not like Bruce. When I read Carol Bowman’s book, I knew that it was Huston who was the “James” my son remembered. I didn’t need proof or confirmation. I accepted the past life explanation as the only one that made sense—the only one that promised a peaceful outcome for my son. James Huston rang a bell. And when Bruce told me from San Diego that this was the only guy killed during the battle of Iwo Jima, well, of course it was James Huston. Period. That was the end of it. Even before I knew that detail about him being the only one killed during that battle, even before any of it, I swear that I knew it deep down.

  For Bruce, at this stage, they were still just names. He could have been looking at names engraved on a slab of marble, a World War II monument.

  The records showed that James M. Huston Jr. was lost on March 3, 1945. He was flying an FM-2 Wildcat, supporting a bombing mission against Chichi-Jima, the Japanese supply base less than two hundred miles from Iwo Jima.

  Bruce was tweaked—it was a possibility. But there remained his unbending stance against the reincarnation theory—Huston was flying a Wildcat, not a Corsair! Either it was not Huston, or his son got the plane wrong. Damn it! Why couldn’t things line up nicely like a mathematical equation? Why did there always have to be these illogical complications?

  Nevertheless, his stone stubborn streak kept him probing, overcoming his own objections, it would seem, but unable to stop himself. Bruce was a hard case.

  At the reunion, he met one of the pilots from VC-81, Ken Wavell. He was a rangy, soft-spoken man who remembered the lost pilots. Walter Devlin, for instance, crashed in the water near the ship, but he couldn’t swim. Wavell tossed a life raft from his own circling plane, but it was too late. Devlin drowned. He had been a friend, and Bruce could see that speaking of it still bothered Wavell, so he changed the subject.

  What about James Huston? Bruce asked.

  “He was a real good man,” said Wavell.

  “Why?”

  Wavell took his time replying. “Well, lots of guys stood down from missions. You could do that if you wanted to, you know. But Jim never missed his call. He was the first to volunteer for the mission that day. I was in the ready room when the XO called for fighter pilots to escort the TBMs into Chichi-Jima. Everybody knew about Chichi-Jima. It was bristling with ack-ack. That’s where George Bush’s TBM went down in 1944. It was a very dangerous place. Anti-aircraft covered every inch of Futami-ko Harbor that led into Chichi-Jima. But Jim volunteered to go.”

  Not that he was reckless. Earl Garrison, who was the parachute packer for the squadron, remembered that Huston would always carefully double-check his rigging before every mission.r />
  Ironically, he was due to be rotated with the rest of his squadron. One way or another, no matter how careful he was, Chichi-Jima was his last mission.

  Jack Larsen was in the group picture that Bruce studied on the plane coming home from the reunion. And Ken Wavell. And James Huston. By the time he got back to Louisiana, Bruce was not certain just what he was looking for—it was all a jumble—but he knew that there was still something important waiting to be discovered.

  James and I went to the airport to pick him up and Bruce came home with a little toy airplane and his luggage filled with the files and pictures and records and notes on Natoma Bay that he had assembled and copied and borrowed… they would open up a whole new world of research. He was obsessed now and I had very little influence. I could see that he was going to have to come to my conclusions by himself. We could talk about it, but he was going ahead come hell or high water…

  It was a Wednesday evening when Bruce landed; he was prepared for the full Scoggin grilling. He had spent a lot of time at Kinko’s in San Diego, copying everything he could get his hands on: logbooks, lists of alumni, pictures of the ship, pictures of the crew. And now he had good grounds for pressing the search: Jack Larsen was alive—available.

  This new clue seemed to indicate that Larsen was not the guy they were looking for. Maybe they were looking for James M. Huston Jr.—or, to put it another way, James 2.

  James 3 was sound asleep in his room.

  For once, Andrea’s debriefing was a little behind the curve. Bruce was full of information and stories and pathways. He was on a mission. There was something about these old guys, bent with the battle scars of war and age…. Well, Bruce had trouble explaining it exactly to Andrea. These veterans might look ancient and beat up, but he saw them as they were in the pictures: lean young men wearing cocky, lopsided grins—guys who seemed to glow with what he saw as an immortal destiny. He was enthralled.

  The veterans had also made him feel a little ashamed. His little lie about writing a book honoring them wouldn’t stand up to these guys. The lie had turned into something else: a promise. And so he and Andrea agreed to push on and find out as much as they could about Jack Larsen and James Huston and settle the questions and doubts, one way or another. They would also begin to gather the necessary information about all the men who sailed aboard Natoma Bay—to make good on a promise.

  Andrea had a different mission:

  I woke up in the middle of the night in a panic. “Oh, my God!” What are we doing? I had all these romantic fantasies about James M. Huston—a nice, handsome kid from a good family who died a magnificently heroic death in the service of his country. An all-American dream. But what if we found out that he was a two-timing womanizer who cheated on his wife and beat his kids and stole money out of the collection plate at church? What if he was a murderer? I would have to spend the next twenty years scrutinizing James, watching for any signs of deviant tendencies.

  Why did we need to know anything more about James M. Huston? Wasn’t it enough that we found out who he was? Would more information change anything in a positive way? No. It was time to close the books and move on.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  THE ONCE PROUD dining room on West St. Mary Boulevard was now like a topographical model of rugged mountains, rising and falling with stacks of data. There were charts and folders and binders and notes and computer printouts—all relating to Natoma Bay. And there were books. Books about World War II, books about old combat aircraft, books about the Navy, books about each battle across the Pacific, and especially, books about the fight for Iwo Jima. It was the high Sierra of a happy researcher.

  That’s what Bruce did: climb the piles of documents, print out records from obscure Web sites, link up with fellow Internet explorers, and spend hours poring over the material, looking for meaning. He was, at heart, a committed researcher, for his instinct was telling him that within all that unexplored muck lay the answer to this perplexing mystery that dogged his life. If he sifted carefully enough, he would find the full story of Natoma Bay and its crews—and a complete explanation of the mystery of his son’s nightmares. And in some unspoken sense, one he couldn’t understand, he might even find the big thing that always eluded him: the meaning of life.

  And so he would have been pleased to spend days, months, years—as much time as it took—working through the files and folders and records, panning the papers like an old prospector.

  In an odd reversal, it fell to Andrea, the intuitive mystic, to play the toe-tapping part of the impatient taskmaster, while Bruce was the dithering truth seeker.

  “Why are you chasing a bunch of dead sailors when we have one foot in the poorhouse?” Andrea asked. “The mortgage is due, the kid has to eat—I have to eat—you have to get a job. We only have ten weeks of money left!”

  Bruce didn’t want to hear it. Andrea wanted him to get a real job, with real benefits. She wanted health insurance, to start to build up a pension, some cushion for retirement—a guaranteed paycheck. The house was on fiscal fire!

  If Bruce had to work, he didn’t want to work for anybody else. Not again. He wanted to be his own boss, run his own consulting business. He wanted to work from home, advising corporations about human resources.

  Fine, only he shilly-shallied about getting started.

  A settlement was reached. Bruce would take steps: send out résumés, network, find companies that needed help in his field. That way, he could still be his own boss.

  “It’s now or never, bud!” was the way that Andrea put it. He would have to put aside the Natoma Bay research. Closer to home, duty called.

  And so the piles of material on the dining room table were shifted. The talk about Jack Larsen and Natoma Bay turned to marketing plans, acquiring business cards, corporate stationery. Bruce started setting up appointments with potential clients, putting out the word that he was available for contract work.

  Andrea handled the administrative stuff, setting up corporate accounts and the software to manage the books. They were a well-balanced team. Bruce could handle all the production and delivery while Dre would manage the office and bookkeeping.

  Since there wasn’t enough money to go out and buy expensive business cards and stationery, Andrea created the cards and stationery on her own. She arranged to have the company incorporated as Accelerated Performances Resources, LLC.

  And almost at once, Bruce found work. He advised a variety of companies about putting together employee benefit pack-ages, setting up executive training programs, managing corporate downsizing, arranging severance packages for fired workers, and transforming union operations into more solvent nonunion shops.

  And a great load lifted from Andrea’s shoulders.

  It felt good that he was doing something about establishing the consulting business. I didn’t mind if Bruce worked on the past life research at night and on the weekends, but I wasn’t going to live in our car or in a box under a bridge for all the Natoma Bay ghosts put together.

  At the same time, while Andrea was bearing down on the consulting business, Bruce was sneaking off by himself to throw out messages in bottles, that is, trolling the Internet.

  And he could see that he had started something compelling, that Natoma Bay wouldn’t leave him alone. Soon after returning from the reunion, Bruce found a Chichi-Jima Web site. It was sponsored by someone named John LaPlant. Bruce sent off one of his midnight postings, which he put together from information he got off the ship’s log—a document that he had never regarded as completely reliable, since it was put together in 1986 and not official but merely contributions of members of the crew:

  I am doing research for CVE-62 Natoma Bay, a WWII escort carrier association.

  The purpose for my visit to your wonderfully done Web site is to learn more about the island and Futami Ko. Lt. Jg James M. Huston Jr., a FM-2 pilot from Natoma Bay, was lost on March 3, 1945 during an attack on shipping in Futami K. His aircraft was apparently struck by AA fire and crashed i
nto the harbor near the entrance. They came in from the high ground side of the Harbor and he crashed while retiring. I am working on a memorial publication about those lost on CVE-62 and a story about CVEs for the Natoma Bay Association. James M. Huston Jr. was one of those lost. The story is going to be dedicated to the entire crew and all the others lost from CVEs in WWII. Is there any place I can go to get a bigger photo of the Harbor or more detailed descriptions of any wreck sites that may have been found in the harbor or near it? Any assistance you could provide would be deeply appreciated. Thank you.

  The posting was the best he could manage. Bruce went to bed; the note had gone off into the “ether.” The message would linger in cyberspace almost a year, and then, out of the blue, there would come a thunderclap in reply. But Bruce’s plea first had to remain unseen, unread—a scrap of too many electrons buzzing through the cluttered Internet atmosphere—until it was plucked out of space, retrieved, and the time was ripe for it to come alive. But not now, not yet. For the time being, Bruce was bouncing back and forth, struggling to find some answers to his questions.

  The next day was Sunday, and while he was in church—inspired or just sleepy from getting to bed late—he came to a decision. He would attend to his family’s financial needs—he didn’t want to wind up sleeping in a car or a box, either—but he would also keep chasing the phantom past life story. After church, he called Jack Larsen and arranged to make the six-hundred-mile drive to Springdale, Arkansas.

  I was determined to figure out what Jack Larsen had to do with James’s memories. Frankly, I had not wholly recovered from the discovery that he was not dead. I guess I had to see him in the flesh to believe in the story.