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

by Andrea Leininger

  “If something breaks, I can fix it, minimize the damage,” he argued. “Besides, we can always leave; if it gets bad enough, we’ll just pile into the car and go.”

  As the night went on, the predictions got worse and Andrea got more nervous. It was after midnight when she declared, “James and I are leaving—with or without you.” Bruce finally saw that it was time to bail. They told James that he was going to see his cousins, Hunter and K. K., on a mini vacation, and, as usual, he took it in good spirits. James was excited, up for anything.

  “Take a good look at the house,” Bruce said. “It might not be here when we get back.”

  Andrea’s heart leaped into her throat. “Do you really think we could lose the house?” she asked pitifully. She couldn’t bear the thought of losing this house—this was her final move, her last stand.

  “No, I don’t think we’ll lose the house, but it will surely get damaged. Maybe we’ll lose the roof.”

  In an odd way, that seemed to calm her.

  Suddenly, he stopped the car before they had even backed out of the driveway. He had forgotten something. He ran into the house and came back carrying all of his Natoma Bay research.

  It was after one a.m. when they pulled out. They drove to Dallas, racing the clouds and wind.

  All the motels and rest stops along Interstate 49 had become refugee centers. Great mobs of eighteen-wheelers were parked off the highway, forming circles like pioneer settlers getting ready to defend a wagon train against the storm.

  They pulled into Jen and Greg’s at dawn. The first thing they did was turn on the TV and watch Lafayette being torn up by eighty-five-mile-an-hour winds. The power lines were down, and the rain whipped fiercely through the downtown center. Bruce tried the home phone, but it was dead. He did manage to get a neighbor, who did a drive-by and reported that a lot of branches were down but the house looked intact.

  The Leiningers got home a week later, and it took them four days to clean up the mess. And then something happened. It was another of those moments that left Bruce and Andrea agape.

  It was during the cleanup. While Bruce and James were raking the leaves and gathering the fallen branches from the yard, Bruce had a sudden impulse to hug his son. He picked him up and kissed him and said how happy he was to have him as a son.

  James replied, in a tone that seemed eerie to Bruce, “That’s why I picked you; I knew you would be a good daddy.”

  Bruce did not know what he had heard. “What did you say?”

  “When I found you and Mommy, I knew you would be good to me.”

  This was not the voice of a child, although it came out of the mouth of a four-year-old.

  “Where did you find us?” asked Bruce.

  “Hawaii,” James replied.

  Bruce said that James was wrong. They had gone to Hawaii just that summer, when they were all together.

  “It was not when we all went to Hawaii. It was just Mommy and you.”

  Although profoundly shaken, Bruce managed to ask where he had found them. And James said, “I found you at the big pink hotel.”

  Bruce remained dumbfounded as James added, “I found you on the beach. You were eating dinner at night.”

  In 1997, Bruce and Andrea had gone to Hawaii to celebrate their fifth wedding anniversary. They had stayed at the Royal Hawaiian, the landmark pink hotel on Waikiki Beach, and on their final night, they had a moonlight dinner on the beach. It was five weeks before Andrea got pregnant. And James had described it perfectly.

  This was not something that either parent had ever discussed—certainly not in detail. Not the pink hotel or the dinner on the beach or the fact that Andrea got pregnant five weeks later.

  He had no idea what to make of it. He was confused and frightened. Bruce ran into the house and told Andrea, but she was already convinced that James possessed knowledge that no one could readily account for. It was just one more thing.

  Meanwhile, Bruce had hooked up with a local steel company for a consulting contract—a financial salvation, just in time. Their reserves were rapidly depleting; the family morale was low, but things were looking up.

  At about the same time, John DeWitt sent nine rolls of microfilm containing records from Natoma Bay. Bruce spent the next three weeks at the University of Louisiana library, copying five thousand pages of these.

  He found something new every day. In one microfilm, there was a diagram that pinpointed the spot where James Huston’s plane crashed. Another contained some details about the crash. It also listed the other pilots who took part in the attack: Stewart Gingrich, Robert Greenwalt, Daryl Johnstone, Jack Larsen, William Mathson, Robert Mount, and Mac Roebuck.

  And he also found a vital new clue. The eight Avenger Torpedo Bombers that took part in the attack—the ones referred to by Jack Larsen—had come off another ship, USS Sargent Bay (CVE-83). The Avenger was equipped with an advanced communications system so the strike leader could control the attack from the air. The eyewitness account in the VC-81 war diary—the details about the plane being hit in the front and bursting into flames and crashing into the ocean on retiring—had to come directly from the VC-83 strike leader. It was the only thing that made sense. Here was his eyewitness!

  Now all he had to do was to find a reunion of VC-83—locate the crew members of the Avenger bombers that followed the fighter planes in VC-81 on March 3, 1945. Surely there would then be more eyewitnesses, more evidence to be found.

  Bruce was in pigheaded heaven.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  JAMES’S ATTACHMENT to his GI Joe action figures did not go unnoticed in the family. He played with the prosaically named Billie and Leon every day; they took baths together, and James even slept with them.

  On Christmas 2001, James got another GI Joe from Aunt G. J. Billy was brown-haired, but this new one was blond, ripped, and came with a black rubber life raft and small battery-powered outboard motor—great for the tub. James called him “Leon.”

  “Wow!” exclaimed Andrea. “What a great name, buddy!” It was not an altogether understandable name, since neither Bruce nor Andrea knew anyone named Leon. There were no Leons in the family, no friends, no neighbors. It didn’t seem to fit a blond warriorlike plastic God.

  However, Leon fit right in with Billy and James. Together, all three—Billy, Leon, and James—made a great military combat unit, going on many successful backyard missions.

  War—even make-believe backyard battle—can be hellish. During one contact with the enemy, Billy was badly wounded; he lost his left leg from the knee down. James was traumatized, but Andrea, like a true battlefield mom medic, came to the rescue. She was able to reattach the leg using improvised field surgery that involved a paper clip and Super Glue. Soon Billy was back in action, fighting for democracy, taking on some hidden foe under the azalea bushes in the backyard.

  For Christmas 2002, Santa recruited a third GI Joe. This one had red hair—and a lot of baggage. He had an entire footlocker filled with uniforms and accessories. After all the sealed packages had been broken open and the wrappings taken out to the garage, James took his new GI Joe to his room to introduce him to the old unit, Billy and Leon.

  Bruce and Andrea stood in the doorway smiling and watching the successful Christmas gift come alive. James was on the bed, outfitting Billy and Leon in fresh uniforms and putting them into their new gear.

  “So what are you going to name your new GI Joe, James?” asked Bruce.

  James turned and looked up. “Walter,” he said.

  Bruce and Andrea looked at each other, puzzled but amused. They didn’t know any Walter. In fact, their son had a whole collection of intriguingly colorless names: Billy, Leon, and Walter. No Buzz, or Todd, or Rocky.

  They laughed, but Bruce was curious and asked, “Hey, how come you named your GI Joes Billy and Leon and Walter?”

  “Because that’s who met me when I got to heaven.”

  Then he turned and went back to play.

  Once again Bruce and Andrea
were faced with a chilling reminder that their son, little James, was operating on levels way beyond their ability to understand. They did the only sensible thing: they retreated. They walked down the hall to the office, closed the door, and stood there for a moment trying to collect their wits.

  “That’s who met me when I got to heaven?” repeated Andrea softly, not wanting to alarm James.

  Bruce went over to the desk and began riffling through some documents.

  “What?” asked Andrea. “What are you looking for?”

  Bruce snatched a piece of paper and read it. He read it again, but couldn’t bring himself to say what was on his mind.

  He was holding the list of names of the men who were killed aboard Natoma Bay. He handed it to Andrea. On the list were James M. Huston Jr., Billie Peeler, Leon Conner, and Walter Devlin.

  “Oh, my God!” she said. “They met him when he got to heaven. When were they killed?”

  Bruce gave her a flat look, then started shuffling and tossing papers around again. He had files with dates and details and could conjure up the records in a flash.

  “They were all in the same squadron,” Bruce said. “VC-81.”

  It was one of those revelations that took a moment to absorb. There was meaning in that detail.

  “When were they killed?” asked Andrea, trying to sound casual.

  But there was nothing casual about this stuff. Bruce looked at the papers, checked them again. Then he looked at his wife. His voice was flat.

  “Leon Conner was killed on October 25, 1944. Walter Devlin on October 26 of 1944. Billie Peeler was killed on November 17th of 1944…”

  “And James Huston was killed on March 3, 1945,” said Andrea. The point was clear. Leon and Walter and Billie were already dead when James Huston was killed over Chichi-Jima.

  They were waiting for him in heaven.

  PART THREE

  The Men of Natoma Bay

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  ANDREA WAS A PIANIST on the Internet. She could run Internet links like a jazz musician, improvising and finding her way through the blind alleys and dead ends and false trails until she had her sweet narrative melody.

  But she couldn’t find the right combination of notes to crack the story of James Huston. It had her stumped.

  He was, of course, the first name on my list. If I was going to find out about anyone, I was going to find out about Huston.

  But it wasn’t at all simple. James M. Huston Jr. was the lone male heir in his family. On her favorite Web site, Ancestry.com, Andrea discovered that his father was dead, his mother was dead, and the only possibly surviving siblings were two sisters.

  It was relatively straightforward to trace surviving male heirs. Their surnames survived marriages, divorces, and remarriages. But Andrea knew from all her years of cracking her own family’s genealogy that finding the female relatives was almost impossible. Girls grew up and got married, and the family surname dried up with the marriage. During the 1940s the face of America was blistered with young war widows.

  But it was not impossible to track them down, provided you could get your hands on the right marriage certificate—which most states would issue for a fee. But you had to know where exactly (the state and county) and when exactly the woman got married. And even that didn’t always solve the problem. If the bride got divorced or the husband died, you had to start all over again, looking for another married name.

  It was like a Coney Island Fun House room of mirrors—you didn’t know where to start looking for the real image.

  Usually, Andrea started with something easy. When she wrote out a to-do list, she put down three things she had already accomplished. That way, she was ahead of the game. Still, when they decided they were going to do a book, she began with Huston. Not an easy start, but that was who she was determined to find. If there was going to be a book—and very soon after the reunion they decided that there had to be a book.

  In fact, it was Bruce who came to that conclusion first. It was to be his penitence. His white lie, along with the little crystals of embellishment, had become a bone in his throat. He told himself that “the book” had been an essential tactic to get into the reunion, but he hadn’t really expected to like these guys. He hadn’t anticipated their warm treatment and openhearted help, nor had he expected to be so awed by the sheer grandeur of their achievements. He didn’t expect to want their respect so badly.

  And the book was always in the air.

  “When do you think we’ll see this book?” a veteran would ask.

  “Oh, books take time,” Bruce would explain.

  “How’s it coming?”

  “It’s moving right along.”

  “What can we do to help?”

  “Can you send me the Aircraft Action Reports?”

  It made him a little crazy. On top of it all, Bruce was also under financial, professional, and household pressure. He was scheduled to start a new job in January 2003. He had won a consulting contract with Lafayette Steel Erectors, and it had a promising long-term future. It would take countless hours to de-unionize the 250 employees and help the company improve its competitiveness. He would also have to recruit new workers and provide benefit packages for everyone. After his long, barren period of unemployment and tight budgets, he couldn’t afford to mess this up. The job wouldn’t leave him much time for research.

  And so he came to the unavoidable conclusion that he needed help. He couldn’t tackle the book alone. He needed Andrea.

  He had a name for the book. It would be called One Lucky Ship. He had worked out that much. Natoma Bay had been through nine major campaigns in the Pacific, from the invasion of the Marshall Islands to the assault on Okinawa. It had earned nine battle stars and was awarded a rare Presidential Unit Citation. Bruce was reasonably sure that it was the last aircraft carrier in the war hit by a kamikazi.

  Through all that action, from October 1943 until the end of the war in August 1945, it had lost only twenty-one crewmen. By any measure, it was a lucky ship.

  Andrea was less than enthusiastic. “No one really needs another dull history book about one lone ship in World War Two,” she said.

  Why not a book about the men, not just the ship? This was something that had long been bothering her. She noticed it every time she drove into a new little town. At its center, next to the courthouse, there was invariably a war memorial. Typically, it was some form of marble slab covered with the names of fallen soldiers. Deserted, derelict, dreary—and, in time, as family members died off, all but forgotten.

  The twenty-one Natoma Bay sailors and airmen killed in action in the Pacific were becoming part of that neglected patch of lawn that stretched across the memory of America; if she and Bruce could bring them back to life, that would be worth a book.

  One winter morning in early February of 2003, I got my second cup of coffee and planted myself in front of the computer with a list of twenty-one names. I was into it before I even started. These men… I wanted to see their faces, find out who they were, who they left behind… how they died.

  It’s true that I had some experience with this business since I had put together the genealogy for our families. But in that case I was working with known ancestors. I had learned how to track the family’s marriage records and death records and property records. And I had the complete right to probe—I was family. In this case, all I had were the names of the Natoma Bay dead, the state that they had enlisted from and the date of their death. And I had a very dubious right to search—I was a stranger.

  The job seemed impossible.

  Her confidence was shaken by her first awkward and futile attempts to find James Huston. But Andrea was not easily discouraged. She violated her own rule about starting off simple, by impetuously going after James Huston. But there were too many dead ends, too many problems—women survivors, no stable family roots. She would come back to it. It was better to be methodical, first to pick the low-hanging fruit. It would, in the end, turn out for the bes
t. She would sharpen her search skills. She would find the other crewmen, and they would fill in the picture.

  With a sigh, she began again, alphabetically. She began with the “B’s”: Eldon Bailey, Eddie Barron, William Bird, Donald Bullis…

  She hit the name on the keyword on Google. Maybe there was a family member who listed the dead airman in a genealogical search.

  Nothing.

  Then she tried “World War II dead.” Nothing.

  “World War II casualties.” Nothing.

  “Navy casualties.”

  There were relevant hits, that is, references to other military Web sites, but they were impossible to navigate or required information (such as social security numbers) that she simply didn’t have.

  On the third cup of coffee, she decided to find sites that were easier to work with. Friendly Web sites. But that, too, was frustrating. Some of them went in and out of business. No longer available.

  After a while, and with her gift for moving from link to link, she began to pick up important clues from her favorite Web site, Ancestry.com. It was an expensive site—fifty dollars every three months (she couldn’t afford longer commitments)—but well worth it. It led her to the useful military Web sites.

  There was one military memorial site that listed all the dead from World War II—hundreds of pages of names. The casualties were listed state by state. And with the state affiliation, they also listed a next of kin.

  Andrea went after male next of kin. Edward Barron and Eldon Bailey were not listed among the dead from their states. Donald Bullis had his mother listed as next of kin. William Bird had a stepfather with a different surname. She set them aside.

  Leon Conner was next. He was from Eufaula, Alabama. His father, Lynn Lewis Conner, was his next of kin. Andrea now had found a ripe, low-hanging piece of fruit. She went to Ancestry.com and pulled up the 1940 census record for Lynn Conner in Eufaula, Alabama. Both Leon’s parents, his three siblings, and Leon himself were all listed.