Of course, I was drawn into this by setting up these tests, establishing questions that had to be answered, and all the while, I was getting closer and closer to something… dangerous… It was like putting my hand in a fire….
And yet, even now that all the evidence had fallen on the other side, so that his holdout seemed perverse, Bruce still was not completely convinced. There was the old matter of the absence of an eyewitness. A thin reed to hold on to, but something nonetheless. He would not, could not, say out loud that this was a past life. He just could not take that last step. The word “reincarnation” violated the Gospels and his own understanding of what the Bible meant.
And it was a period of relative peace. The spiritual crisis seemed to recede. Even the nightmares had almost vanished from the house on West St. Mary Boulevard. They became rare, breaking out every few months.
Bruce’s concentration was on the search into lives of the dead servicemen of Natoma Bay. The families would send their packages of documents and pictures to Lafayette, and Bruce would carefully copy them all and send them back. The families trusted the Leiningers with the original documents. This made a big impression on Bruce and Andrea, and they were scrupulous in their care of the material.
The lovingly wrapped bundles contained the original telegrams notifying the family of the death, the newspaper obituaries, the funeral programs, the enlistment records, the letters home, and the final effects. Bruce made an inventory for each casualty. He made a loose-leaf binder for each one, and Andrea wept every time a package came in the mail.
Bruce called from work every day, asking if a package had arrived. By the beginning of March, they were swamped with material. Bruce would spend the evenings calling the families, letting them know that their package had arrived safely. Gently he would ask and answer new questions that arose out of the material.
Andrea’s attention was on more mundane matters. She was up all night worrying about where James was going to start his formal education. The 2002–03 school year for the pre-kindergarten class at Asbury United Methodist Church was about to end, and in her usual thorough way, Andrea searched for a replacement school. It had to be the best private school—she would tolerate nothing less for James. Ascension Day School passed all her tests.
I had no second choice. I was in a panic over whether or not he would be accepted. I even called the school to see when they were sending out acceptance letters. I couldn’t sleep. You would think that I was waiting for a letter from Harvard.
One day Mr. John, the mailman, brought the mail to the house. There was a letter from Ascension. James was accepted. I cried. Then I called Bruce. James was happy, but not as excited as I was.
In the creative parenting department, Andrea had few equals. At the end of February, she attended the St. Jude’s Bike-a-Thon at Asbury Church. Some of the children were riding two-wheelers. She told Bruce that it was time to make the transition. James had had training wheels on his bike for a year.
But James was nervous about flying solo.
The training wheels are more like a crutch, since most kids at this stage have already figured out how to balance without really knowing it. When I was a dancer, I had a crazy teacher who liked to bang her cane on the floor in time with the music. It made everyone nuts. So the guys decided one day to take her cane to the shop area and cut it down by an eighth of an inch. An imperceptible amount. She didn’t really notice it.
A few weeks later, they cut another eighth of an inch off the bottom. The teacher was not able to put her finger on it, although she knew something was different.
A month later, after a few more trims, she had to bend over to bang the cane on the floor. She finally figured it out and got a new cane with a steel tip. But that prank made the banging bearable.
I decided to use the same trick with James’s training wheels. I raised them a little bit, and he didn’t notice. Then I raised them a little more. Finally, he had to adjust his balance to stay on the bike.
The trouble was that our driveway was too short to work up enough speed to find the proper balance. One day I took him to the end of West St. Mary, where there is a cul-de-sac. James could ride around in a circle like he was in the Indy 500. I took off the training wheels and held the back of the seat, running along with the bike just in case.
When James finally had enough speed, I let go and he took off. He took off riding his bike to our house, and I was screaming about the stop signs. He blew right through them. Now, I am not a good runner. All the years of ballet trained me to lead with my toes, not my heels. But I was a mother whose son was in peril. And I ran like the wind, screaming and yelling to stop at the stop signs.
When we got home, I yelled at him.
“I told you to stop at the stop signs. You went through every one of them! You’re lucky you didn’t get run over by a car. Why didn’t you stop?”
James said simply, “I couldn’t remember how to stop the bike.”
I had to hobble around for the next three months because I hurt my knee chasing him. But he didn’t need those training wheels anymore.
All in all, it was a tranquil, happy time. Andrea got her preferred school, and Bruce didn’t have to crack his skull over the spiritual implications of James’s ordeal.
One night, they were up late transcribing notes and copying records and photos. It was shortly after midnight; Bruce was in his office. Andrea was in the kitchen. Suddenly, they heard James crying in his sleep. Andrea came down the hall from the kitchen and met Bruce at James’s door.
They went into his room, and there was James, sitting up in bed, sobbing. But he seemed to be asleep. They both went to him, held him, and he opened his eyes, but he clearly was asleep.
“Are you all right, buddy?” asked Bruce.
He didn’t answer. He kept crying.
“Are you having a bad dream?” he demanded.
James just stared at his parents and kept crying.
“What’s the matter?” insisted Bruce.
Bruce started to get upset—he wanted an answer. If there was something the matter, he expected to hear what it was. It was that old didactic streak that he had since college. But Andrea couldn’t tell if James was awake or asleep.
“Go get a glass of water,” she told Bruce, giving him something helpful to do to get him out of the room.
Then she rubbed James’s back and almost chanted, “It’s okay, honey. You’re in your room and you’re safe and everything is okay.” It was the basic Carol Bowman technique of soothing the child without shocking him, not waking him rudely, not heightening the fear.
He seemed to come awake gently just as Bruce returned with the water. James took a long drink.
“What were you dreaming?” asked Bruce.
“I don’t remember.”
And as he lay back down to sleep, Andrea told Bruce to go back to what he was doing; she would stay with James for a while.
When Bruce was gone, she cuddled with James, cooing about his safety, until she was certain that he had fallen into a restful sleep; then she went down the hall to Bruce’s office.
“What do you think that was about?” he asked. “He hasn’t had a nightmare in months.”
Andrea had an idea. It was something she had thought about all day, although it was not something she wanted to bring up, fearing that it could provoke ridicule.
“Do you know what day it is?”
Bruce blinked. He didn’t know where she was going with this. She had so many twists in her thinking.
“The date? Yeah, it’s March third.”
Andrea nodded. “March third. It’s the anniversary of James Huston’s death,” she said.
Bruce got it; he slapped his head. Of course. Then he thought of something else. “Did you tell him that?” asked Bruce.
“Of course not,” replied Andrea.
“Did you even mention it during the day? Is there any way he could have overheard it?”
“No. No. But you know something, there’s
no way we’ll ever know for sure,” she said.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
THE AIR WENT out of Andrea that spring. Ironically, it was too much proof! Too much for her, not enough for Bruce.
Frankly, I was tired of Bruce’s endless investigation. Nothing was enough. There was always just ONE more detail that needed to be nailed down, confirmed—then he’d really believe. My life was simpler. I chose to believe. I didn’t need a dead body in my living room to convince me that James was experiencing the life of James Huston.
Take the nightmare that came on the anniversary of James Huston’s death; that would seem to tie it down, or at least indicate a connection to James Huston. At the very least, it was powerfully suggestive. But it didn’t end the controversy under the Leiningers’ roof.
“We can’t be certain. It was only one nightmare. He’s had a million nightmares.”
“Wait a minute! Wasn’t there another nightmare at roughly the same time, in early March of 2002? Maybe even March third?”
“Yes, but that was in 2002. It had no meaning.”
“Why not?”
“It was before we knew the actual date of James Huston’s death.”
“So?”
“It didn’t count.”
They were all dizzy with confusion. And so they did what they always did: they blinked and swallowed and went on with life—that is, life with all the uncertainty that accompanied it.
In April they celebrated James’s fifth birthday by driving to the Naval Air Station at Pensacola, Florida, the home of the Naval Air Museum. Pensacola was also the home base of the Blue Angels.
As usual, Bruce threw in some bonus miles. They drove two hundred miles farther to Eufaula, Alabama, to visit Leon Conner’s family. That was just like Bruce—roaming the country, searching out pilots, as if he was going to find that missing link. Every trip had that ulterior motive. Andrea accepted it—just another toll on the road that might move them forward.
They spent a day at the naval museum at Pensacola. The equipment and artifacts from the carriers and planes were always a kick. Everyone liked squeezing into the tight spaces of the old aircraft carriers, imagining the sailors twisting and hurrying to battle stations under the claxon call of war.
And then there were the airplane cockpits that they kept stored on the second floor—James loved those. They almost had to eject him from the cockpit of an old F-4 Phantom, one of the original Blue Angels aircraft. It took pleading and the threat of starvation to get him out.
One of the purposes of the trip was to get more information about Natoma Bay, but they were at the wrong museum. The museum for escort carriers was in Texas. It was located aboard USS Lexington (CV-16), which was anchored at Corpus Christi.
Another trip, another chance for Bruce to look up veterans. There were always retired pilots who hovered like moths around the flame of a naval air station. Something about the proximity of airplanes attracted them, made them settle down nearby.
The Leiningers spent the Memorial Day weekend in Corpus Christi. And one afternoon, while Andrea took James swimming, Bruce drove to Rockport to visit another aging pilot. This one had flown on a mission in which another VC-63 pilot had been killed. There wasn’t much he could add to the action reports, but Bruce didn’t mind. Looking at these old, bent men with thin white hair pushing themselves around on walkers, he saw the brash young pilots who they once were in those sixty-year-old photographs.
And, in fact, the visits with the pilots were never completely fruitless. Their memories were unreliable, and the details that they could add were not significant. Still, Bruce enjoyed seeing them in the flesh; he relished their company, and he kept adding bits and pieces to his documents.
But he could not add the one thing that he was always looking for: an eyewitness account of the death of James M. Huston Jr. That was his last little thread of skepticism.
It was about to be cut.
June 3 was a typically warm, sultry Louisiana afternoon. Andrea was at home, trying to assemble a cooling, satisfying menu, not paying much attention to anything in particular, when the phone rang.
“Hi, my name is Jack Durham and you don’t know me. I’m calling because I found a post that your husband made on a Web site about Chichi-Jima…”
Another member of the club—the we’re-never-gonna-finish-researching-or-talking-about-Natoma Bay club.
“I’ve been trying to contact your husband for weeks, but he must have a new e-mail address, because all my messages come back. I finally decided to look you up in the phone book.”
Andrea was only half listening—there was the more urgent business of dinner—and she couldn’t keep up with all the characters in the great Natoma Bay drama.
“Is Bruce home?”
“Huh?”
“I was just saying that I found his posting on the Chichi-Jima Web site—the one he posted last September…”
Wait a minute! This was that old message in a bottle. This was an answer from the guy who had been at Chichi-Jima. This was a potential eyewitness!
“No, Bruce isn’t home, but this is his wife, Andrea. I’d be glad to give him a message and have him call you back.”
And then this caller, Jack Durham, started to talk to Andrea about the reason he was trying to get in touch. Yes, he wanted to talk to Bruce—someone—because of the uncertainty he had been living with for so many years.
“I was so excited when I read his post. About the attack on Futami-ko Harbor. He wanted to find out if anyone saw that plane get shot down. When I read the details, I realized that I had been on that mission that day, March third of 1945, and we saw that airplane get hit and crash into the harbor.”
“Oh, my gosh!” She could barely speak. “You actually saw the plane get hit?”
And the voice on the phone provided the answer to so many questions that were driving the Leininger family to the brink.
“Yeah. I saw him get hit.”
Why didn’t he report it? Why were the after-action reports all so muddled and confused? Why had they all been delivered as a kind of rumor—a third-person version?
Durham had a perfectly reasonable explanation: “Well, minutes after that guy’s plane was hit, my plane was hit. We never got back to the ship—USS Sargent Bay. We went into the water, too. But everyone in my crew survived.”
And so Andrea came to see that her husband wasn’t so crazy after all. His long investigation had produced more than one shock of discovery.
Andrea told Jack Durham that Bruce would be very glad indeed to call him back. She wrote down his telephone number, then checked it several times. She got his address and a backup number just in case there was another snafu.
She was waiting for me at the door, with a piece of paper on which she had written a phone number. It belonged to a guy named Jack Durham, and she said that it was a guy I had been waiting for all my life.
Of course I called immediately. He told me what he told Dre: he read my note on the Chichi-Jima Web site—the one I posted way back in September. When he read it, he realized that he was a witness to James Huston’s death over Futami-ko Harbor.
He was off Sargent Bay—he was a radioman on one of the eight TBM Avengers who made the attack on Chichi-Jima from Sargent Bay. The eight–FM-2 fighter escort came off Natoma Bay.
I asked him if he was sure—very sure—about the details. He said that he checked—he looked it up in his logbook: three March 1945. That was his mission.
Jack Durham had written it down in an informal memoir.
“Everything was just routine until late in the afternoon of March 2, 1945. They told me that I was replacing Pop Stewart and would fly a strike mission against Chichi-Jima, the hellhole of the Bonin Islands.…
“This part of the story should begin at about oh-two-thirty on the morning of the third. We were awakened and dressed for flight. Then off we went to the mess, where the cooks asked us how we wanted our eggs—and, if I remember correctly, how we wanted our steaks. Steaks! Tha
t should have been the tip-off.
“It was reported that a Japanese buildup of troop replacements and supplies had to be stopped. Each of our planes was loaded with four five-hundred-pound bombs and six rockets with five-inch warheads. Our flight to the target was about a hundred and twenty-five miles, and we wanted to be there by sunrise so that our approach would be helped by having the sun in their eyes. As we approached the island from the east, we could see the ack-ack fire exploding far in the distance—to let us know they were waiting for us to ‘surprise’ them.
“We formed up in echelon and prepared to dive, and I noticed that we were ‘tail-end Charlie’—that is, the last plane in the attack. Oh, well, I thought, make the dive, fire the rockets, drop the bombs, and bug out. In a couple of minutes we’d be on our way, with another mission behind us.
“I had charged my .30-caliber peashooter and thought I’d strafe something while fleeing the harbor. With only two hundred and eighty rounds in my canister—and a high rate of fire—I didn’t have much time to fool around.
“The first thing I noticed was the incredible amount of AA fire—this wasn’t like Iwo.
“One of the fighters from our escort squadron was close to us and took a direct hit on the nose. All I could see were pieces falling into the bay. He, too, was ‘tail-end Charlie’ of the fighter escort.
“Before I realized it, my gun was quiet. I had run out of ammo.
“When we pulled out of the dive and headed for open sea, I saw the place where the fighter had hit. The rings were still expanding near a huge rock at the harbor entrance.
“When the run was over, I heard the conversation between the other pilots of the group—they still hadn’t dropped their bombs. We climbed for altitude to make the second run. We did it once; we can do it again.”
But on the second run, Durham’s plane was hit, though not badly enough to go straight into the harbor. They were able to limp away and ditch where they could be rescued by fellow Americans.
Soul Survivor: The Reincarnation of a World War II Fighter Pilot Page 19
