Left for Dead

by Peter Nelson

  The symptoms of post-traumatic stress would have varied from man to man, depending on each one’s personality, the support group he returned to and the nature of his experiences in the water. Generally speaking, a sailor or soldier suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder might find himself on an emotional or psychic roller coaster, moving from times when the past intrudes suddenly on his consciousness to times when he feels almost numb to it. He can feel intense emotions without remembering what happened to him, or he can remember every detail of what happened but feel nothing. The sound of water splashing in the kitchen sink while he’s reading the newspaper in the next room can become the sound of a shark’s fin pushing against a wave, and without his knowing why, suddenly his heart races, his blood pressure spikes, he breaks into a sweat and the hairs on the back of his neck stand on end. Memories of being in danger spontaneously interrupt his stream of thought, so that he can have flashbacks while he’s awake and nightmares when he’s asleep, nightmares that can recur for years.

  After a while, maybe three to six months after the traumatizing event, these intrusions begin to attenuate, lessening in frequency and intensity, but it doesn’t necessarily mean he’s recovering, rather that a kind of numbness is setting in. In severe cases it’s called post-traumatic amnesia. The sufferer constricts his field of consciousness or willfully suppresses his thoughts, trying to close out the feelings or images that upset him. A good many PTSD sufferers intentionally numb themselves with drugs or alcohol to wash away the feelings of helplessness and terror. The quality of a sufferer’s life becomes diminished by a general lack of openness or generosity, because he’s playing it safe without knowing he’s doing it, closing himself off to a danger that has long since passed.

  The intrusions become fewer and farther between, but the net effect over time is a distortion of reality, until the sufferer can feel disconnected from the world around him, like he’s just pretending to be himself, or going through life more as an observer than as a participant. Combat veterans suffering from PTSD frequently feel unresolved guilt about the things they did and, often more troubling, things they could have done differently to change the outcome.

  Many of the men who came home from World War II didn’t want to talk about it. They wanted to put it behind them, let it rest, forget about it, and besides—what could they possibly say that would convey the truth of it anyway?

  Robert McGuiggan and Mike Kuryla both worked construction in Chicago after the war, McGuiggan as a bricklayer. He helped erect the Sears Tower. At the time it was built, it was the tallest building in the world. Radio Technician Jack Miner went to work for his father’s lampshade materials company and eventually took it over. For fifty years, off and on, he has thought about his friend Ray. His nightmare was about not being able to hold Ray’s head out of the water. For a long time, he wondered if anyone had ever heard the SOS he helped send.

  Harlan Twible stayed in the navy until 1947, then went into the reserves and got called up again in 1951 during the Korean conflict. He served as vice president of an electrical manufacturer in Indiana and retired to Florida. For a while, he had dreams where the Indianapolis was sailing straight into his bedroom. He didn’t speak about the sinking until 1989, in part because he didn’t want his life to be defined by a single event, as catastrophic as it may have been. He didn’t care to be known primarily as the survivor of a shipwreck. When he realized that for the most part kids don’t really know much about World War II, their grandfathers’ war, and therefore don’t appreciate that freedom is something you occasionally have to fight for and protect, he started speaking up, and is often invited to speak at schools.

  The navy wanted Morgan Moseley to reenlist and offered to promote him to chief, but he decided he’d had enough of cooking for the navy and got out November 12, 1945, four days before his twenty-fourth birthday. He went to work for the railroad. In June of 1949, he married his wife, Joy, and with her raised four daughters. Moseley bought a farm in north central Florida, where he raised and sold cows. It’s the kid he couldn’t help who haunts him. He has nightmares almost every week. He still sees the boy in the hatch, his black hair, his flushed complexion, the apprehension on his face. One second he was right there, almost out, and the next second he was gone. He was a good kid. All he ever asked for was a midnight snack. He’d probably been on his way to the galley when the ship sank. Why didn’t he climb out when he had the chance? More to the point—why, Moseley thinks, didn’t he let the kid go first? Why didn’t he let him climb through the hatch first? That’s all he had to do.

  Cozell Smith went to work for Sun Oil in the marketing department, helping build roadside travel marts, traveling a great deal and moving among Oklahoma, Missouri and Tennessee. He was a happy guy who liked to tell jokes and entertain friends, but his outer life didn’t always reflect his inner life. After the war, he had recurrent nightmares about being in the water, and would kick his legs violently in his sleep as if swimming, until his wife had to get out of the bed and shout at him from across the room to wake him up. She didn’t dare grab him or try to hold him still, because in his dreams, the shark was pulling him down again, taking him by the hand and dragging him into the darkness. On several occasions while on the road on business, staying alone in a hotel, Cozell Smith made so much noise in his sleep that the people in the adjoining rooms called the police. He never talked with his family about what had happened to him, but toward the end of his life he spoke on the telephone almost daily with one of his shipmates, a man named Buck Gibson, and they agreed that in many ways, the ones who had gone down with the ship were the lucky ones. Images troubled him, particularly the image of a man slitting another man’s throat to drink his blood. It got worse as he got older. In retirement, with more and more time on his hands, he began to wonder what the purpose of his surviving was. He could have died but he didn’t—why? Near the end, he began seeing a psychologist at the VA hospital in Tulsa, who encouraged him to write down his thoughts and feelings. His son Michael never really knew what his father had been through until he read the essay, entitled “For Peace of Mind.” Cozell Lee Smith passed away in October of 1996.

  When Gil McCoy got back to St. Louis, he felt glad to be alive and determined to do something important with his life. He’d been given a second chance, he felt, and he wanted to make the most of it, though first he had a favor to do for a friend. He’d promised a hometown pal named Harry, whom he’d run into on Guam, that when he got back to St. Louis he’d look his fiancée up and maybe take her to a movie, keep her company until Harry got back. Anything for a friend. Her name was Betty Goldbeck and she turned out to be the love of Gil McCoy’s life.

  In 1958, McCoy was living in Boonville, Missouri, when he got a surprise visit from Felton Outland, one of the last five men on McCoy’s raft. Outland had read a book on the sinking called Abandon Ship! by a man named Richard Newcomb, published that year, which laid out the narrative of the sinking and the injustices done to Captain McVay. Outland felt moved to drive all the way from North Carolina to thank the man who’d saved his life. The reunion was tearful and joyous and it got McCoy to thinking—maybe it would do some of the other survivors some good to get together again and check in with one another. He even consulted with a psychiatrist at the University of Missouri and asked his advice. He was able to track down 220 of the 317 men who’d made it out of the water. The reunion was held in July of 1960 at a hotel in downtown Indianapolis, the city the ship had been named after.

  McCoy knew they needed to talk. A closed-door session was set up, no wives allowed, with a sergeant at arms at the door to make everyone feel secure that they wouldn’t be overheard or interrupted.

  Men arranged themselves as best they could according to the groups they’d been with in the water fifteen years before, and then they testified, confessed—got things off their chests that they’d been carrying with them for years, things they’d done and things they’d seen. They talked about their nightmares. Some didn’t sp
eak but only nodded, thinking, Yeah, I did that. I felt that. I remember that. Men cleansed themselves, atoned, apologized, said their piece and bawled like babies. For some, it was too hard, too intense. The session didn’t last more than a few hours. The survivors came away from it with an understanding that every man has a breaking point and it’s nobody’s fault when he breaks.

  McCoy had hoped the bad dreams would stop entirely after the reunion, but they didn’t. They became more integrated into his life, and he didn’t feel quite so alone, knowing he wasn’t the only one having them, and that if he wanted to, there were other survivors he could talk to. In his dreams, he still heard the screams of the men who’d been trapped below after he’d climbed through the hatch. He still saw the glint of the battle lantern he’d left behind shining through the crack just before the hatch was dogged. What if there was just one more guy he could have freed? What if the men who went down with the ship blamed him, or cursed his name as the compartment filled with water to drown them all? By the light of dawn, he didn’t blame himself and knew he’d done everything he could, but at night, in his dreams, he still heard their voices and saw their faces and wondered why he’d lived and they hadn’t, why he’d been lucky and they hadn’t, or if it wasn’t luck, why God had spared him and not them.

  What the survivors accomplished at their first reunion, and what they continued to do at subsequent reunions, was to begin the healing process by establishing a way to put the story into words, enabling those survivors who needed to, to speak about things that felt unspeakable. The reunion gave Gil McCoy and everyone else who’d attended a renewed sense of community and, more importantly, a renewed sense of purpose. To a man, the survivors came away from the reunion with the conviction that their captain had been unfairly court-martialed, hung out to dry and used as a scapegoat by the same navy that had left them in the sea to die. This was the part of their collective story that was still out of balance, the wrong that needed to be righted.

  They’d invited Captain McVay to the first reunion and met him at the airport, standing at attention and saluting him as he stepped down from the plane with his wife, Louise. He broke down and cried. His father had died the year before—if only he could have seen this reception. Captain McVay had been hesitant to come, certain that some of his men still hated him for what had happened to them. He found the opposite was true. They embraced him and told him they didn’t blame him. Gil McCoy suggested over drinks in his hotel room late one night with McVay that the captain had gotten a raw deal, and that perhaps there was something to be done to clear the captain’s name. McVay demurred, saying (despite the endorsements of his crew) that he’d gotten what he deserved.

  How did he come to feel that way?

  After the court-martial, McVay took a desk job at the naval air station outside of New Orleans. Even though he’d had his sentence remitted, he knew he wasn’t going anywhere, and that he’d never get another ship. After he’d put in his thirty years of military service, he retired on June 30, 1949, at the age of fifty. He was promoted to rear admiral upon retirement, but that was standard practice, a “tombstone promotion,” it was called, one that didn’t reflect or imply any sort of exoneration. Afterward he still preferred to be called captain, not admiral. He got a job working for an insurance company, later for an employee benefit consulting firm. Some of his friends found him cheerful and fun-loving, while others found him reserved and distant. Some noticed that he didn’t whistle anymore, and frequently seemed lost in thought.

  When his beloved Louise died of lung cancer a year after the first reunion, his heart broke. He later got remarried to a socialite named Vivian Smith, a woman he’d known since his youth and dated back in the thirties. The couple moved to her farm in Litchfield, Connecticut, where he kept himself busy with small projects between excursions into Litchfield high society. In 1965, his favorite grandson died of a brain hemorrhage at the age of nine.

  Perhaps hardest of all for McVay to bear were the cards and letters he received from the families of the sailors who died when the Indianapolis sank, hate mail blaming him and asking him how he could live with himself, even Christmas cards from families telling him how he’d ruined their Christmases forever because he’d killed their sons. Louise had tried to screen his mail for him and keep him from seeing the hate mail, but she was never entirely successful. Since her death, he’d collected a large number of letters, which he saved in bundles bound by string or rubber bands.

  On Wednesday, November 6, 1968, Charles Butler McVay spent the morning on his farm helping his gardener, a man named Al Dudley, prepare the shrubs and flowers for winter. A gravel drive led to a pair of barns behind the house, one converted to a four-car garage, the other a toolhouse, with an old gas pump between them. A faded hex sign decorated the back barn. The temperature was in the high forties, the day overcast with rain predicted that evening. The newspaper that day reported on the presidential election held the day before between Richard Nixon and Hubert Humphrey, but by the time the paper went to press, it was still too close to call. The back pages told of postponed peace talks in Paris to end the war in Vietnam, violent student election protests, kids carrying coffins and Viet Cong flags down Fifth Avenue in New York City to protest what the military was doing in Southeast Asia. The world had changed a great deal since 1945.

  That afternoon, McVay’s housekeeper, Florence Regosia, noticed his lunch was still untouched, so she went to his room, where she saw an empty holster on the night table. She’d just checked to see if the car was in the garage when she heard a shot. She went to the back door, where she ran into Al Dudley coming up the flagstone steps. The gardener had found the body in the front yard. The bullet had entered McVay’s skull on the right side. His .38-caliber service revolver was in his right hand. He held his house keys in his left hand. Attached to the key chain was a small toy sailor, a gift he’d received as a boy that he’d carried as a good-luck charm. He died a few hours later in the hospital. Charles Butler McVay III’s ashes were eventually scattered over the Gulf of Mexico, where seven years before he’d strewn the ashes of his true love, Louise.

  Efforts by the survivors to clear the captain’s name were already under way when they heard of the suicide. The tragedy only spurred them to redouble their efforts. They organized, looked for information, wrote letters to the navy, appealed to their senators and congressmen. As chairman of the Indianapolis Survivors’ Association, Giles McCoy petitioned President Ford in 1975 to grant the survivors a Presidential Unit Citation, only to be turned down. The case was also investigated in 1975 by Senators Vance Hartke and Thomas Eagleton, without results. When Louise McVay’s cousin Graham Claytor, the captain of the USS Doyle, became secretary of the navy under President Carter, McCoy and the others held out hope for McVay’s exoneration, only to be told there was nothing Claytor could do. McCoy petitioned President Reagan in 1980 for a Presidential Unit Citation, but he was again told the Indianapolis did not meet the criteria for such an award. A second plea to Reagan in 1983 was answered: “All avenues of appellate review have long been exhausted. No authority exists for the Secretary of the Navy or the Judge Advocate General to change the findings. . . .” A presidential pardon had been eliminated as an option when Secretary Forrestal remitted McVay’s sentence back in 1946—a president couldn’t pardon McVay because technically he’d already been pardoned.

  In 1992, Republican Senator Richard Lugar of Indiana, who was born in Indianapolis, requested that an Indiana law firm do a legal study of the court-martial, but nothing changed. An account by the Department of the Navy entitled Report on the Court-Martial of Captain Charles B. McVay III, USN, Commanding Officer, USS Indianapolis, drafted in March of 1996 in response to three separate inquiries by representatives, again supported the findings of the court-martial.

  For all their letters and all their lobbying, it looked to the survivors of the USS Indianapolis as though the navy was going to win. It was going to wear them down and prevail by sheer attrition, the in
stitution outlasting a group of old sailors, many of whom were frail or sick. More were dying each year. They’d promised themselves they wouldn’t stop trying to clear their captain’s name, but their hopes seemed dim, their chances remote—until an eleven-year-old boy named Hunter Scott started a history fair project in Pensacola, Florida.

  Chapter Twelve

  The Boy’s Crusade

  May 1997 to October 2000

  Political interest can never be separated in the long run from moral right.

  Thomas Jefferson

  After interviewing Maurice Bell, Hunter Scott had contacted all of the 154 survivors still alive, using a directory of names and addresses that Bell had given him. He’d sent each survivor a questionnaire, asking questions such as, “Where were you when the torpedoes hit?” and “Did you see any sharks?” Of the 154 survivors to whom he’d sent letters, 83 responded. Some men replied only briefly with curt one-sentence answers, as if it was still something they didn’t want to talk about, but others sent him envelopes full of material, including multiple-page personal narratives they’d written out in longhand or typed up years before on old Smith-Corona typewriters with faded letter Ms and ink-filled es. Harlan Twible sent Hunter chapters from a book he was working on about his life. Others sent newspaper or magazine articles they’d saved over the years. Morgan Moseley gave him the telegram the navy had sent Moseley’s mother, telling her her son was a casualty, which she assumed meant her son was dead. Hunter had even managed to contact Mochitsura Hashimoto, now a retired Shinto priest, who’d sent him a vintage and somewhat sinister-looking autographed black-and-white photograph taken of the Japanese captain as he stood at his periscope.

  For his project Hunter also had a photo of Captain McVay and one taken of the Indianapolis just before she’d sailed from Hunters Point. He had a map of the South Pacific, with the spot marked where the Indy had sunk, as well as newspaper articles from 1945 and pictures taken at the court-martial. He’d printed out and mounted brief paragraphs telling the story of the sinking, the reasons why rescue had been so tragically delayed, as well as quotes from some of the survivors stating what an injustice it was that their captain had been court-martialed. He had a flowchart illustrating the various military jurisdictions. He had letters from survivors, first-person accounts of how they’d suffered in the water for four and a half days, collected in a pair of three-ring notebooks. He also had notes from them wishing him luck, many expressing the hope that perhaps his project would help them in their quest to clear their captain’s name. After fifty years without success, it would have been hard to say how many of the survivors truly believed that Hunter’s project would do much good, but Hunter believed it. As far as he was concerned, he’d been passed a torch, commissioned to right a wrong.