by Peter Nelson
Admiral Pilling looked a bit stunned when the hearing was over, sandbagged and blindsided, as if he’d also expected Senator Warner to bury the issue once and for all, only to find himself on the hot seat. He’d been through a “murder board” before the hearing, a mock interrogation where his assistants threw every hard question they could think of at him, but all the same, he came off seeming unprepared. Hunter Scott had the same impression, and even went so far as to approach the admiral as he was talking to his staff and say, respectfully, “Excuse me, sir—I’d like to give you a copy of my research, because it appeared you had some difficulty answering some of the questions, and I think this will provide you with some of the answers.” Pilling turned, took the packet Hunter offered him and muttered a quiet “Thank you,” then turned back to his staff, displeased, the expression on his face seemed to say, at being shown up by a kid. He was a brilliant man, with a Ph.D. in mathematics from Cambridge, and probably wasn’t used to having teenagers offer to help him answer questions.
Many wondered afterward what harm there would be in the navy’s admitting it had made a mistake in court-martialing McVay. To be fair, the navy had investigated itself over the years and had owned up to virtually every mistake it had made regarding the disaster. The difference, as Senator Smith so eloquently pointed out, was in the degree of punishment and the disproportionate suffering it caused. Smith wanted to know—would the navy have court-martialed McVay if the ship hadn’t sunk? Of course not. Perhaps the navy’s obstinacy over the last thirty years stemmed from a sense that Congress would never have reexamined the court-martial if McVay hadn’t committed suicide, and that wasn’t the navy’s fault.
Would Hunter Scott still have been motivated to clear McVay’s name if the captain hadn’t committed suicide? Absolutely. Hunter Scott is, by most measures, a normal kid. What makes him a bit different from a lot of kids may be his extremely well-defined sense of right and wrong, a sense springing from his deeply held religious beliefs.
That is unlikely to change. Many things about Hunter did change during his crusade to help the survivors of the Indianapolis. The little boy is now over six feet tall, his sweet small voice today deep and adult-sounding, though still full of polite “yes, sirs” and “no, ma’ams.” His boyish shyness has been replaced by a quiet confidence, though his innate curiosity is intact. His goals have changed too. When he started, he thought he wanted to join the navy when he grew up, but after seeing how the navy bullies people, he’s not so sure anymore. Lately the Coast Guard has been looking better and better.
After the 1999 hearing, the survivors went home and got on with their lives. They visited with their grandchildren, watched the news on television, stayed in touch with each other via e-mail, and waited. When the resolution passed in October of 2000, they celebrated a significant victory, but they still wanted to know what action the navy was going to take—if any. Years of frustration prevented them from feeling too optimistic.
In the fall of 2000, George W. Bush was elected President of the United States. Florida Representative Joe Scarborough offered to set up a meeting between Hunter and President Bush, at which time Hunter could petition the president to expunge all mention of the court-martial from Captain McVay’s records. Hunter waited to hear from Scarborough. Then on April 18, 2001, the navy sent Senators Warner and Smith a letter indicating their desire to comply with the legislation passed the previous October. On April 24, 2001, President Bush nominated Gordon R. England to be his new secretary of the navy. Three days later, the navy announced it would offer the crew of the Indianapolis a Navy Unit Citation, and that it would retrieve Captain McVay’s record from the National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis for review to “determine the best approach to modify his record.” In June, a month after he was sworn in, Secretary of the Navy England met with Senator Smith to discuss McVay’s case. On July 11, England sent Smith a letter stating that although he did not have the legal authority to overturn a court-martial or delete the findings from McVay’s record, he did have the power to insert a copy of the Senate Resolution into Captain McVay’s file, thus addressing the false perception that McVay was responsible for the tragedy.
Hunter was fishing in the pond in his backyard when Mike Monroney phoned him with the news of McVay’s exoneration. The exhilaration lasted for days, kept alive each time a survivor called or wrote to thank Hunter for his efforts on their behalf.
By the time this book comes out, Hunter will be as old as some of the men who enlisted and went off to fight the Japanese and the Germans, over half a century ago, just a bunch of boys, doing their duty for their country, cocky young guys who believed they were going to live forever. By the time this book comes out, more of the survivors will have died. Each will have found his own way to peace. Someday, in the not-so-distant future, there will only be a handful left, enough to fill a small life raft, and then there will be a mere half dozen, and then five, then four, then three, then two, then one, and then there will only be the story of what happened to them, the record, which a young boy helped set straight.
Bibliography
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Anderson, Jim. “The Tragic Indianapolis Story Told.” NCVA Cryptolog, Spring 1984.
Bartholomew, Robert E., and Erich Goode. “Mass Delusions and Hysterias: Highlights from the Past Millennium.” Skeptical Inquirer, May 2000.
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Buell, Thomas. Master of Seapower: The Biography of Fleet Admiral Ernest J. King. Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 1995.
Cady, Capt. John. Transcript of summary at court-martial. December 1945.
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Acknowledgments
First and foremost I’d like to thank Hunter Scott and his family, father Alan, mother Leslie and sister Whitney, for furnishing me with books, articles, newspaper clippings and videotapes, for answering my questions and e-mails, and for welcoming me to Florida and spending time with me there. Many of the resource materials for this book, both primary and background, were originally amassed by Hunter in his quest to exonerate Captain McVay, including letters and relevant articles from the survivors themselves, to the extent that Hunter Scott now probably has more information on the USS Indianapolis in his private collection than any government archive or public library. What they sent was nearly overwhelming, and I’m sure it wasn’t half of all they had. I couldn’t have wished for greater cooperation and assistance, and I join with the survivors in thanking Hunter Scott for all the work he’s done. He is a remarkable young man and I suspect we have not heard the last of him.
Among the survivors who spoke with me both on and off the record, I am most grateful to Maurice Bell, Mike Kuryla, Giles McCoy, Robert McGuiggan, Jack Miner, Morgan Moseley and Harlan Twible, not only for helping me with my research but also for fighting for this country over fifty years ago. I know that for all my efforts to imagine what they went through and to reproduce and illustrate their experiences in this book, words will never completely convey the full measure of their suffering or adequately illuminate the sacrifices they made in the defense of freedom. They are not men who have ever sought personal glory or attention, and most will tell you they were only doing their job, only doing what they had to do, and no better than anybody else, but they are heroes all the same. Particular thanks to Diane Smith for sending a personal narrative written by her late husband, Cozell, that he’d entitled “For Peace of Mind.” The first chapter of this book is an account based on that narrative, drawn to approximate his experience aided by information given to me by Diane and by Cozell’s son Michael. Thanks as well to Mrs. Katherine Moore, whose beloved husband, K.C., went down on the Indianapolis and who reminded me that the families of the men who died are also survivors and should never be forgotten.
Thanks to Don Allen in New Hampshire and to Mako Hanyu in Japan, to Professor Jaimie Hubbard in the Asian Studies department at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, and thanks to Shawn Lindholm at the University of Massachusetts Translation Center in Amherst. Thanks to Dennis Bilger, archivist at the Truman Library, and to George Burgess, director of the International Shark Attack File and the coordinator of museum operations at the Florida Museum of Natural History in Gainesville, Florida. Thanks also to Dr. Lisa Natanson at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and to Carol Coon at the San Francisco Public Library. Thanks and appreciation to Dr. Al Steinman, one of the foremost authorities on survival at sea and former head of the United States Coast Guard’s medical program. Thanks to Hugh O’Doherty, former Coast Guard pilot, for edifying me as to search and rescue at sea, and to Captain William J. Toti, former commander of the nuclear submarine USS Indianapolis, whose firsthand knowledge of the responsibilities of command proved invaluable to me. Also a very special thanks to Senator Robert Smith of New Hampshire for giving me so much of his time on the phone (proof that he may be, as one D.C. insider told me, “the nicest man in Washington”) and for having the wisdom to listen to a little boy, and thanks to retired lobbyist Mike Monroney for helping me understand how Washington works—his efforts on behalf of the survivors would make for another entire book, though for editorial purposes they have been given only a passing mention here.
I’d like to thank my intrepid researchers Dave Hower and Mark Erelli for both finding the answers to my questions and supplying me with the answers to questions I forgot to ask. Thanks as well to Lisa Timmons, the best travel agent in America, at United Nations Travel in Philadelphia.
On the publishing side, thanks to editor Karen Wojtyla for the great job she did of reducing my original text to a more manageable length and keeping things moving, and thanks to Beverly Horowitz for bringing her vision to the project. Much thanks to Doug Whynott, a great writer who initially got this book off the ground, and even more thanks to my agent, Todd Shuster, for originally recognizing what a great story we had and for his inspired creativity during the process of drafting and selling the proposal to the right people in the right way.
Finally, thanks to my wife, Jennifer Gates, for all her support and understanding during the drawn-out writing process and for taking the baby those times when I needed both hands to write. Thanks also to Jack for helping me by sitting on my lap, which taught me to type fairly quickly with only one hand.
About the Author
PETE NELSON is the author of eighteen books of fiction and nonfiction and has written for numerous magazines. His most recent book, That Others May Live (Random House, 2000), tells the story of the air force’s pararescue jumpers. He lives in Massachusetts with his
wife and son.
Published by
Delacorte Press
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Copyright © 2002 by Pete Nelson
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Nelson, Pete.
Left for dead: a young man’s search for justice for the USS Indianapolis / Pete Nelson; with a preface by Hunter Scott.
p. cm.
Summary: Recalls the sinking of the U.S.S. Indianapolis at the end of World War II, the navy cover-up and unfair court martial of the ship’s captain, and how a young boy helped the survivors set the record straight fifty-five years later.
1. Indianapolis (Cruiser)—Juvenile literature. 2. McVay, Charles Butler, d. 1968—
Trials, litigation, etc.—Juvenile literature. 3. Scott, Hunter, 1985–—Juvenile literature. 4. Trials (Naval offenses)—United States—Juvenile literature. 5. World War, 1939–1945—Naval operations, American—Juvenile literature. [1. Indianapolis (Cruiser) 2. McVay, Charles Butler, d. 1968—Trials, litigation, etc. 3. Scott, Hunter, 1985– 4. Trials (Naval offenses) 5. World War, 1939–1945—Naval operations, American.] I. Title.
D774.I5 N35 2002
940.54'5973—dc21
