Soul Survivor (14 page)

It was not as if he had no training in large-scale research. As an undergraduate at Fairleigh-Dickinson University in New
Jersey, Bruce had double-majored in political science and Russian studies. This was in the early 1970s, and the Cold War was
still a hot career field. At Columbia University, he did his graduate work in International Relations under Zbigniew Brzezinski,
among others, and got excited by the prospect of big-time polisci. He looked into all the aspects of détente (and found that
the Russians had a different and more aggressive interpretation of the word) and studied the Russian language, thinking that
he would someday be moving in high diplomatic circles.

Back in school, he had learned to be very systematic about solving problems and doing basic research:

1. Define the problem;

2. Develop a statement of purpose;

3. Select a research method;

4. Build a research design;

5. Define the limits of the project;

6. Spell out the methodology.

And this is how he tried to approach James’s nightmare “project.” But his student days were, of course, precomputer. Modern
software changed a lot of research techniques, sometimes speeding things up but often glutting the system with too much information.
Sometimes the material simply couldn’t all be handled.

He also developed a hardening of his tenacity when he began to research the family genealogy. His uncle Bill, the eldest of
seven children born to Bruce’s grandparents, had always been curious about the family history. The family legend was that
the Leiningers had come to America from Alsace-Lorraine, a long-disputed region between France and Germany, but the details
of his ancestry were lost in the fog of myth and memory.

Bruce had spent weekends in dusty, neglected stacks of reference books in a Texas library in the mid-nineties, trying to find
the path of his family’s migration from the Palatinate to America. Finally, in an all-but-hidden cranny, he came upon J. Daniel
Rupp’s
Collection of 30,000 Names 1727–1776.
And on page 238, in a list of 338 passengers who arrived in Philadelphia aboard a ship named
Phoenix
on August 28, 1750, there was the name of Johan Jacob Leininger—an ancestor. He later found substantiation in the dusty stacks
of the Philadelphia court archives.

What that did—the discovery of that route to his past—was fill Bruce with a sense of power, the certainty that, with enough
hard work and imagination, he could crack any riddle.

Including the mystery of James’s nightmares.

By mid-October, Bruce was on the American Battle Monuments Commission Web site, which provides the names of the dead and missing
from both World Wars as well as the Korean War. He focused on World War II aircraft carrier combat deaths and found a Web
site with eighty-seven pages of names, with up to two hundred names to a page. The printer ground out the pages, one by one.
There were almost ten thousand names. It took two days to print the pages.

There were 121 Larsons killed in World War II, and 49 more spelled “Larsen.” Of the 170 dead Larsons/Larsens, there were only
ten buried abroad who had the first name Jack or James or John. It took numerous heroic midnight efforts to squeeze that much
out of the Web site.

Bruce would go to bed at two a.m. and be back online at six. Four hours of sleep was enough. But he was still groping his
way through a dark room—he had no workable plan about how to trace the dead Larsons/Larsens, or what exactly to look for when
he found one who seemed promising.

But there were other facts that he did have, and he found himself in the triangulation business.

He had the history of
Natoma Bay,
and he carried it around with him—took it to work with him—as if that could ignite some inspiration.

In his office, scrutinizing the book, he learned that the ship had been commissioned on October 14, 1943, so the lost Larsons/Larsens
would have to fit into that time frame—between October 1943 and the end of the war, in early August 1945.

He had the aircraft: a Corsair—and those didn’t enter carrier service until 1944, so Bruce had yet another narrowing window
through which to look for information.

Three solid clues:
Natoma Bay,
Jack Larsen, the Corsair. Now all he had to do was link them together somehow.

Sometimes in the middle of the night, when all the Web sites and the hyperlinks had driven him to the edge of a meltdown,
he would go out on the porch and sit in the rocker. Leaves would drift down from the big river birches in the front yard,
and the air smelled of sweet-acrid fire. Somewhere up north, in the distant canefields, they were burning the stumps of the
sugarcane to get the land ready for next spring’s planting. Some days, flurries of burnt ash floated like snow onto the streets
of Lafayette. It was not unusual to wake up and find a little dusting of sugarcane ash on the windshield.

But just now, a Yankee in Cajun country, he would just sit there in the rocker, drinking in the seventy-degree autumn and
cleansing the stress from his mind.

In the middle of everything else, Bruce had to clean up the yard. His father, Ted, was coming for a visit, and Bruce wanted
the place to pass inspection. A seventy-three-year-old China Marine (he served in China right after World War II), Ted had
a distant and crusty relationship with his son. “I don’t remember him ever asking me anything personal,” recalled Bruce.

Ted drove more than fifteen hundred miles from Pine Grove, Pennsylvania, in a minivan with his second wife, Mary Lou. They
bought the minivan by cashing out Mary Lou’s fourteen-thousand-dollar 401(k) plan. Bruce called her “Sister Mary Lou” because
of her saintlike forbearance over thirty years in dealing with his father.

In a way, it was a small victory that Ted was coming at all. He had refused to visit when Bruce lived in San Francisco, which
he called “the land of fruits and nuts.” But then, Ted had a lot of quick and quirky opinions. He wouldn’t fly, because he
believed that all the airline mechanics “smoked dope.”

He didn’t even want to go to visit the brand new D-day Museum—the grand attraction that Bruce had been urging him to see—because
it was in New Orleans. Ted considered that city the epicenter of wicked temptation. Bruce had to assure him that they would
avoid the fleshpots of Bourbon Street and go straight to the museum, which was in a warehouse section of town.

Bruce and Ted made the two-hour drive to New Orleans while Mary Lou stayed behind and visited the Super Wal-Mart.

On the way down, father and son were largely silent. But coming back, after the visit, they spoke. Usually they spoke
at
each other, never making emotional contact. “Like two anchormen on the evening news talking about things,” was the way Bruce
described it; no one would ever describe their dialogue as a conversation. But this time it was different. Maybe it was the
old World War II reminders, or maybe it was, finally, a recognition of their relationship, but stolid, silent Ted listened
respectfully to the tale of the nightmares, and he didn’t mock or disparage, or dismiss his son’s worry.

After a few days, Ted and Mary Lou drove off, on their way to St. Louis and a reunion of China Marines, leaving Bruce with
his dilemma. Funny, he thought, how his father was receptive to the idea of his grandson having inexplicable dreams. He seemed
to accept that James could actually know about things that he could not possibly know.

If he had been asked to predict his father’s reaction, Bruce would have thought that Ted would make some brutal, sarcastic
comment. But he didn’t.

He was, astonishingly, something he almost never was: sympathetic. Even
interested.

Bruce went back into his home office and banged away on the computer. Focusing on the names of the dead pilots, he picked
one: Charles T. Larson. It was a random shot among the casualties of the 1944–45 period. He plugged into the Web site of the
National Archives and filled out a form asking for details about the dead pilot. He gave the pilot’s name, rank, serial number,
and date of birth.

But he was not a relative, and the Archives wrote back that it could not help him—only blood relatives had the right to such
an inquiry.

The next few weeks were a jumble of holiday preparations. Jen and Greg were coming for Thanksgiving again. Bruce was very
fond of Jen’s husband, Greg, and he was looking forward to having a good old-fashioned bull session, man-to-man, where they
could sit down and commiserate about the chaos of their professional lives.

In the heat of all the holiday preparations, a book came from Bobbi. She had found it in an obscure section of a library devoted
to the supernatural and paranormal and New Age phenomena. It was
Children’s Past Lives: How Past Life Memories Affect Your Child,
written by Carol Bowman, a recognized expert in the wildly untested and touchy new field of past life studies. Bowman was
the mother of a son who was said to have experienced a past life on a Civil War battlefield. Bobbi sent the book to Andrea,
who laid it down somewhere in the bedroom graveyard of unread books. Andrea meant to read it, but her hands were full of Thanksgiving
preparations, and besides, she didn’t need convincing. She already took her mother’s word about the explanation for James’s
nightmares—a kind of hearsay endorsement that her child was experiencing a past life.

Another book arrived that holiday season, this one from the History Book Club:
The Battle for Iwo Jima
. Bruce had ordered it as a Christmas present for Ted, who cherished anything about the Marine Corps in World War II’s Pacific
theater.

On Saturday morning, bored with television cartoons, James jumped up on Bruce’s lap, and together they leafed through the
book they were going to give to Poppy for Christmas. At some point they got to a page that contained a photo of Iwo Jima.
James pointed to it and said, “Daddy, that’s when my plane was shot down.”

“What?”

“That’s when my plane was shot down.”

“James, what do you mean?”

“That’s when my plane got shot and crashed.”

Bruce rushed into his office, where he had a copy of the
Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships. Natoma Bay
had been at Iwo Jima, had been in battle, had supported the