Soul Survivor (19 page)

There were a couple of frail veterans at the door, and they greeted me without any complicating misgivings. They accepted
me as openly and innocently as they would a thirsty traveler.

The room was dotted with tables, and on them were posters and maps and photographs—all types of memorabilia and journals and
documents—the tangible evidence of
Natoma Bay.
A friendly man with pure white hair came up to me as I leafed through the material on the table, and introduced himself.

“I’m John DeWitt,” he said, holding out a hand.

I smiled. I had been trying to get in touch with John DeWitt for months. He was the ship historian and the secretary of
Natoma Bay
Association. And, as it turned out, like so much in this makeshift ready room that I had only heard about—and doubted—he was
real.

“I’ve been trying to reach you,” I said. A gentle reproach.

He nodded. He knew about people trying to get in touch with him. “I’m retired, you know. That means I don’t sit around waiting
for someone to call.”

“So why not have an answering machine?”

He paused, weighing, I suppose, whether or not I was worth a real answer. “Well, Bruce”—he sighed, having decided in my favor—“when
I retired, I told myself that I would never let a phone run my life. If someone really wants to talk to me, they’ll call back.”

It was an educational moment for me; it told me a lot about the values and priorities of that unsung segment of the greatest
generation. Life was right there in front of them. They were not anxiously sitting around and waiting for someone to call.

“What brings you to our modest little gathering?” he asked.

And I told him the tall tale of the imaginary man in my hometown who talked about
Natoma Bay
, and repeated my white lie about considering writing a book about the ship—a lie that was beginning to burn my lips.

Not that I was completely bogus. I told John that I had a list of eighteen men who had been killed, who had served aboard
the ship, and I wanted to learn more about them. (One, in particular. I had been advised by Shalini Sharma, the
20/20
producer, that a friend at the Center for Naval History had found a record of a John Larsen—a name that was close enough to
Jack—who was a naval pilot.)

For obvious reasons, I did not mention my son and his nightmares and a father’s quest to put it all to rest. In this case,
I thought that the end justified the means, although I saw no real harm in the means.

John DeWitt, whether he believed me or not, gave me the benefit of the doubt. The ship certainly was worth a book. He was,
after all, the historian and knew about all the battles and casualties
Natoma Bay
had suffered.

Then I brought up the name of the person I was really interested in: Jack Larsen. I said I had been trying to track him down.
I wanted to know what had become of him. Leo Pyatt had told me that he saw him fly off one day and he never came back. He
seemed to have gone missing; I was not sure I would ever find out what finally happened after he left the ship. Only family
members had access to the military and personal records.

DeWitt tilted his head and looked at me kind of quizzically. “Well, you know something, Bruce? I think he’s on our Association
roster.”

He took me to one of the tables in the ready room and reached down into a pile of documents and pulled out an old, tattered
sheaf of papers. He began flipping through it, and after several pages he stopped and grinned. “Yep, here he is.”

He showed me the page with Jack Larsen’s name on it.

Then he asked if something was wrong. Apparently, I had suddenly turned pale.

“Are you okay?”

I might have said yes—I don’t remember—I was in that momentary fog that clouds memory. And I was trying to come to terms with
the fact that Jack Larsen, the elusive character whose death I had been trying to document, was not only still alive but residing
in Springdale, Arkansas.

At that moment, while I was trying to absorb this latest twist, Leo Pyatt came over to the table and introduced himself. After
the pleasantries, I said that John DeWitt had just hit me over the head with a mallet. He showed me Jack Larsen’s name on
the association roster. He was still alive!

This didn’t seem to faze Leo. He wasn’t even surprised. I had apparently misunderstood his first comment, that Larsen flew
off one day and no one ever saw him again. What he meant was that Larsen literally flew off
Natoma Bay
to head for another assignment. It didn’t necessarily mean he was killed.

It was almost too much to take in. I had been there for less than half an hour and I had found one big piece of the puzzle—something
that had kept me awake for the past two years. It was right there on the table all along.

I had to force myself to try and adjust. There was also the matter of James M. Huston, the name on the list of eighteen dead
that had always stuck out. A name I had always resisted. I had dismissed the possibility of Huston as a candidate for my search.
I had reasons, none of which were very good when I come to think of it. I just didn’t want him to be the guy. But now I had
to rethink that name….

It was actually a domestic problem. Andrea had latched on to Huston’s name long before the reunion. She saw the “James,” and
for her that connection was decisive. But she couldn’t make Bruce see it. He was committed to his first choice, Jack Larsen.
He had heard it from Leo Pyatt’s own mouth—Larsen had flown off one day and never came back.

Bruce went through the rest of that first night of the reunion trying to get as much information as possible, trying to relaunch
his search, but it was a waste of time. The place was crowded with old sailors and airmen who reminisced about what they had
gone through in the Pacific, but this was not what Bruce sought. The veterans had vivid memories, all right, but they didn’t
have the big picture. They, like all soldiers, viewed the war from the vantage point of a foxhole—even if that foxhole was
on an aircraft carrier.

Natoma Bay,
like all ships, was tightly compartmentalized. The air groups stayed with the air groups, and the ship’s company stayed with
the ship’s company. There was little mixing. The members of VC-63 knew the other members of VC-63, but they didn’t know the
members of VC-9 or VC-81. They were watertight boxes. They remembered guys in their section, but if they didn’t have business
with somebody, they didn’t blend. That’s just the way it was.

Bruce found himself going over the records, looking for combat reports, and trying to coax relevant memories out of the veterans,
and though they were willing, they just weren’t able to dig down deep enough to satisfy Bruce.

“Didn’t know him—he wasn’t in my squadron,” was the usual reply. Or “He doesn’t come to the reunions.”

That was Jack Larsen. Why didn’t he come to the reunions?

“Don’t know,” said DeWitt. “We always send him the invitation, but he never comes. Some guys don’t. Some guys don’t like to
remember.”

So then he tried to follow this new thread, the one that led to James Huston. But he didn’t believe in it. Bruce would have
had to sift through a thousand combat mission reports to find out exactly what had happened to Huston. And he would discover
that Huston wasn’t even killed at Iwo Jima. He was killed on a mission a couple of hundred miles away, at a place called Chichi-Jima.
And no one had seen him go down. But at this stage, Bruce was not inclined to follow that trail. For reasons both explicit
and intuitive, he did not want to believe that James Huston was his man. Larsen—that was the name his son had given. That
was the name that came out of the nightmares. James had never mentioned Huston—at least, that was the rationale that Bruce
clung to. He remained lost in a fog with the name Jack Larsen as the one sure thing he could count on.

Chaperoned by his new friends, Leo Pyatt and John DeWitt, Bruce had helped assemble the veterans, got them talking, but before
long it was midnight and these guys were tired and yawning, and they had to call it a night.

Bruce walked back to his hotel in a state of high excitement—and nervous confusion. The first thing he did was to call home.

Andrea was not surprised about Jack Larsen. Not even that he was alive and residing in Arkansas. She was happy that they might
be able to get this thing straight—and, yes, even happy that the money for the trip wasn’t wasted.

“Boy, am I glad you went to the reunion,” she said.

And then Bruce told her about James M. Huston, and she almost jumped through the phone.

“Oh, my God!”

Bruce was less excited, not quick enough to catch her point. “Listen, we’ve come across this name before,” he said. “We never
agreed about him. The case isn’t all that clear…”

“No!” Andrea practically screamed. “Tell me the name again.”

“James M. Huston Jr.”

“Don’t you
see
?”

“What?”

“Junior. Junior! We never saw that ‘Junior’ before. That makes our James… James Three.”

It was the signature at the bottom of every single one of little James Leininger’s drawings of the sea and air battles: “James
3.”

Andrea was crazy to get off the phone and convene the panel. But first she wanted to convince Bruce to stay on the trail,
to gather as many documents as he could carry, and, for God’s sake, to call Jack Larsen now that they had found him.

“It’s too late tonight; I’ll call in the morning. Meanwhile, don’t get all crazy about Huston. He may not be the guy.”

“He’s the one,” she told Bruce, trying not to boil out of her skin with excitement.

“The records aren’t clear,” insisted Bruce.

“Bruce!”

Bruce fell back on the fact that no one at the reunion ever knew what happened to Huston. No one had actually seen him die.

And, the truth is, Bruce was stubborn. He had been blinded by Leo Pyatt’s early declaration that Larsen had flown off one
day and no one ever saw him again. He had taken that as irrevocable deductive proof that the case was settled.

But he was weakening. His reservations were starting to get mushy, picked off by the past-life snipers. He was getting a little
tired of his lonely holdout. Nevertheless, he still had one ace in the hole.

“What about the Corsair?” he all but shouted.

Andrea had no answer.

He went over that crucial item. No Corsair had ever flown off
Natoma Bay
—every veteran at the reunion agreed on that. Huston had been flying an FM-2 Wildcat the day he was killed. Not a Corsair,
as James said.

And there were no eyewitnesses to his death, so they didn’t even know that he’d been shot down in the same way that James
described it. He could have just run out of fuel.

As far as Bruce was concerned, the whole thing was still an open mystery.

I
WAS WORRIED about Bruce. He was flying home on the first anniversary of the terrorist attack—September eleventh. He didn’t
mention it, so I didn’t mention it, but when his plane landed in Houston, I breathed a sigh of relief. A crazy fanatic might
try to blow up a plane going from San Diego to Houston, but I figured no self-respecting terrorist would bother taking out
a puddle jumper going from Houston to Lafayette.

Meanwhile, Bruce’s report from the reunion was big news among us girls. The panel took it all in, turned it around, gave it
their own spin, their best thoughts, their own characteristically wild guesses, and then spoke… and spoke, and spoke. You
couldn’t shut us up. The phone was never quiet; someone had another thought, another opinion. Oh, we all had plenty of thoughts
and opinions! And there were a lot of “I told you so” moments. But most of all, we were insane with curiosity. We couldn’t
wait to get our hands on Bruce.