Soul Survivor (2 page)

I told the Leiningers that James was remembering a past life death, and I reiterated the techniques in my books: acknowledge
what James was going through as a literal experience and assure him that he is now safe, that the scary experience is over.
Other parents had found these techniques worked to allay their children’s fears and to let go of memories of a traumatic past
life death. Andrea understood. She intuitively knew what was happening with James: that he was suffering from actual memories
of his plane crashing. I reassured her that she was capable of helping her son.

I didn’t hear from Andrea after that, and I assumed it meant that my advice had helped and that James was better. Then, about
a year later, a producer from ABC contacted me about doing a segment on children’s past lives. I scanned all my e-mails and
pulled out a few promising cases, including the Leiningers’. I found myself wondering what had happened with James.

I called Andrea to get an update. She was happy to report that she had followed my method and that James’s nightmares had
all but stopped. Great news!

But there was more. Although the nightmares had subsided, and James’s fears about his crashing in a plane had dissipated,
he continued to amaze them with new details about his life as a fighter pilot. He remembered the type of plane he flew, the
name of his aircraft carrier, and the name of one of his pilot friends. I was excited that this case was still progressing
and I strongly hoped that the Leiningers would share their story on TV. Andrea was open to the idea, but she had to consult
with her husband. In our first conversation, Bruce’s opening line to me was, “You have to understand, I’m a Christian.” I
felt I had hit a wall. I thought I’d have to find another case for TV. But then he surprised me when he added, “But I can’t
explain what’s happening with my son.” We talked more and I sensed an opening. Clearly, he was struggling to keep his Christian
beliefs intact as he tried to understand what was happening to James, and he desperately needed to explain it in some way
other than reincarnation. I understood how shocking this was for him, and I offered my reassurance that this was all “normal.”

The TV show was a great success; the story was presented clearly and fairly. We were all pleased. Over the next few years,
we exchanged dozens of e-mails. Andrea sent me photos of James and his many drawings of planes being shot down. We spent hours
on the phone talking excitedly about James’s latest revelations and amazing coincidences, one after another, all of which
led them farther and farther down the rabbit hole.

For Andrea and me, each new revelation was a confirmation of what we already knew: that James was remembering an actual past
life. But Bruce continued to struggle. Each revelation added to his conflict. So this book is about Bruce as much as about
James. He was torn between his deep Christian belief “that we live only once, we die, and then go to heaven,” and what he
was witnessing in his own son. No matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t explain away what he was seeing.

Bruce’s drive to disprove James’s past life memories adds great weight to this fascinating story. We see how hard he works
to find a “rational” explanation. We watch as he tracks down leads with the dogged perseverance of a detective, not satisfied
with anything less than hard facts. And the body of evidence that he and Andrea amass, through their diligent research, is
the main reason their story is so extraordinary.

Soul Survivor
is special in other ways as well. We are witness to something miraculous in the way young James touched the hearts of so
many. His present family, the family of his previous life, and the surviving veterans who fought beside him in his former
life were all deeply affected by James. What came so naturally to this little boy shook the deep-seated beliefs of those around
him. His story reveals a new perspective on life and death for anyone who sees that this was not just a child’s imaginings,
but something achingly real.

Carol Bowman

Author of
Children’s Past Lives
and

Return from Heaven

The Dream

It’s only a bad dream, and when you wake up in the morning, it’ll all be gone.

M
IDNIGHT
, M
ONDAY
, M
AY
1, 2000

T
HE SCREAMS CAME out of nowhere. One day James Leininger, just three weeks past his second birthday, was a happy, playful toddler,
the centerpiece of a loving family of three living on the soft coastal plain of southern Louisiana. And then suddenly, in
the darkest hour of midnight, he was flopping around on his bed like a broken power line, howling at the sky as if he could
crack open the heavens with his ear-shattering distress.

Flying down the long hallway from the master bedroom came his mother, Andrea. She stopped at the doorway of her first and
only child and, holding her breath, watched her son’s thrashing and screaming. What to do? Somewhere in one of the texts in
her great library of child-rearing books, she had read that it could be dangerous to wake a child abruptly from a nightmare.

And so, struggling to hold herself back, she stood there in the doorway, frozen. She nonetheless did make a reasonable assessment
of the situation, for she was nothing if not a thoroughly rational and well-informed mother—a student of all of the latest
child-rearing tactics and techniques. She noted that James was not pinned under a wooden beam. He wasn’t bleeding. She couldn’t
see any obvious physical reason for the terrible commotion. He was simply having a nightmare. It had to be a ghastly one,
but still something that fell within the boundaries of routine childhood evils.

Of course, she wanted desperately to rush in and grab her little boy, shake him out of his bad dream, and cuddle him back
to sleep. But she didn’t. For Andrea Leininger was no ordinary parent. A trim strawberry blonde, she still had her stage-star
good looks at thirty-eight, plus something less obvious: iron discipline. This came from her long training as a professional
ballerina—a career she had given up when the pain of performing outweighed the pleasure. Now her career was kicking frantically
at his covers and screaming bloody murder.

As she clinically tried to assess the situation, she thought she knew where the nightmare was coming from: the unfamiliar
house. It was just two months since they’d moved from Dallas, Texas, into the seventy-year-old home in Lafayette, Louisiana.
If it felt strange to her, she guessed that it must be a world gone topsy-turvy to James—her new great love. Even the outside
sounds were alien—the wind whispering through the Spanish moss, the swamp birds yawking from the branches of the old oaks,
the insects crashing into the screens. Nothing like the long, still silences that fell like a blanket over the suburban outskirts
of Dallas.

And James’s room itself, with its faded pink flower wallpaper and solid sealed shutters—nothing like a little boy’s room—gave
her the creepy feeling of being shut inside a tomb. Yes, these had to be the ingredients for a perfect storm of a nightmare.
Calming herself, she tiptoed to her son’s bed, picked him up, and held him in her arms, crooning softly: “Sleep, sleep, sweet
baby! It’s nothing, really, nothing. It’s only a bad dream, and when you wake up in the morning, it’ll all be gone!”

And as she held him, he gradually stopped thrashing, and the screams tapered off into whimpers—little whispers of grief—and
then he went back to sleep.

That first night, she recalled, she hadn’t been paying particular attention to
what
he was screaming—hadn’t heard any specific word that made any sense. His sounds were blurred and blunted inside the high-octane
howl of a very young child who looked and sounded as if he were fighting desperately for his very life. No, she thought, not
a real life-threatening event. Just a child being attacked in a nightmare.

Nevertheless, she was profoundly shaken, but determined to cope with it—part of the deal. This was the bargain she’d made
when she agreed to marry Bruce Leininger, twelve years her senior, who already had four children from a previous marriage.
Of course, Andrea had been married before, too, but had no kids. If they were to marry, she had told Bruce firmly, she wanted
a child. That was the deal; that was her prenup.

Bruce, holding to his part of the bargain, had heard the screams from James’s room and rolled over and whispered, “Would you
handle it?” This was Andrea’s job.

In the grand scheme of their lives, the deal was a fair one. He got the gorgeous dancer, and she got the big, handsome corporate
executive—plus a child. Of course, not everything worked out as planned. Bruce had labored to near collapse holding up his
end of the deal, which was to provide his extended family with basic security.

At that moment, here in Lafayette, it was Bruce who appeared to be undergoing the greater crisis, striving mightily to master
and hold down a new job. He had been “let go,” as they say, from his last big-paying job in Dallas over a difference of opinion
in management. The buyout wasn’t bad, but the sudden cruelty of the experience—the prospect of unemployment for a man who
had always been a high achiever, always at the top of his class, always near the pinnacle of the corporate hierarchy, a model
of poise and self-control—left an unspoken fear hovering like a cloud over the Leininger household.

The new job, the adjustment, was not easy. Bruce was a human resources executive, which was a little like being a corporate
fireman. Wherever personnel problems broke out, he had to rush in and put out the fire. That meant dislocation, a lot of moving
around and resettling. It was okay when there were just the two of them, Bruce and Andrea, but now they had James. In four
years, Bruce had been forced to uproot the family three times. The first time was when he landed a new job in San Francisco.
He found a great town house overlooking the ocean in Pacifica. Andrea was enchanted. “There’s nothing between us and Japan,”
she swooned.

It was a happy and romantic interlude. And it was in San Francisco that James was born. Within two years Bruce had a better
job offer in Dallas, which had the added advantage of putting Andrea back in the bosom of her family. She was from Dallas
and had deep attachments to her sisters and mother, but it entailed another move. And then that job fell apart when Bruce
challenged the decisions of a superior and had to find a new job, impress a new boss, find a new home, and manage the relocation.
Not that he was complaining—he was just exhausted. As for Andrea, she’d had enough of moving. When Bruce found the new home
in Lafayette, she decided that this one would be for good.

And now along comes this shattering nightmare! Bad timing, Bruce thought. Still, it was only a noisy bad dream—no big deal.
In his previous marriage, Bruce had managed to calm all four of his children going through night terrors. But he was now just
too tired to manage this kind of thing again.