Soul Survivor (21 page)

What about James Huston? Bruce asked.

“He was a real good man,” said Wavell.

“Why?”

Wavell took his time replying. “Well, lots of guys stood down from missions. You could do that if you wanted to, you know.
But Jim never missed his call. He was the first to volunteer for the mission that day. I was in the ready room when the XO
called for fighter pilots to escort the TBMs into Chichi-Jima. Everybody knew about Chichi-Jima. It was bristling with ack-ack.
That’s where George Bush’s TBM went down in 1944. It was a very dangerous place. Anti-aircraft covered every inch of Futami-ko
Harbor that led into Chichi-Jima. But Jim volunteered to go.”

Not that he was reckless. Earl Garrison, who was the parachute packer for the squadron, remembered that Huston would always
carefully double-check his rigging before every mission.

Ironically, he was due to be rotated with the rest of his squadron. One way or another, no matter how careful he was, Chichi-Jima
was his last mission.

Jack Larsen was in the group picture that Bruce studied on the plane coming home from the reunion. And Ken Wavell. And James
Huston. By the time he got back to Louisiana, Bruce was not certain just what he was looking for—it was all a jumble—but he
knew that there was still something important waiting to be discovered.

James and I went to the airport to pick him up and Bruce came home with a little toy airplane and his luggage filled with
the files and pictures and records and notes on
Natoma Bay
that he had assembled and copied and borrowed… they would open up a whole new world of research. He was obsessed now and I
had very little influence. I could see that he was going to have to come to my conclusions by himself. We could talk about
it, but he was going ahead come hell or high water…

It was a Wednesday evening when Bruce landed; he was prepared for the full Scoggin grilling. He had spent a lot of time at
Kinko’s in San Diego, copying everything he could get his hands on: logbooks, lists of alumni, pictures of the ship, pictures
of the crew. And now he had good grounds for pressing the search: Jack Larsen was alive—available.

This new clue seemed to indicate that Larsen was not the guy they were looking for. Maybe they were looking for James M. Huston
Jr.—or, to put it another way, James 2.

James 3 was sound asleep in his room.

For once, Andrea’s debriefing was a little behind the curve. Bruce was full of information and stories and pathways. He was
on a mission. There was something about these old guys, bent with the battle scars of war and age…. Well, Bruce had trouble
explaining it exactly to Andrea. These veterans might look ancient and beat up, but he saw them as they were in the pictures:
lean young men wearing cocky, lopsided grins—guys who seemed to glow with what he saw as an immortal destiny. He was enthralled.

The veterans had also made him feel a little ashamed. His little lie about writing a book honoring them wouldn’t stand up
to these guys. The lie had turned into something else: a promise. And so he and Andrea agreed to push on and find out as much
as they could about Jack Larsen and James Huston and settle the questions and doubts, one way or another. They would also
begin to gather the necessary information about all the men who sailed aboard
Natoma Bay
—to make good on a promise.

Andrea had a different mission:

I woke up in the middle of the night in a panic. “Oh, my God!” What are we doing? I had all these romantic fantasies about
James M. Huston—a nice, handsome kid from a good family who died a magnificently heroic death in the service of his country.
An all-American dream. But what if we found out that he was a two-timing womanizer who cheated on his wife and beat his kids
and stole money out of the collection plate at church? What if he was a murderer? I would have to spend the next twenty years
scrutinizing James, watching for any signs of deviant tendencies.

Why did we need to know anything more about James M. Huston? Wasn’t it enough that we found out who he was? Would more information
change anything in a positive way? No. It was time to close the books and move on.

T
HE ONCE PROUD dining room on West St. Mary Boulevard was now like a topographical model of rugged mountains, rising and falling
with stacks of data. There were charts and folders and binders and notes and computer printouts—all relating to
Natoma Bay.
And there were books. Books about World War II, books about old combat aircraft, books about the Navy, books about each battle
across the Pacific, and especially, books about the fight for Iwo Jima. It was the high Sierra of a happy researcher.

That’s what Bruce did: climb the piles of documents, print out records from obscure Web sites, link up with fellow Internet
explorers, and spend hours poring over the material, looking for meaning. He was, at heart, a committed researcher, for his
instinct was telling him that within all that unexplored muck lay the answer to this perplexing mystery that dogged his life.
If he sifted carefully enough, he would find the full story of
Natoma Bay
and its crews—and a complete explanation of the mystery of his son’s nightmares. And in some unspoken sense, one he couldn’t
understand, he might even find the big thing that always eluded him: the meaning of life.

And so he would have been pleased to spend days, months, years—as much time as it took—working through the files and folders
and records, panning the papers like an old prospector.

In an odd reversal, it fell to Andrea, the intuitive mystic, to play the toe-tapping part of the impatient taskmaster, while
Bruce was the dithering truth seeker.

“Why are you chasing a bunch of dead sailors when we have one foot in the poorhouse?” Andrea asked.
“
The mortgage is due, the kid has to eat—
I
have to eat—you have to get a job. We only have ten weeks of money left!”

Bruce didn’t want to hear it. Andrea wanted him to get a real job, with real benefits. She wanted health insurance, to start
to build up a pension, some cushion for retirement—a guaranteed paycheck. The house was on fiscal fire!

If Bruce had to work, he didn’t want to work for anybody else. Not again. He wanted to be his own boss, run his own consulting
business. He wanted to work from home, advising corporations about human resources.

Fine, only he shilly-shallied about getting started.

A settlement was reached. Bruce would take steps: send out résumés, network, find companies that needed help in his field.
That way, he could still be his own boss.

“It’s now or never, bud!” was the way that Andrea put it. He would have to put aside the
Natoma Bay
research. Closer to home, duty called.

And so the piles of material on the dining room table were shifted. The talk about Jack Larsen and
Natoma Bay
turned to marketing plans, acquiring business cards, corporate stationery. Bruce started setting up appointments with potential
clients, putting out the word that he was available for contract work.

Andrea handled the administrative stuff, setting up corporate accounts and the software to manage the books. They were a well-balanced
team. Bruce could handle all the production and delivery while Dre would manage the office and bookkeeping.

Since there wasn’t enough money to go out and buy expensive business cards and stationery, Andrea created the cards and stationery
on her own. She arranged to have the company incorporated as Accelerated Performances Resources, LLC.

And almost at once, Bruce found work. He advised a variety of companies about putting together employee benefit pack-ages,
setting up executive training programs, managing corporate downsizing, arranging severance packages for fired workers, and
transforming union operations into more solvent nonunion shops.

And a great load lifted from Andrea’s shoulders.

It felt good that he was doing something about establishing the consulting business. I didn’t mind if Bruce worked on the
past life research at night and on the weekends, but I wasn’t going to live in our car or in a box under a bridge for all
the
Natoma Bay
ghosts put together.

At the same time, while Andrea was bearing down on the consulting business, Bruce was sneaking off by himself to throw out
messages in bottles, that is, trolling the Internet.

And he could see that he had started something compelling, that
Natoma Bay
wouldn’t leave him alone. Soon after returning from the reunion, Bruce found a Chichi-Jima Web site. It was sponsored by
someone named John LaPlant. Bruce sent off one of his midnight postings, which he put together from information he got off
the ship’s log—a document that he had never regarded as completely reliable, since it was put together in 1986 and not official
but merely contributions of members of the crew:

I am doing research for CVE-62
Natoma Bay
, a WWII escort carrier association.

The purpose for my visit to your wonderfully done Web site is to learn more about the island and Futami Ko. Lt. Jg James M.
Huston Jr., a FM-2 pilot from
Natoma Bay,
was lost on March 3, 1945 during an attack on shipping in Futami K. His aircraft was apparently struck by AA fire and crashed
into the harbor near the entrance. They came in from the high ground side of the Harbor and he crashed while retiring. I am
working on a memorial publication about those lost on CVE-62 and a story about CVEs for the
Natoma Bay
Association. James M. Huston Jr. was one of those lost. The story is going to be dedicated to the entire crew and all the
others lost from CVEs in WWII. Is there any place I can go to get a bigger photo of the Harbor or more detailed descriptions
of any wreck sites that may have been found in the harbor or near it? Any assistance you could provide would be deeply appreciated.
Thank you.

The posting was the best he could manage. Bruce went to bed; the note had gone off into the “ether.” The message would linger
in cyberspace almost a year, and then, out of the blue, there would come a thunderclap in reply. But Bruce’s plea first had
to remain unseen, unread—a scrap of too many electrons buzzing through the cluttered Internet atmosphere—until it was plucked
out of space, retrieved, and the time was ripe for it to come alive. But not now, not yet. For the time being, Bruce was bouncing
back and forth, struggling to find some answers to his questions.

The next day was Sunday, and while he was in church—inspired or just sleepy from getting to bed late—he came to a decision.
He would attend to his family’s financial needs—he didn’t want to wind up sleeping in a car or a box, either—but he would
also keep chasing the phantom past life story. After church, he called Jack Larsen and arranged to make the six-hundred-mile
drive to Springdale, Arkansas.

I was determined to figure out what Jack Larsen had to do with James’s memories. Frankly, I had not wholly recovered from
the discovery that he was not dead. I guess I had to see him in the flesh to believe in the story.