Soul Survivor (22 page)

On the phone, Larsen was polite but curious. Why was I interested in his exploits? I told him that he was the only fighter
pilot from VC-81 that I could find who knew all about the pilots who had been killed: Adrian Hunter, Walter Devlin, Billie
Peeler, John Sargent, and James M. Huston.

But before he went to see Jack Larsen, Bruce drove to Dallas to fulfill that other promise: to put his name in play for the
network of human resource consultants. He was diligent. He made some contacts and left some business cards, and the effort
would soon pay off. He would land some work.

To save money, Bruce stayed with Jennifer and Greg, who had moved back to Dallas. This meant that the night before he left
for Arkansas, he had to undergo the panel’s interrogation. Bobbi and Becky and Jennifer peppered him with questions to ask
Jack Larsen. Maybe he was the pilot in the dream, after all. See if James’s version of the story rang any bells. Was he ever
shot down? Was his plane hit in the engine?

With Andrea on the phone and the other members of the panel feeding him questions and setting benign traps for Jack Larsen,
Bruce became punchy from all of the direction, redirection, and overdirection; he was just eager to get going.

It was a crisp morning at the end of September when he pulled into the driveway of Jack and Dorothy Larsen. The drive had
been nerve-wracking—too much time and too much speculation and too many possibilities. Springdale, Arkansas, was a spotless
little town, clipped and clean—just where you might expect to find a retired naval officer. The lawns were all neat and tidy
and ready for inspection.

Jack Larsen, a sprightly old fellow with a sunny smile and an endearing paunch, was waiting for Bruce at the door, along with
his wife. They sat in the sunroom drinking iced tea and eating lunch and making small talk about their families. It was an
easy, unpressured introduction to the former pilot. Larsen told of his career in the Navy; he had stayed in for twenty-two
years, retiring in 1964 as a lieutenant commander. After his discharge, he had found administrative jobs in state governments
from California to Arkansas, but nothing too fatiguing. He had already done his part for his country in two major wars.

“Well, how do you wanna do this?” he finally asked Bruce.

Bruce brought out his tape recorder, and Jack talked about life aboard
Natoma Bay
: the war, the battles, the young men. And there came some fascinating historical nuggets. Jack was the assistant armament
officer, and it was aboard
Natoma Bay
that the first crude napalm bombs had been improvised. They mixed napalm powder with gasoline in the drop tanks to form the
jelly.

“It looked like we were making Jell-O,” said Jack.

Then they rigged the drop tanks with a detonator: a hand grenade attached by a lanyard to the pin, then connected it to the
wing. When the tank was dropped, the lanyard pulled the pin. You had to drop the tank at the right altitude and speed so that
the grenade would explode when the jelly hit the ground.

Then Bruce brought up the casualties: the eleven members of VC-81 killed from
Natoma Bay
. Bruce had discovered that some were officially listed dead a year after they had actually been lost. He wanted to be systematic
and deal with them chronologically, but a lot of the dead and missing were listed as killed late in 1945 or 1946—well after
the war had ended. This created one more element of confusion that made Bruce resist naming Huston as the pilot in James’s
dreams. Jack explained that it was a military bookkeeping quirk: If there were no eyewitnesses to the loss, a pilot would
be listed as missing in action. There was a good reason for the policy. Some pilots survived a crash and were taken prisoner.
If the pilot was still missing after a year or after all POWs had been liberated, the military would reclassify them as missing
in action. The official date of death would be a year from the date he went missing. The insurance was paid and the records
closed.

There were a total of seven airmen from
Natoma Bay
whose deaths did not become official until after the war ended; three had been from VC-81.

Jack remembered most of them from VC-81, not in great detail, and not too much about their deaths. Just the things one could
dredge up almost sixty years after the fact.

Except for James Huston. Jack remembered clearly the day James M. Huston Jr. died: March 3, 1945. “It was going to be the
last chance we had to get at the Japs. Our squadron was scheduled to be relieved. This was our last mission, and I sure as
heck wanted one more shot at them.”

Jack took out his flight logbook and showed the details of the mission to Bruce: an FM-2 fighter armed with rockets, piloted
by Larsen, took off from
Natoma Bay
to strike Chichi-Jima.

“There was no opposition on the flight to Chichi-Jima. No enemy aircraft. And when we arrived off Futami-ko Harbor, we formed
up to make our attack ahead of the bombers. As we pushed over to make our strafing run, the heavy black puffs of smoke from
the flak were so thick it seemed to me that I could have walked to the ground on it. My only thought was to get this over
with as fast as I could and get the heck out of there.

“I really do not remember anything else, other than that it was not until after we got back aboard ship that I learned Huston
was missing. No one had seen his plane go down, because he had been tail-end Charlie. He was the last guy in our group to
make the initial strafing run. I was just happy to make it back to our ship without being hit. I’m reasonably certain Jim’s
plane was hit by flak, because it was so heavy out there.”

Again, no eyewitness.

Just listening to Larsen’s story of the attack came as a shock. Bruce did not fully comprehend—not until this second—what
it was like, the frightful storm of battle: these men in little, flimsy airplanes flying through a hurricane of steel to attack
the Japanese base. What they must have felt, dashing in and out of that lethal gauntlet, blind to everything but the mission.
Some men screamed all the way through the attack; some lost bladder control; some squeezed the joystick so hard that they
almost broke it off in their hand. And some died.

They sat for a moment—Bruce and Jack Larsen—silent. It was just a memory now, but it would always be a horrendous moment for
Jack. Bruce, like his son, was coming to see the deadly air over Chichi-Jima.

They took Bruce to dinner; the Larsens insisted. And Bruce canceled his hotel reservation and stayed with them in their guest
room. It was as if he had passed some sensitivity test and was now a fit member of their inner circle. That evening, they
spoke more about the war—life on the home front during World War II. Dorothy remembered that the wives were always nervous,
waiting for the telegrams notifying them that they had become widows.

The next morning, when they were having breakfast, Bruce began to talk about his son, a four-year-old, who had a strange fascination
with World War II aircraft. And, funny thing, James also had a deep knowledge of the subject—an ability to distinguish between
the Corsair and the Avenger. And, even more surprising, he was able to identify the Japanese Betty as well as the Zero.

Jack pushed away from the table and stood up. “Wait a minute,” he said, then disappeared through a door in the kitchen that
led to the garage. He wasn’t gone long, and Bruce could hear the sound of rummaging through the door. When Larsen returned
to the kitchen, he was carrying a dusty, crumpled old canvas bag in his hands. He handed it to Bruce.

“Give this to James.”

Inside was an old cloth flight helmet with the goggles and oxygen mask attached.

“I was wearing this on the day I flew off
Natoma Bay,
” he said. “On the day James Huston was shot down.”

W
HEN HE RETURNED from Arkansas, Bruce gave his son Jack Larsen’s cloth flight helmet, the one he had worn on the mission in
which Huston was shot down. James wore it whenever he went into his closet cockpit. He wore it while flying his flight simulator
and while watching the tapes of the Blue Angels. He went through a kind of grim ceremony just getting into the helmet. James
put it on firmly, professionally, slapping out the air bubbles, shaping the fit, as if he were going to work.

On his second day back, Bruce received a package from John DeWitt, the
Natoma Bay
Association historian. DeWitt had promised to send Bruce the war diary of VC-81—James Huston’s squadron. Bruce already had
the unofficial log, but he felt he couldn’t rely on anything that had the informal taint of old memories. The crew had put
together “The Blue Book” (a makeshift log) in 1988, more than forty years after the event. How could he trust that?

But DeWitt sent the official war diary. This was an official government document, material typed in 1945, right after the
battle and the debriefing, when everyone’s memory was fresh:

The sixteenth day at Iwo Jima, 3, March 1945, was eventful. It opened with a strike on a reported concentration of large enemy
transports at Chichi-Jima. Eight FM-2s from this squadron participated in the attack. They made three attacks: on the first
firing rockets at shipping and on the second and third attacking anti-aircraft positions to protect the torpedo bombers which
were following. The shipping was identified as one medium transport vessel and smaller FTC-class freighters. Damage was unobserved.
On the first attack as the fighters were retiring toward the entrance to Futami Harbor, the FM-2 piloted by Lieut. (j.g.)
James M. Huston Jr. was apparently hit by anti-aircraft fire. The plane went into a 45-degree dive and crashed into the water
just inside the harbor. It exploded on impact and there was no survivor or wreckage afloat. He was one of the squadron’s better
pilots. He was quiet and unassuming, always alert and his keen eyes tally-hoed everything within sight. He was always the
first to sight aircraft and shipping; he tally-hoed [spotted] the only submarine sighted by the squadron. He was credited
with the destruction of four airborne enemy planes.

Fine. The bulk of the material Bruce had posted on the Chichi-Jima Web site was accurate. But credible documentation was essential,
especially to someone like Bruce. The eyewitness question was still up in the air. Who had seen the plane being hit? The word
“apparently” modified the report of anti-aircraft fire.

But which pilot or which crew member had actually seen the plane hit the water and explode on impact? Where did that detail
come from? It didn’t come from Jack Larsen, who said he only noticed Huston missing when he got back to the ship.

Again Bruce had that small window of uncertainty to squeeze through with his doubts.

Bruce called John DeWitt to thank him for sending the war diary and records, and they got to talking about James Huston. DeWitt
now remembered something new. It had never seemed important until Bruce began to ask questions—it seemed only sad. DeWitt
recalled that James Huston’s father, James McCready Huston, used to come to the early reunions. During the 1960s.

Unlike a lot of suffering parents of dead or missing soldiers, Huston had come around sniffing for details about the death
of his son. McCready was unable to deal with his son just vanishing from the earth without something solid, some tangible
proof, some eyewitness to vouch that such a terrible loss had really happened. It was heartbreakingly poignant, really. The
father was a bent old man who always seemed to drift to the fringe of the reunions, picking off the old pilots or crewmen,
mentioning his son, seeking something.…

“My son was James Huston. Do you know what happened to him?”

He never found out, since there were no eyewitnesses to find; the one survivor who perhaps could tell him something, Jack
Larsen, never attended the reunions. And so James Huston gave up. He finally stopped coming to the reunions, stifled by grief
and frustration. He died in 1973, never having learned anything specific about his son’s death.

When Bruce hung up the phone after talking to John DeWitt, he told Andrea about the haunting visits of the senior Huston.
She took the old man’s tragic quest as another significant sign of the cosmic connection; she was even more certain now that
it was James Huston Jr. who was the goal of their search.