Soul Survivor (31 page)

They were all dizzy with confusion. And so they did what they always did: they blinked and swallowed and went on with life—that
is, life with all the uncertainty that accompanied it.

In April they celebrated James’s fifth birthday by driving to the Naval Air Station at Pensacola, Florida, the home of the
Naval Air Museum. Pensacola was also the home base of the Blue Angels.

As usual, Bruce threw in some bonus miles. They drove two hundred miles farther to Eufaula, Alabama, to visit Leon Conner’s
family. That was just like Bruce—roaming the country, searching out pilots, as if he was going to find that missing link.
Every trip had that ulterior motive. Andrea accepted it—just another toll on the road that might move them forward.

They spent a day at the naval museum at Pensacola. The equipment and artifacts from the carriers and planes were always a
kick. Everyone liked squeezing into the tight spaces of the old aircraft carriers, imagining the sailors twisting and hurrying
to battle stations under the claxon call of war.

And then there were the airplane cockpits that they kept stored on the second floor—James loved those. They almost had to
eject him from the cockpit of an old F-4 Phantom, one of the original Blue Angels aircraft. It took pleading and the threat
of starvation to get him out.

One of the purposes of the trip was to get more information about
Natoma Bay,
but they were at the wrong museum. The museum for escort carriers was in Texas. It was located aboard USS
Lexington
(CV-16), which was anchored at Corpus Christi.

Another trip, another chance for Bruce to look up veterans. There were always retired pilots who hovered like moths around
the flame of a naval air station. Something about the proximity of airplanes attracted them, made them settle down nearby.

The Leiningers spent the Memorial Day weekend in Corpus Christi. And one afternoon, while Andrea took James swimming, Bruce
drove to Rockport to visit another aging pilot. This one had flown on a mission in which another VC-63 pilot had been killed.
There wasn’t much he could add to the action reports, but Bruce didn’t mind. Looking at these old, bent men with thin white
hair pushing themselves around on walkers, he saw the brash young pilots who they once were in those sixty-year-old photographs.

And, in fact, the visits with the pilots were never completely fruitless. Their memories were unreliable, and the details
that they could add were not significant. Still, Bruce enjoyed seeing them in the flesh; he relished their company, and he
kept adding bits and pieces to his documents.

But he could not add the one thing that he was always looking for: an eyewitness account of the death of James M. Huston Jr.
That was his last little thread of skepticism.

It was about to be cut.

June 3 was a typically warm, sultry Louisiana afternoon. Andrea was at home, trying to assemble a cooling, satisfying menu,
not paying much attention to anything in particular, when the phone rang.

“Hi, my name is Jack Durham and you don’t know me. I’m calling because I found a post that your husband made on a Web site
about Chichi-Jima…”

Another member of the club—the we’re-never-gonna-finish-researching-or-talking-about-
Natoma Bay
club.

“I’ve been trying to contact your husband for weeks, but he must have a new e-mail address, because all my messages come back.
I finally decided to look you up in the phone book.”

Andrea was only half listening—there was the more urgent business of dinner—and she couldn’t keep up with all the characters
in the great
Natoma Bay
drama.

“Is Bruce home?”

“Huh?”

“I was just saying that I found his posting on the Chichi-Jima Web site—the one he posted last September…”

Wait a minute! This was that old message in a bottle. This was an answer from the guy who had been at Chichi-Jima. This was
a potential eyewitness!

“No, Bruce isn’t home, but this is his wife, Andrea. I’d be glad to give him a message and have him call you back.”

And then this caller, Jack Durham, started to talk to Andrea about the reason he was trying to get in touch. Yes, he wanted
to talk to Bruce—someone—because of the uncertainty he had been living with for so many years.

“I was so excited when I read his post. About the attack on Futami-ko Harbor. He wanted to find out if anyone saw that plane
get shot down. When I read the details, I realized that I had been on that mission that day, March third of 1945, and we saw
that airplane get hit and crash into the harbor.”

“Oh, my gosh!” She could barely speak. “You actually saw the plane get hit?”

And the voice on the phone provided the answer to so many questions that were driving the Leininger family to the brink.

“Yeah. I saw him get hit.”

Why didn’t he report it? Why were the after-action reports all so muddled and confused? Why had they all been delivered as
a kind of rumor—a third-person version?

Durham had a perfectly reasonable explanation: “Well, minutes after that guy’s plane was hit, my plane was hit. We never got
back to the ship—USS
Sargent Bay.
We went into the water, too. But everyone in my crew survived.”

And so Andrea came to see that her husband wasn’t so crazy after all. His long investigation had produced more than one shock
of discovery.

Andrea told Jack Durham that Bruce would be very glad indeed to call him back. She wrote down his telephone number, then checked
it several times. She got his address and a backup number just in case there was another snafu.

She was waiting for me at the door, with a piece of paper on which she had written a phone number. It belonged to a guy named
Jack Durham, and she said that it was a guy I had been waiting for all my life.

Of course I called immediately. He told me what he told Dre: he read my note on the Chichi-Jima Web site—the one I posted
way back in September. When he read it, he realized that he was a witness to James Huston’s death over Futami-ko Harbor.

He was off
Sargent Bay
—he was a radioman on one of the eight TBM Avengers who made the attack on Chichi-Jima from
Sargent Bay
. The eight–FM-2 fighter escort came off
Natoma Bay.

I asked him if he was sure—very sure—about the details. He said that he checked—he looked it up in his logbook: three March
1945. That was his mission.

Jack Durham had written it down in an informal memoir.

“Everything was just routine until late in the afternoon of March 2, 1945. They told me that I was replacing Pop Stewart and
would fly a strike mission against Chichi-Jima, the hellhole of the Bonin Islands.…

“This part of the story should begin at about oh-two-thirty on the morning of the third. We were awakened and dressed for
flight. Then off we went to the mess, where the cooks asked us how we wanted our eggs—and, if I remember correctly, how we
wanted our steaks. Steaks! That should have been the tip-off.

“It was reported that a Japanese buildup of troop replacements and supplies had to be stopped. Each of our planes was loaded
with four five-hundred-pound bombs and six rockets with five-inch warheads. Our flight to the target was about a hundred and
twenty-five miles, and we wanted to be there by sunrise so that our approach would be helped by having the sun in their eyes.
As we approached the island from the east, we could see the ack-ack fire exploding far in the distance—to let us know they
were waiting for us to ‘surprise’ them.

“We formed up in echelon and prepared to dive, and I noticed that we were ‘tail-end Charlie’—that is, the last plane in the
attack. Oh, well, I thought, make the dive, fire the rockets, drop the bombs, and bug out. In a couple of minutes we’d be
on our way, with another mission behind us.

“I had charged my .30-caliber peashooter and thought I’d strafe something while fleeing the harbor. With only two hundred
and eighty rounds in my canister—and a high rate of fire—I didn’t have much time to fool around.

“The first thing I noticed was the incredible amount of AA fire—this wasn’t like Iwo.

“One of the fighters from our escort squadron was close to us and took a direct hit on the nose. All I could see were pieces
falling into the bay. He, too, was ‘tail-end Charlie’ of the fighter escort.

“Before I realized it, my gun was quiet. I had run out of ammo.

“When we pulled out of the dive and headed for open sea, I saw the place where the fighter had hit. The rings were still expanding
near a huge rock at the harbor entrance.

“When the run was over, I heard the conversation between the other pilots of the group—they still hadn’t dropped their bombs.
We climbed for altitude to make the second run. We did it once; we can do it again.”

But on the second run, Durham’s plane was hit, though not badly enough to go straight into the harbor. They were able to limp
away and ditch where they could be rescued by fellow Americans.

The account was now complete. No one from
Natoma Bay
had seen Huston go into the water, because they were flying away from the scene. Huston was the last plane of the fighter
escort group to attack the ships anchored there. He was the “tail-end Charlie” of the attack. When he ran into the anti-aircraft
fire, the other fighter planes—including his wingmen, Jack Larsen, Bob Greenwalt, and William Mathson Jr.—were already forming
up for the next attack. No one looked back. Only the bombers from another squadron off another ship witnessed Huston’s death.

Durham’s story about the mission was vivid. Bruce put down the phone and ran into his office and plucked out the combat records,
the war diary from
Sargent Bay
, and read them back to Durham. It verified everything he said. Huston’s plane was hit in the engine, and the front exploded
in a ball of flames and instantly crashed into the harbor. No one saw any survivors.

The official versions all corresponded, but more than that—on an even more thrilling level—it matched perfectly the nightmare
account given by little James back in 2000.

For a moment, Bruce was speechless. Andrea stood next to him holding her hands over her mouth.

There were other witnesses, said Durham. Fliers on the TBMs had seen Huston’s plane get hit and crash.

Durham gave him the names: Ralph Clarbour, Bob Skelton, and John Richardson. They were also on the mission; they also saw
Huston’s plane hit and crash in flames.

Over the next few weeks, Bruce spoke to the other witnesses, and, with minor variations, all the accounts supported what Durham
said. It was a kind of
Rashomon
of the battle of Futami-ko Harbor off Chichi-Jima.

As was his habit, Bruce wanted to visit the veterans, speak to them face-to-face, prove to himself that he was getting the
real thing from reliable sources.

John Richardson lived in Nacogdoches, Texas. He was suffering from Parkinson’s disease, but he was eager to see Bruce. He
asked Bruce to bring a photograph of the dead pilot.

Bruce drove three hundred miles to see him. John Richardson was old and weak, but he had things to get off his chest.