Soul Survivor (36 page)

Evans stayed on in the Navy for thirty years and became an officer, rising to the rank of lieutenant commander. He was a master
diver and would eventually teach the special-effects team, along with Robert DeNiro, how to dive in the movie
Men of Honor.

On the second day, Bruce went over to the video rental store to get a tutorial on how to operate the audiovisual equipment
that he would use to show the PowerPoint presentation and video at the banquet. Meanwhile, James changed into his flight suit
and came down to the ready room. James and Andrea encounted an older-looking gentleman with a jovial smile; he was Jack Larsen,
and Andrea screamed with excitement when they were introduced. James shook his hand and smiled.

That there was actually a Jack Larsen and that they were all here meeting face-to-face was an astonishing thing in itself.
The reality was enough. And all the veterans and their families began to trickle into the ready room, where James stood sentinel
in his flight suit. He quietly studied all the faces and listened to the tidbits of conversation and was attentive to little
habits and mannerisms—he was looking for his friends.

No one thought it odd that a six-year-old child was in the thick of it, eating breakfast, lunch, and dinner with the old veterans,
listening to their stories with the polite rapt attention of someone not a peer but not quite a child.

He was inseparable from men who had been his wingmen in war. He sat with them when they had breakfast, followed them around
like a puppy. One morning, when he was taking a break with his mother at the pool, he looked troubled. She asked what was
wrong.

He shook his head; he had a few things on his mind, he said—nothing that he wanted to talk about at the moment. Andrea pressed
a little, and he confided, “I’m sad that everyone is so old.”

Well, of course. He remembered them all as hot young pilots! Andrea realized that James was caught in a slipstream of memory.

Of course, the thing that made this reunion so extraordinary was the presence of Annie Barron. When she and James met, would
it be an encounter between an old lady and a young boy, or would it be that other reunion, the meeting of lost siblings across
more than half a century?

The Leiningers were nervous. Andrea was hoping that she could orchestrate the meeting, mentally prepare the ground. But they
bumped into each other, as if fate had something else in mind.

Andrea and James were heading down to the lobby, on their way to the pool, when Andrea spotted Annie and her daughter, Leslie,
heading for the reception desk. She panicked. This was not the ideal moment. Annie had just come all the way from California
and would surely be exhausted. So Andrea took James back to the room. After about twenty minutes, Bruce came back, and they
decided to go to the pool together. As they headed toward the elevator, they found themselves walking straight into the path
of Annie and Leslie.

There was no getting around it. Introductions were made, hugs were exchanged, and James became uncharacteristically quiet.
He watched Annie intently, studying her, weighing… something. It was as if he was trying to find the face of his twenty-four-year-old
sister in the eighty-six-year-old woman.

“I found him shy,” Annie would recall. “Children of that age are shy. I would catch him looking at me, as if he was studying
me.”

They spoke very little, as if they each were afraid of shattering something fragile. Still, there was something powerful and
detectably understanding between them.

Andrea and Bruce asked Annie and Leslie to join them for dinner that evening. It would be a more auspicious moment, Andrea
thought. They planned to meet at the San Antonio Riverwalk. That night, all of them, along with Bobbi, went to a casual Mexican
restaurant. The lively atmosphere settled everyone’s nerves, and Annie and James seemed to bond. They settled into a kind
of watchful but fond relationship, something that defied an explanation.

The featured event of the reunion was the memorial service and the dedication at the Nimitz Museum in Fredericksburg of the
new plaque. This was the event that Bruce had been planning for months—his own combined operation, his own version of D-day.
He drove ahead to Fredericksburg in his Volvo. He wanted time to set things up.

He laid out the chairs, placing a flag and a program on each one. But just as he got everything set up, the main group of
veterans and their families pulled in.

This was not in the plan. Bruce had wanted some time alone to gather his thoughts—he would have to speak—but it was too late.
The guests had arrived. The memorial service was conducted; a bell tolled for each man lost, and a family member placed a
small flag in a stand that Bruce had built. Speeches were delivered, prayers offered, silence observed, taps played, and the
bronze plaque was unveiled. It was quietly impressive. It was his moment.

But the reunion really belonged to James. After the service, the group toured the museum. There were a lot of displays spread
over the grounds. There was even a five-inch cannon. James wanted to climb on it.

“
Natoma Bay
had one of these,” he said of the gun.

Stanley Paled and Frank Woolard, who had served aboard
Natoma Bay,
were right beside James when he said it. They could not believe what they had just heard.

“Where was it located?” asked Stanley.

“On the fantail,” James replied, and the two veterans just stared at him—that was exactly where the five-inch gun was located.

Lloyd McKann and his wife, Alta, were walking past the gun, a little ahead of the rest of the crowd, when he heard it, too.

James and his mother were about forty feet behind us—a ways behind—and we passed the five-inch gun.
Natoma Bay
had one just like it on the fantail. I whispered that to my wife. And then we heard James say, “Oh, they had a gun like that
on
Natoma Bay.”

You know, when I said that to Alta, he was out of earshot. He couldn’t have heard me. I’m positive of that.

The next night, there was a banquet, and the veterans were noisy with a kind of relief. They had met James. They had met James
Huston’s sister, Annie. They had watched the video, read the binders, seen the complete picture of “Naty Maru’s” war service,
documented and illustrated by Bruce Leininger.

There were among them the believers, the skeptics, and those who accepted that something inexplicable had sailed in the wake
of
Natoma Bay
.

It had been exhausting—the years of slavish devotion to records and documents and tracking down veterans. But in the end,
Bruce and Andrea had accomplished something almost miraculous. They had solved the riddle of their child’s nightmares. But
it was bigger than that. In the course of doing it, they had resolved the mysteries for a lot of families and veterans of
a small escort carrier, one of many that had served nobly in the war in the Pacific.

Coming home from the reunion in the old Volvo, Bruce and Andrea were exhausted but happy. A great weight had been lifted.
They also realized something profound. These men would never again be together like this—the casualties of time were even
more inexorable than the victims of war. The Leiningers had gotten to see all these people, had gotten a chance to say good-bye.

And in the backseat, James slept peacefully.

I
N THE SUMMER of 2006, James was like most other eight-year-old boys. He was nuts about
Star Wars
movies, Spiderman, Batman, and the usual violent video games that ate up his mother’s fingernails. He still played with airplanes,
but his life was crowded with the customary small-town activities: ballgames, birthday parties, cookouts, and sleepovers.
He seemed more or less like any other sweet kid of those tender, dreamy years—except that every so often he had a nightmare.
Not those big, kicking screamers, but a softer, sobbing reminder that there was still something lingering within him.