Soul Survivor: The Reincarnation of a World War II Fighter Pilot

by Andrea Leininger

  He needed the time. Bruce had just attended his first Natoma Bay reunion, and swimming through his head was an unassembled jumble of brand-new facts. While a lot of things had been clarified by his meeting all those gray, fading veterans, the story had now grown more complicated and enigmatic. Questions and answers overlapped, collided, and failed to make sense. He needed to organize and solidify his thoughts, and on an airplane flying thirty thousand feet in the air was as good a place as any.

  It was a morning flight with breakfast snacks, but in spite of the 9:30 a.m. departure, Bruce ordered a Scotch.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking. We’re flying at thirty thousand feet, and the weather is clear, and we should get into Houston a little early. I would now like to ask for a moment of silence, in respect for those who died exactly one year ago today, in the attacks of Nine-eleven…”

  So that was it! It had completely slipped his mind. Nine-eleven! That explained all that empty space in the terminal and on the plane. It was not just an anomaly in the traffic flow: it was the ghost of the World Trade Center!

  Nine-eleven—so much had happened since then…

  Bruce had been at work when the airliners crashed into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and the field in Pennsylvania. It had been a routine morning, broken open suddenly… and then Andrea had called to alert him; an echo of every conversation everywhere in America was repeated:

  “Did you hear?”

  “I’m watching.”

  Like everyone else, they were each dumbfounded, glued to the closest TV set (he in his office, she in their home), as the fresh bulletins flashed and crawled across the television screen. So much coverage, so little comprehension. For a while, everyone just kept watching, as if awaiting some explanation. But the same news scrolled by again and again, as the same planes flew into the same buildings, which collapsed, over and over.… And, in the end, everyone was left with the same wounded rage.

  In Lafayette, as everywhere else, soldiers were called up, yellow ribbons went around the trunks of trees, and the bewildering question “What comes next?” left everyone in a suspended state of nervous anticipation.

  For the Leiningers, gripped as they were with their child’s long dilemma, the daily business of moving on took a strange new urgency.

  Well, it was something else to contemplate while the plane streaked home from San Diego. Not that Bruce’s mind was inactive. The reunion had put fresh strains on his conscience. There was the matter of the lie. It weighed on him heavily. It had started innocently enough—he told it only because he couldn’t see a way around it—but like all lies, it had grown out of control and become this enormous, unmanageable thing.

  It began with the phone calls, almost two years earlier, in the autumn of 2000. The calls came after James’s unforgettable Thanksgiving utterances about Iwo Jima and Jack Larsen. Bruce had been a little crazed back then, desperate to uncover the mystery of Jack Larsen’s identity.

  After his exhausting searches through myriad Web sites, he found the Escort Carriers Sailors’ and Airmen’s Association, plucked four names off that Web site, and began to make blind phone calls. One number was disconnected. Another member of the group he sought was in the hospital, dying. A third never answered. The fourth was Leo Pyatt. It took Bruce a lot of tries, but the man finally answered his phone.

  I got Leo on the phone and I said, you don’t know me, but I’m interested in Natoma Bay. And he said, did you serve on it? I said no, I didn’t serve on it. He asked if my father served on it. I said no. Then he asked me a question for which I was completely unprepared. Simple, really, and I was an idiot for not having anticipated it, for not being prepared—for not having an answer ready.

  “So why are you interested in Natoma Bay?”

  I was flapping my mouth, not geared up for so obvious a question, but I couldn’t tell him that my two-year-old son is telling me about your ship and about Iwo Jima and everything else. So I lied. I said, well, there’s a guy in my neighborhood who is talking about your ship…

  “Who is he?”

  “He’s a good friend… Ravon Guidry.”

  That’s the trouble with lies; you go down that road and pretty soon you’re in a swamp…

  “… And he’s got an uncle that was talking about the ship. He’s got Alzheimer’s; he’s pretty marbled out most of the time.… But we found out that Natoma Bay was a real ship, so I just started looking. You see, I’m a writer and I’d like to do something to memorialize Natoma Bay. I’m thinking of writing a book….”

  Pretty soon you’re just babbling and rambling like a crazy person, but good old Leo Pyatt must’ve taken pity on me. He said, “Okay, I’ll tell you anything you want to know.”

  And that’s how the lie started. Bruce was going to write a book about Natoma Bay. In spite of his worries about his phony improvisation, it turned out to be brilliant. It gave him complete license to poke and probe without having to mention the fantastical possibility that his two-year-old son—according to his wife and several members of her family—had been Leo’s shipmate. There was the glaring and even more improbable detail that the particular World War II pilot they were talking about had been killed before his own father was born. And if all that weren’t enough, it was this same out-of-kilter father who was on the other end of the phone. Not the ideal pitch for establishing trust with a crusty old veteran.

  A book was the perfect cover. He got to ask his questions without having to undergo psychiatric evaluation. And Bruce proceeded right to the heart of the matter:

  “Were there Corsairs on Natoma Bay?”

  “No. Not that I know of.”

  There! He’d made his case. There were no Corsairs. James had gotten it wrong. Bruce had effectively debunked the whole story, along with the wacky possibility of reincarnation. Bruce felt at once a great lift and a plunge of disappointment. He had proved his point: no Corsairs, no reincarnation. Period. But it left him a little deflated nevertheless. Could it be that easy? Was that all there was to it? One question? So he decided he’d better push it a little further. A good researcher doesn’t get derailed by the first bump in the road, or inconsistency. If he was nothing else, Bruce was thorough:

  “Okay, well, what kind of planes flew off the ship?”

  “Oh, the FM-2 and TBM.”

  “What are they?

  “The FM-2 was a small fighter. They called it a Wildcat. And the other was an Avenger with a crew of three.”

  “Cool. Those were the only planes?”

  “Those were the only planes that I ever saw fly off the ship.”

  “Were you a pilot?”

  “I was an airman. A radioman on a TBM Avenger. My squadron was VC-81.”

  “What does ‘VC’ mean?”

  “‘VC’ means ‘composite squadron’—more than one type of aircraft was assigned to it.”

  “Can you tell me anything about what happened at Iwo Jima?”

  “Sort of.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, I flew thirty-six combat missions. We flew sortie after sortie supporting the battle….”

  And Leo began to talk about the rough air battle, with the deadly ground fire and the flak, and as he was really getting into describing the action, Bruce asked another question. He wanted to clean this thing up completely, and there was still the matter of the identity of the pilot.

  “Can you tell me anything about a guy named Jack Larsen?”

  He didn’t even pause.

  “Oh, yeah. I remember Jack. We never saw him again.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “He flew off one day and we never saw him again.”

  This was wrong! This was evidence for the other side—something confirming. He knew the name. How could James have dreamed up the name of a real member of the air group? It was another revelation that made him shiver.

  To Bruce, this conversation did clarify, in some oblique fashion, that Jack Larsen was a real person an
d was, in fact, the person James was dreaming about. Not that any of it made any sense. Bruce felt painfully confused, bewildered. But perhaps the mystery of just who James was dreaming about now was solved, even if the how and why of it all remained impenetrable.

  Still, it was only a dream, and the fact that James got something wrong—the Corsairs—made me feel reassured in a strange sort of way. The Corsairs were crucial to my skepticism. James insisted on the Corsair, and I insisted on consistency. It was my one strong grip on reality.

  We spoke some more, and finally, when Leo had begun to feel comfortable with me, he told me about the forthcoming reunion of the Natoma Bay crew members in San Diego in 2002. If I really wanted to learn about the “Naty Maru”—that’s what the men affectionately called Natoma Bay—he would get me an invitation. That would be the place to find out about Natoma Bay.

  Of course, Bruce had to wait almost two years until the reunion, and a lot happened before he even got there. For one thing, he read Carol Bowman’s book Children’s Past Lives. In that winter of 2000, he sneaked it out of the house while Andrea wasn’t looking, and read it in his office during his lunch hour. He didn’t believe the stories of the kids she’d written about—they made his teeth sore—but he read the damn thing, and he didn’t object when Andrea got in touch with Carol Bowman. Andrea actually read it after Bruce—the Christmas of 2000 was too hectic, with Jen and Greg visiting—and she saved the book for her luxurious bathtub sessions, late at night, lubricated by wine, when she didn’t have to listen for the nightmares. The book couldn’t help but ring a bell with her, and she sent the author an e-mail.

  Dear Carol Bowman:

  I am not a crackpot. I ran a bookkeeping operation in a large firm, and my husband is vice president of an oil field services company. My mother gave me your book, and I believe that my son is experiencing a past life. He is obsessed with airplanes—World War II airplanes—and can identify them, for example the P-51 Mustang…

  Bruce snarled about “the reincarnation bullshit,” but in his own grudging way, he was curious, too. After all, this was the first time they had gone outside the family, consulted an “expert.” Bowman was a recognized authority in the field of reincarnation studies. She had credentials.

  And Andrea’s e-mail struck a familiar note.

  “They weren’t crackpots,” Bowman concluded after a series of e-mails in which she had tried to help the Leiningers control James’s nightmares in the winter of 2001:

  “You listen for the tone. They seemed like sane and sober people. And the common threads were there: the age when the nightmares began—two—the violence, the remembered death, all that energy surrounding the trauma. These are all crucial and consistent with children who are experiencing past lives.”

  Carol advised Andrea to tell James that what he was experiencing were things that had happened to him before, that it was now over, and that he was now safe. She said that she had used these techniques before, and they seemed to have a powerful healing effect on children. She had another strong piece of advice, something she told all of the parents whose children might be experiencing past life memories: Don’t ask questions that would suggest an answer. For example, don’t ask “Did you fly a Corsair?” It was something that Andrea knew instinctively—she never prompted James. She would, as Carol Bowman suggested, ask open-ended questions to which he alone would supply the factual information. Questions such as “And then what happened?” Thus there was never any inadvertent feeding of detail. Carol’s approach—telling James that what was happening to him was something that happened to him before but is now over—seemed to work. It took the pressure off, and as soon as Andrea talked to James, told him that he was sleeping in his own bed and that he was not in an airplane on fire, the nightmares started to taper off from several times a week to once every other week.

  And during his waking hours James began to talk rationally from time to time, about his so-called past life experiences—a phenomenon that Carol Bowman called “joining his reality.”

  In March 2001, Andrea wrote Carol, telling her that her tactics worked, thanking her. And then life got in the way; they lost touch for about a year.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  JAMES TURNED THREE in April 2001, and the nightmares—thanks to the advice of Carol Bowman—grew less violent and less frequent. But the obsession with airplanes did not lose steam. James wore out two Blue Angel videos in that year. He even wangled a meeting with a few of the pilots when the Blue Angel flight demonstration team came to Lafayette for the Sertoma Air Show.

  One Halloween, James had a school assignment to decorate a pumpkin. Unlike Cinderella, James insisted on turning the pumpkin into an airplane. So off Andrea and James went to Hobby Lobby, where they picked up a foam glider and attached the wings and fuselage with wooden kabob skewers to the painted pumpkin. In the end, it actually bore some resemblance to an F-16 Thunderbird. In fact, some of the Thunderbird pilots who happened to be on a visit to Lafayette came to James’s school for a talk and spotted the pumpkin plane. They borrowed it to show to the other pilots.

  Of course, in the life of any child, there were the usual bumps and tribulations. James came down with a bad throat infection, a parapharyngeal abcess, and it landed him in the hospital for a few days. It was tougher on the family than on James; he handled the tests and needles and minor surgery like a trouper and bounced back with youthful resilience. It was Bruce and Andrea who were rattled.

  For the most part, James was an ordinary child leading an ordinary life—or so it then began to seem. There were calm, uneventful intervals when everything seemed perfectly normal. Inevitably, as in the life of any tyke, there were also playfully mischievous moments. Nobody in the family would forget the sight of him at age three climbing to the landing of the guesthouse, dropping his pants, and peeing down into the backyard, marking his territory. Certainly the next-door neighbor would bear it mind, as he immediately built an eight-foot wooden fence blocking that particular view.

  It was roughly the same time that Bruce had to endure one of James’s more creative pranks. One day, when he was running late for a business trip to Houston, he came to the car and found that James had been fooling with the positioning levers on the driver’s backrest, hopelessly jamming it. Bruce had no time to fix it, so he had to drive to Houston and back with the backrest locked in the prone position.

  Just a kid’s shenanigans, and neither Bruce nor Andrea ever punished James with anything more severe than a tiny time-out or “the hairy eyeball.”

  However, whenever the Leiningers let down their guard, whenever the nightmares subsided or when James’s creepy remarks seemed merely the flare-up of a hyperimaginative child—that is, whenever the hackles were lowered and life seemed to go along without the possibilities of a supernatural, heart-stopping moment—they were sharply reminded that theirs was not an ordinary passage. And they never knew what would trigger another weird disclosure.

  Meanwhile, enigmatic things kept popping up. For instance, by this time, James had been given two GI Joe dolls, and he gave them curious names: Billy and Leon. Not the glamorous, heroic names you might expect a three-year-old to bestow on his frontline soldiers. The Leiningers dismissed the names as quirky—James had a penchant for odd names. One stuffed dog was named Balthazar. No one could push him for an explanation that he probably didn’t have. When asked, he simply shrugged.

  There were other peculiar moments—for instance, when James was alone in the sunroom and, as Andrea watched from a distance, he pulled himself to attention and saluted. Then he said, “I salute you and I’ll never forget. Now here goes my neck.”

  What did it mean? A child’s melodramatic game? Something connected to his recurrent flaming crash? So many mysterious corners and crannies in a child who finally had just been toilet trained.

  And now along came the furious pictures. Sometime in that summer of 2001, James began to draw. The pictures were invariably scenes of battle, with bullets and bombs exploding a
ll over the page. Typically, it was a naval battle, and always there were aircraft overhead. The drawings were clearly violent, and the details of the weaponry and the tactics were accurate in their fashion. That is, there was something uncannily retro about the battles—they suggested a World War II environment. No jets, no missiles. Propeller-driven aircraft in combat in a naval engagement.

  And James could name the aircraft in the pictures. He told Bruce and Andrea that he had drawn Wildcats and Corsairs, and he even named the Japanese planes with the red sun on their fuselages: Zekes or Bettys. Why, asked Bruce, was he giving the Japanese planes boys’ and girls’ names?

  James replied, “The boy planes were fighters and the girl planes were bombers.”

  Bruce went on the Internet and checked, and James was right. According to U.S. naval personnel at the time, the Americans assigned boy names to fighter planes and girl names to bombers.

  But there was something else about the drawings that was even more curious: James signed some of his drawings “James 3.” When he was asked why he signed them “James 3,” he said simply, “Because I am the third James. I am James Three.” Yet again, he had no further explanation. And no amount of prodding produced a different response. It was as if he himself didn’t have the answers to these troublesome questions.

  In March 2002, on the eve of James’s fourth birthday, Carol Bowman called. Andrea answered the phone.

  She called one evening around dinnertime. She said it was Carol Bowman, but the name didn’t register at all, and there was one of those long, awkward pauses while I wracked my brain. Then she said she was the author of Children’s Past Lives, and I felt so stupid for not recognizing her name. We talked for about an hour, catching up, and she said that a producer from the television program 20/20 contacted her about doing a show. The producer was Shalini Sharma, a woman of Indian heritage who had an interest in spiritual mysteries. She also believed in reincarnation.