They wanted to do a show on children who remembered a past life. They were particularly interested in a child who had a past life memory of a military nature. I understood why. This was, after all, barely six months after the attack on the World Trade Center, and just five months after our troops had been sent into Afghanistan, on October 7, 2001—which was Bruce’s birthday and why I remember it so clearly. So the military and death were on everyone’s mind.
Carol asked if we would be interested, and I told her I didn’t know. I’d have to think about it. I’d never considered going public with James’s story. Frankly, I worried about what the neighbors would think. We live in a small Southern town that is heavily Catholic. I did not want to be ostracized. I did not want parents to tell their children not to play with James because he was weird. I didn’t want to be written off as insane or crazy.
My first instinct was to say no. But I had to talk to Bruce—and, of course, the panel. When Bruce got home from work, we talked about it for a long time, and, surprisingly, he was all for it. Bruce thought that the resources that a producer for 20/20 could bring to bear would inevitably dig up some legitimate help in researching James’s story. Maybe we’d get some answers that didn’t involve reincarnation. That was always his intention: to pour water on the reincarnation theory.
The panel, however, being a kind of collective adventure-seeker, was all in favor of doing the show as long as no last names were used and the town of Lafayette was not mentioned on the program. Andrea feared the loss of anonymity, but mostly she feared damage to her precious son.
Eventually, Bobbi came up with an idea that seemed workable: “Why don’t you just stay open and evaluate how you feel through each phase of the process? If, at any time, you feel that things aren’t working out in your favor, you can opt not to go forward. Just proceed with cautious optimism, set up the ground rules, and evaluate as you go along.”
In spite of the fact that the panel was on his side, Bruce grumbled about their having such a big voice in the life of his family. Andrea explained that “the panel” was a fact of life and could not be avoided. “It’s how we operate.”
She called Carol and told her about her apprehensions, and Carol understood. She was neutral about the decision. Andrea was grateful that she wasn’t taking sides—pushing could only bring out Andrea’s overly protective streak. (Her fear of child molesters was so great that she never allowed James to go to a public restroom by himself; when Bruce asked when Andrea would allow that, she replied—only half joking—when he graduates from high school or gets his black belt in karate.)
Carol told her that three families were being considered for the show, which would be a pilot for a new show tentatively entitled Unexplained Mysteries.
There would be a child from Colorado and another in Florida, but James was the only “military” story.
There were a lot of phone calls over the next few weeks—Carol to Andrea, Andrea to Carol, Shalini to Andrea—and in the end, all Andrea’s terms were agreed to. There would be no last names used on the program, and the town of Lafayette would not be mentioned.
Two other stories might be used on the program, but James’s would be the most compelling.
In early May, after James had turned four, the show’s producer, Shalini, came down for a visit. She was making a tour, visiting the boys in Colorado and Florida, as well as Louisiana. She was young and pretty, and in the context of a decision in which sensibilities and impulses played such a big part, the “vibe” was important. Andrea and Bruce and, most important, James liked her.
The full impact of what they were about to embark on had not yet struck the Leiningers. It was not the going public or even going on national television—it was just this sweet young woman who believed in reincarnation; that is, she believed in James.
It was only an afternoon, but it was a full few hours. Shalini asked James about his story, and he told her about the Corsair. She asked him to show her a picture of a Corsair, so he got out one of Bruce’s books and picked out the Corsair.
“That’s a Corsair,” he said. “They used to get flat tires all the time! And they always wanted to turn left when they took off!”
He had never said that before—never given the characteristics of the plane. Andrea was very excited. James had just had a past life recollection in front of someone who wasn’t a member of the family. He’d had them with Jenny and Bruce, but this was different—significant—and Shalini recognized it. James’s memories could resurface at any time, given the right trigger. It opened up a whole new topic for the afternoon discussion. That night, when Bruce got home, they went out to James’s favorite restaurant, Tsunami, where he had his favorite dish, sushi.
Shalini had her lead story for the show. James, she believed, was the real thing.
Then she flew off to Florida to visit another family, another boy, and test another story.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
IN APRIL 2002, just after his fourth birthday, James took his old car seat out of the garage and dragged it into Bruce’s office closet and mounted it on a plastic file box. Then he took a learning toy that had a keyboard on it, and Bruce helped him hang it high over the front of the old car seat. He also managed to get a Playskool driving console with a little phone on it and stuck it directly in front of his assemblage. That was his cockpit. He found an old construction hard hat and adjusted the band so that it became his helmet. A couple of old canvas bags and a backpack became his parachute.
James would saunter into the office while Bruce was working, open the closet door, strap on his gear, put on his helmet, climb into the car seat, and close the door behind him. Bruce would hear the takeoff: “VROOM! VROOMMMM! WRRRRRR!”
Through the door he could hear the battle: “Roger… Zero at six o’clock… Hit him!”
After a while, the door would fly open and James would come tumbling down. The first time he saw it, Bruce thought his son had fallen. But James just got up, dusted himself off, and when Bruce asked what was going on, he replied, “My plane was hit and I was parachuting.”
It was cute, but it was also eerie.
James had already shaken his parents at a local air show when he had mounted the cockpit of a Piper Cub, grabbed the headgear, and put it on with chilling familiarity. Bruce was busy making home movies of some other scene and didn’t see it, but he heard Andrea scream, “That’s it! That’s it!”
“What? What’s wrong?!”
“That’s it!” she repeated, pointing to James’s motion, putting on the headgear. “That’s what he does when he gets into the car! Oh, my God, after he buckles his seat belt, he’s putting on his headset, just like a pilot!”
It was the routine she had observed again and again in the car, with James mimicking the motions of settling into a cockpit.
Even the Blue Angels were taken aback by James. At the air show when he met them at age three, James was asked what he wanted to be when he grew up. Most kids say automatically a Blue Angel pilot, but James was a little more specific:
“I want to be an F-18 Super Hornet pilot and then a Blue Angel pilot—the slot pilot.”
Not quite the standard toddler’s ambition.
Meanwhile, Carol and Andrea and Shalini were holding daily strategy sessions for the July filming of the 20/20 segment. The terms were agreed to: no last names, no hometown, no closely identifying marks. Shalini sent James a gift. It was a model of a Corsair. He quickly knocked off the propeller in a mock crash. He was thrilled.
And Bruce was in a double quandary. On the one hand, the real reason for his intense interest in Natoma Bay would be revealed to the veterans—he had been chasing his son’s nightmares, and the book came as an afterthought. In spite of the fact that all the names would be withheld, the veterans would know the truth. At this stage, he’d never personally met any of the veterans or betrayed their trust in any important way, and although he could still count it as an innocent duplicity, Bruce felt a sting of conscience.
&nbs
p; There was, however, another dilemma—something even more powerful—and he had a decision to make. If they were to go on national TV, he would have to appear to be a believer in the reincarnation theory. But it was still not something that he believed. In fact, he was in the business of not believing it. However, what was the harm in seeming to acquiesce, keeping quiet, allowing the network professionals to come to their own conclusions? Maybe they could end up verifying or debunking the story. After all, something or someone had to break open the case.
And so he made a private pact to keep his doubts off the air, while letting Andrea speak for the other side. He felt a tad dishonest.
Amid the 20/20 preparations and excitement, Bruce had other, more pressing concerns.
His time with the company was almost over. That summer there were three companies who expressed an interest in buying OSCA, which was in the midst of a spike in growth. In a year the stock had more than doubled. That whole season, Bruce, along with the executive team, was locked into secret, silent meetings with Halliburton, Weatherford, and BJ Services, going over the books, fielding initial offers, tweaking numbers, trying to protect the interests of the workers and the stockholders.
Finally, the deed was done: OSCA was sold to BJ Services, and a new, grim reality set in at the house on West St. Mary Boulevard. Most of the executive team had been terminated—no surprise there; that was the whole idea. Generous severance packages had been arranged. Bruce had seen to that. Everything went according to plan. And yet, the stark reality of being once again out of work came as a cold shock.
Bruce kept going to the office, making certain that all the golden parachutes for the executive team were deployed, seeing to the smooth transfer of one management team to the other.
And Andrea fell victim to an icy panic. Her husband was jobless. Never mind the beefed-up stock portfolio and the large severance check and the fact that this sale of the company was what he had been working for. The fact staring her in the face was that he was unemployed. And that led inexorably to that other damned threat. Lafayette was a small town. The prospect of another high-level human resources job opening up within its precincts was unlikely. Therefore, there was, somewhere along the way, the stone-cold chance that they would have to uproot and move again. To her, it was an impossible thought.
Even by the hectic standards of the Leiningers, the summer of 2002 was frantic. Bruce’s oldest son, Eric, was graduating from Virginia Tech. The family flew up for that, and during the flight, James made a big impression on the pilot with his intimate knowledge of a cockpit and his unbridled enthusiasm for flying.
And in the midst of all this, Bruce had to have a double hernia operation, after which he had to drive to Dallas. Jen and Greg were holding a big party celebrating the final stages of the adoption of their daughter, Ainsley. Bruce was just two days out of the hospital, but he had to make the drive. Andrea drove the four hundred miles to Dallas with Bruce reclining in the passenger seat, packed in ice.
At the same time, the 20/20 staff wanted to shoot some preliminary footage of James at a museum of old planes. So after the party for Ainsley, they all drove to Galveston—another three hundred miles—where, on June 29, they filmed James at the Lone Star Flight Museum. James circled a polished-up Corsair, pushing on the propeller, touching the wheels, inspecting with striking familiarity the vital parts that dwarfed him.
He was all business, performing a professional pilot’s preflight inspection of an aircraft.
(Bruce was limping along, a spectator, dreading the 235-mile drive back to Lafayette on Interstate 10—a bumpy nightmare.)
The 20/20 crew took seemingly endless film of the four-year-old child soberly circling the Corsair. James pointed out the tailhook, which, he said, clearly indicated that this was a naval aircraft. Only Navy planes had tailhooks to grab the arresting wire when landing on an aircraft carrier. He also pointed out the vulnerable tires, which took a lot of pressure on a hot carrier landing; they had a tendency to burst—another fascinating detail that Shalini Sharma had confirmed with a naval historian.
Less than a week later, Andrea was atwitter. Shari Belafonte was coming to her home! The daughter of Harry Belafonte! The whole panel was atwitter—no one more than Bobbi, who swooned over Harry Belafonte. Shari was the on-air talent who would be conducting the interview for the 20/20 segment.
For two days, Andrea tried to anticipate everything she could. She cleaned and polished like a soldier getting ready for inspection. She had a large carafe of coffee waiting, also a big tray of Danish pastry. She had arranged with a local catering company to deliver box lunches and pasta salad at eleven thirty a.m.
At eight a.m. on July 2, the crew arrived at the house. They were five: one sound man, one lighting technician, two camera-men, and the producer—Melissa. All in their late twenties or early thirties, they were very businesslike. They came in and scoped out the house, looking for the best angles and camera shots. Then they started moving the furniture around, took everything out of the sunroom…
Oh, God! Andrea fretted. What if I haven’t cleaned out that room like a fiend? What if they find the dust bunnies or, God forbid, a dead cockroach!
Melissa explained that Shari and Carol Bowman were at Girard Park, near the campus of the University of Louisiana, filming some other locations and interviews, but they’d be along.
Finally, the appointed hour arrived. At nine o’clock, the doorbell rang, and there they were.
Shari Belafonte, stunning in her golden hair and olive flight suit, seemed to radiate glamour. Her smile was like sunshine, and James took to her immediately. She got on the floor with him and played with his toy planes, and he told her why none of them had propellers.
At one point, the phone rang. Andrea could see by the
caller ID that it was her sister Jen, so she asked Shari to pick up the receiver. Jenny was starstruck and said, “I feel like I’m talking to Mick Jagger or something.”
Carol looked like a therapist to Andrea: calm, accepting. She was a middle-aged woman in a military green outfit, soft-spoken with a benign smile, and seemed not at all judgmental.
Carol and Shari were bothered by the heat—it was July in the South—and they asked for ice water as Melissa set up the shots.
And Andrea was being a vivacious Southern belle, making sure that everyone was being plied with enough food and beverages, that she was getting enough photos of this once-in-a-lifetime experience, that James was behaving, that she didn’t look a million years old. That she didn’t look fat! All the while, one thought kept running through her head: Shari Belafonte is in my friggin’ house!
The lunch showed up on time, but they sent gallons of pasta salad by mistake. In the background, Bruce was a little bewildered by all the fuss, as well as a little tender from his recent surgery.
Meanwhile, the gaffer set up the lights, the cameramen their equipment, and the sound man his microphones and recorders. Melissa explained how the particular shot would go. If it didn’t go the way she wanted, she yelled, “Cut!” and they redid it.
At one point, Shari asked if Andrea and Bruce believed in reincarnation or in souls returning to earth, whereupon the sound man reported that the battery for the recorder had gone dead. He put in a new battery, but something then went wrong with the charger, and it wouldn’t record.
Melissa told Shari to ask the question again, and the screw holding the camera on its tripod broke, and the camera came crashing to the floor. They tried again, and again there was a glitch. Then the TV in the next room suddenly came on, and everyone felt a cold, eerie chill. Except for the TV in the distance, there was breathless silence. Finally, the producer said, “Let’s just come up with another question,” which saved Bruce from having to answer the crucial question about reincarnation—something he had dreaded ever since they agreed to do the segment.
The Leiningers had little time to spend with Carol Bowman, but she did tell them her thoughts. James was a delightful child, and the nightmares were
connected with reality. He was not imagining the dreams, and he was completely authentic in his reactions. She saw Andrea as a concerned parent who was trying her best to cope with a dizzying whirlwind. But Andrea was receptive to the idea of a past life. She was open and friendly and willing to take advice: be gentle with James; do not try to push him to answer questions; allow him to find his own comfortable ground. If he wants to talk, let him, but don’t push him. If he doesn’t want to be interviewed, don’t force him. Andrea didn’t have to be told, but she agreed. She saw her son’s experience in the same way that Carol Bowman did. James was the conduit of a mysterious wonder that they called a past life.
Bruce? He was another story.
“Bruce,” Carol Bowman would say later, “was very hostile to the idea of reincarnation. That was very clear. He did not believe in it. He fought it.”
In a way, Carol handled Bruce the same way she handled James: she left him alone. No forcing beliefs down his throat. He would have to come to his own conclusions by himself. She knew that the harder she pushed, the harder he would push back.
And indeed, Bruce was having trouble with Andrea’s stubborn certainty. She believed in the whole past life business, but he was still hip deep in his search for Jack Larsen. He wanted proof—something that would stand up to scientific testing—that there was even such a thing as a past life and, furthermore, something tangible about his son’s experience. So far, all he had were baffling indications that something unusual had taken place, but no real proof of what it was.
Soul Survivor: The Reincarnation of a World War II Fighter Pilot Page 11