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

by Andrea Leininger

  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.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  WHEN 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.

  “No,” said Bruce slowly, “there is still the matter of the Corsair. And the fact that we cannot find an eyewitness.”

  “There can be no ironclad proof,” she argued. “Not after all this time. You’re just being pigheaded.”

  Bruce didn’t disagree. He knew that he was being pigheaded. But that was the trait of a good researcher—keep after something until it is nailed down tight. Otherwise…

  In the fall of 2002, the Gulf Coast was struck by a number of quick storms. And while Bruce was wrestling with the implications of the logs and diaries and halting memories of Natoma Bay survivors—as well as Andrea’s indifference to the factual details that his stringent requirements for irrefutable proof demanded—another storm approached Lafayette, Louisiana: Hurricane Lili.

  On September 30, 2002, the Emergency Operations Center at the Lafayette Office of Emergency Preparedness announced that a hurricane storm would strike the Louisiana-Texas coastline no later than Thursday, October 3. The governor ordered mobile homes and low-lying areas evacuated.

  Bruce wasn’t worried. Lafayette was the highest ground in the parish. Besides, the hurricane was supposed to hit Florida first, not Louisiana. It would dissipate by the time it ever got here.

  All this was exciting for James, who had a teacher named Lily and wanted to know why they named a hurricane after her. “You better not get that teacher mad,” said Andrea.

  While she was whizzing back and forth, trying to nail down her little fort against the oncoming winds and possible flood, Bruce was busy packing.

  She asked where he was going.

  He reminded her that he had an important business appointment in Houston on October 3. He would leave early on the second, spend a night in Houston so that he would be fresh for the interview, then come right home afterward. No big deal.

  Andrea was at her wits’ end.

  “What?”

  “Well, you wanted me to make appointments, so I made an appointment. You wanted me to get a job interview, so I landed a job interview. That’s what you wanted, isn’t it?”

  “Now?”

  “I’m doing what you told me to do.”

  That was the thing about Bruce. Once you pointed him in a certain direction and told him to charge, he was off to the sound of the guns.

  In the four months since his job at OSCA ended, he had arranged this one interview—she had to let him go. The house might be in danger, but her fiscal universe depended on his landing a solid, nine-to-five everyday job, not starting a consulting firm.

  The house was strong, Bruce insisted. James seemed to be excited by the prospect of getting blown away. Well, Bruce said, he wouldn’t be gone that long.

  And so with the storm clouds still only a rumor, he drove to Houston. And at nine a.m. on Thursday, October 3, he met with his prospective employer. The meeting went so well that they stayed together for lunch. Then he was ready to drive back to Lafayette.

  Meanwhile, Andrea was desperately trying to take precautions. She got in line at the municipal loading dock, where they were distributing sandbags. But demand was so high, they were being rationed. After four hours of waiting, word came down the line that each applicant would be limited to one sandbag. “What am I gonna do with one friggin’ bag of sand!” she yelled out her car window. “Hold on to it so I won’t blow away?”

  Holding on to her anger, she drove to Lowe’s and began the sandbag search all over. The only thing she could find was high-grade sand—the expensive kind in which you could search for diamonds. And the plywood she had to buy was the same quality used to build furniture. She also picked up about five rolls of masking tape. Andrea loaded James and the supplies into her Saturn and raced back to the house on West St. Mary Boulevard. On the way, she stopped for Happy Meals at McDonald’s—she had no idea when they would eat again.

  When she got home, she started cross-hatching the windows with masking tape to prevent the glass from splintering in the high winds. The television now was no help. Lili was getting worse and coming closer—she had turned into a category three hurricane. The county opened the Cajun Dome and designated it an emergency shelter. Andrea tried to call Bruce, but he had turned his cell phone off. She went into Lamaze breathing. Maybe she wasn’t going into labor, but the ex
tra oxygen helped.

  When Bruce called at two p.m. after his business lunch, saying that he was starting to drive back and should make it home by, oh, say, five, Andrea was a wreck.

  “You better hurry. There’s no food—the markets have been picked clean. Everyone is clearing out.”

  There was panic in her voice, and Bruce, sensing that he had perhaps underestimated the crisis, quickly headed east on Interstate 10. It was an easy but spooky drive. All the traffic was going the other way. He passed through Beaumont—a ghost town. After Beaumont, there was not one single car heading in his direction. And no cops. And so he mashed down on the accelerator, and his 850 turbo-charged Volvo soared beyond all the speed limits.

  Back at home, Andrea summoned her inner soldier, got James back in the Saturn, and headed out again. She filled the car with gas, filled the propane tank, got three hundred dollars from an ATM, loaded up on candles and batteries, took a

  shower and bathed James (you had to be clean for a hurricane—something she didn’t even know she knew), then cleaned the tub and filled it with water.

  Still no word from Bruce. Lili had now been bumped up to category four. Andrea started collecting family photos and home videos.

  And then Bruce arrived. Together, he and Andrea nailed the plywood over the big window in the sunroom and over the windows on the south side of the house—the side that would bear the brunt of the storm. Andrea laid down plastic sheeting and held it in place with what she regarded as diamond-encrusted sandbags to stop any water from flooding in. James was squealing with delight, thinking that he had found another game; this one was called Monster Lili.

  Meanwhile, the bulletins were growing more and more alarming. Andrea thought they should leave and drive to Dallas, but Bruce didn’t want to. He was determined to stand his ground and defend his home.