Soul Survivor by Andrea Leininger & Andrea Leininger & Bruce Leininger

Author:Andrea Leininger & Andrea Leininger & Bruce Leininger [GROSS, KEN]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: OCC022000
ISBN: 9780446550840
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2009-06-05T04:00:00+00:00

It was actually a domestic problem. Andrea had latched on to Huston’s name long before the reunion. She saw the “James,” and for her that connection was decisive. But she couldn’t make Bruce see it. He was committed to his first choice, Jack Larsen. He had heard it from Leo Pyatt’s own mouth—Larsen had flown off one day and never came back.

Bruce went through the rest of that first night of the reunion trying to get as much information as possible, trying to relaunch his search, but it was a waste of time. The place was crowded with old sailors and airmen who reminisced about what they had gone through in the Pacific, but this was not what Bruce sought. The veterans had vivid memories, all right, but they didn’t have the big picture. They, like all soldiers, viewed the war from the vantage point of a foxhole—even if that foxhole was on an aircraft carrier.

Natoma Bay, like all ships, was tightly compartmentalized. The air groups stayed with the air groups, and the ship’s company stayed with the ship’s company. There was little mixing. The members of VC-63 knew the other members of VC-63, but they didn’t know the members of VC-9 or VC-81. They were watertight boxes. They remembered guys in their section, but if they didn’t have business with somebody, they didn’t blend. That’s just the way it was.

Bruce found himself going over the records, looking for combat reports, and trying to coax relevant memories out of the veterans, and though they were willing, they just weren’t able to dig down deep enough to satisfy Bruce.

“Didn’t know him—he wasn’t in my squadron,” was the usual reply. Or “He doesn’t come to the reunions.”

That was Jack Larsen. Why didn’t he come to the reunions?

“Don’t know,” said DeWitt. “We always send him the invitation, but he never comes. Some guys don’t. Some guys don’t like to remember.”

So then he tried to follow this new thread, the one that led to James Huston. But he didn’t believe in it. Bruce would have had to sift through a thousand combat mission reports to find out exactly what had happened to Huston. And he would discover that Huston wasn’t even killed at Iwo Jima. He was killed on a mission a couple of hundred miles away, at a place called Chichi-Jima. And no one had seen him go down. But at this stage, Bruce was not inclined to follow that trail. For reasons both explicit and intuitive, he did not want to believe that James Huston was his man. Larsen—that was the name his son had given. That was the name that came out of the nightmares. James had never mentioned Huston—at least, that was the rationale that Bruce clung to. He remained lost in a fog with the name Jack Larsen as the one sure thing he could count on.

Chaperoned by his new friends, Leo Pyatt and John DeWitt, Bruce had helped assemble the veterans, got them talking, but before long it was midnight and these guys were tired and yawning, and they had to call it a night.

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