Soul Survivor (25 page)

Andrea went after male next of kin. Edward Barron and Eldon Bailey were not listed among the dead from their states. Donald
Bullis had his mother listed as next of kin. William Bird had a stepfather with a different surname. She set them aside.

Leon Conner was next. He was from Eufaula, Alabama. His father, Lynn Lewis Conner, was his next of kin. Andrea now had found
a ripe, low-hanging piece of fruit. She went to
Ancestry.com
and pulled up the 1940 census record for Lynn Conner in Eufaula, Alabama. Both Leon’s parents, his three siblings, and Leon
himself were all listed.

There was a clear path to Leon Conner’s story, and it seemed as if it would open up for her. She Googled Eufaula, Alabama,
and found that they held an annual pilgrimage, that is, a re-creation of the antebellum South, where the classic, columned
homes are opened and guests are welcomed and treated with lavish hospitality. One of those old columned Southern mansions
was called the Conner-Taylor home. And now she felt the jolt of discovery.

Andrea was a child of the South, and she knew that these small towns were close-knit. The name Conner had to have a long trail
of connections. With a sense of excitement, she Googled “Conner” and “Eufaula, AL” and found a Conner-Lawrence Real Estate.

Now she turned to the full white pages Web site, focusing on Eufaula, where she discovered a total of five Conners and started
cold-calling. There is a common charm that people of a certain cultural background recognize. They know and react to it. Andrea’s
soft, sympathetic spiel was invariably met with polite, helpful attention:

“Hi! My name is Andrea Leininger, and my husband and I are working on a book about an escort carrier in World War Two called
Natoma Bay
. One of the men killed in service on the ship was Leon Conner from Eufaula, and I was trying to find someone who was a relative
of Leon’s. Would you happen to be related to Leon Conner?”

“No, I’m not a relative, but his cousin Gwen is. Would you like her number?”

The first call!

Gwen Conner was as excited as Andrea when she got the phone call. She had grown up with Leon and married one of his cousins.
He was a family legend, the golden child who had gone off to war and died in battle for his country. Gwen had photos—movie
star good looks—and poignant letters and poetic details about Leon, the son of a successful businessman who pitched in and
helped the poor families of Eufaula when times got tough.

Gwen couldn’t stop talking about him—his church work, his tennis game, his parts in the school plays, and his voice in the
town operettas. He was a wonderful dancer, and during the town cotillions he danced so long that his shirt would be soaked
in perspiration. He’d run home and change into a fresh shirt and come back and dance some more. An enthusiast. A wonderful
spirit.

Gwen stayed on the phone for an hour, talking about her dead cousin, the long memories flooding back from sixty years ago.

He was an ideal boy: six feet tall, blond, blue-eyed, a football star who also played the violin. Bright and ambitious, he
graduated from Alabama Polytechnic Institute (which later became Auburn) in 1942 and joined the Naval Reserve in April.

Blond! Just like James’s namesake GI Joe.

When he was killed in October 1944, one month before his twenty-fourth birthday, he had already won Air Medals for leading
attacks against enemy airfields on the Solomon Islands. He was posthumously awarded the Navy Cross, the nation’s second highest
medal, for making repeated attacks against an enemy cruiser. It was almost legendary, his exploits on that fatal day during
the Battle of Leyte Gulf off Samar Island in the Philippines.

Leon’s TBM had made repeated runs against the enemy ship, and when he was out of bombs he spotted another TBM from another
carrier going in for an attack. The other pilot asked Leon if he could make a strafing run ahead of him to draw fire, and
Leon went in first, despite the fact that his plane was fat and slow and the strafing runs were usually reserved for the more
elusive little fighters. The TBM he had escorted in made a direct hit on the cruiser, then fell into the ocean in flames.
When Conner returned to
Natoma Bay,
his gunner, Louis Hill, confronted him on the flight deck. “If you ever pull a stunt like that again, I’ll beat the shit
out of you.” Conner volunteered for a second mission later that day, attacking the same enemy formation. It was on the second
attack on heavy warships that Conner was killed, along with crew members Donald Bullis and Louis Hill.

He was awarded a total of six medals for bravery.

Oh, yes, said Gwen, he was a brave pilot and a beloved member of the community. And he left behind some broken hearts. While
he was in pilot training in Jacksonville, Florida, on May 28, 1943, he married Mary Frances “Fay” Widenburg.

His parents, Lynn and Lalla, had borne their share of grief. They had six children, two of whom died during a flu epidemic
in the winter of 1917–18. With Leon’s death, half their children were gone.

It was a long and moving conversation—many conversations—and Gwen tried to make Andrea understand the importance, the stellar
qualities, of the dead cousin.

“You know, his wife, Faye, married again,” she told Andrea. “But she never got over Leon. She kept his picture on her nightstand
for the rest of her life. Her second husband didn’t mind.”

But all along, Andrea had been having mixed feelings about this whole research process—she didn’t know if she wanted to see
what lay under the rocks. She knew that she didn’t want to find out anything bad about James Huston Jr. But the panel had
ruled against her. Their argument was simple: Huston was bound to be okay. The Navy didn’t allow hoboes or escapees from Alcatraz
to fly its planes.

Okay, but what if she didn’t like him? Simple as that. What if he turned out to be a real jerk? Andrea might quit the whole
project. But, of course, she wouldn’t. She was far too nosy for that.

If there were any lingering misgivings, Leon Conner’s story put her mind to rest.

T
HE ACCUMULATING FLUKES and strokes of accurate details connected to the GI Joe action figures were dumbfounding. How could
James name them for dead pilots? How could he know the ones who died before James M. Huston Jr.? He couldn’t read the list
of names of the casualties—he had no way of knowing who would be there to “meet him in heaven.” He was a four-year-old child,
and he was saying things that made his parents’ skin crawl.

Leon Conner had blond hair, just like his namesake GI Joe. Bruce and Andrea knew that when they found Billie Peeler and Walter
Devlin they, too, would have hair matching the action figures.

They were being pulled hard in a blind but compelling way. Bruce and Andrea moved forward in a fog of confusion. They didn’t
quite understand exactly what they were looking for, but they knew that their research would uncover the answer to their sons’
shocking declarations. It was as if all the dead crewmen were waiting to be discovered, and their job was to fulfill that
role.

And so, in their own erratic yet systematic fashion, they forged ahead. They would find some answers by tracking down the
families of all the
Natoma Bay
dead. Andrea, attempting to keep one foot ahead of the other, stayed alphabetical. Eddie Barron was not one of the GI Joes,
but one thing would lead to another….

Ed was Jewish and had married a beautiful Jewish girl in Los Angeles a week before we left San Diego.

It was a passage in a clear loose-leaf binder. The pages carefully typed, the way people used to keep memoirs before computers.
It had come from Cliff Hodge, a gunner in VC-63. His name was on the
Natoma Bay
roster of veterans, but he had been too sick to attend the 2002 reunion. When Bruce got home from the San Diego reunion,
he called Cliff Hodge in St. Louis, introduced himself, and asked if Cliff had ever served with any of the men killed in action.

“As a matter of fact, yes…”

The digging paid off. There were these amazing surprises that kept popping up as a result of Bruce’s diligence and persistence.
Cliff Hodge told him that he had served with Eddie Barron and Eldon Bailey, knew them personally; they were shipmates and
combat veterans out of the same squadron.

Bruce and Cliff had a long telephone conversation. The old veterans were usually eager to talk, especially to someone who
had been to the reunions, someone who was familiar with the territory. At the end of their phone call, Hodge said he had something
to send Bruce. It was his unpublished memoir, a book he titled
World War II: A Scrapbook & Journal—The Human Side.
It was filled with pictures and notes and stories about the men and life aboard
Natoma Bay.
It was another example of finding a treasure trove of material—a thick packet of clues in the nameless mystery. Pieces of
the memoir had been in Cliff Hodge’s closets and albums for sixty years. He had been putting it together for his grandchildren,
but he said that Bruce could have a copy.

The stories that Cliff Hodge delivered showed the human side of the war. On February 12, 1944,
Natoma Bay
was anchored at a secure bay in the Marshall Islands. Cliff, an aviation machinist’s mate, was responsible for squadron equipment,
and the ship was running low on a certain type of valve for the TBMs. The ship’s motor whaleboat took him over to USS
Intrepid,
where they had the missing valve. “Don’t forget to come back and get me!” he yelled at the coxswain.

Cliff picked up the valves, but the whaleboat never returned. The coxswain didn’t forget; he just got lost among all the ships
in the lagoon.

A call went out: “All hands man your stations to weigh anchor!”

Intrepid
had been ordered to join a task force for a surprise attack on the island of Truk. Cliff was stuck. The officers of
Intrepid
found him an old cot and some light duties, and Cliff tried to stay out of the way. Four days later, he was in the middle
of the attack on the island. On the second evening, he was flung out of his cot. His neck really hurt, and he didn’t know
what it was that had jarred such a big aircraft carrier. The ship had been torpedoed
—
not enough to sink her, but badly enough to take her out of action.

Cliff would discover later that he had hairline fractures of two vertebrae in his neck.

Intrepid
was sent back to Pearl Harbor for repairs. Living on a flimsy cot with scavenged clothing, Cliff worried about being court-martialed
for being AWOL for so long. There was something else pressing on his mind. His wife, Elsie, was pregnant, in her last trimester,
and he hadn’t heard from her for weeks. One evening a man in officer’s tans asked if he could do anything for him. He was
from the Red Cross. “Yeah, I want to know if I’m a mother or a father.” Cliff forgot about the visit and went back to sleep.

On March 1, Cliff was rolled out of his cot at two a.m. and told to report to the small boat dock on the double. He boarded
a large seaplane and was flown to Espiritu Santo in the New Hebrides Islands, where, almost two weeks later,
Natoma Bay
dropped anchor. He rejoined the ship, not knowing if he would be sent to the brig or back to duty.

Everyone loved the story—going away for an hour to fetch some spare parts, then getting caught up in a battle, being torpedoed,
sailing eight thousand miles, and coming back a month later without the parts. It was a great story.

Waiting for Cliff were fresh uniforms, his old bunk, and his mail. The news was good. His daughter, Nancy Lee Ann, was born
on February 5, 1944. There was one little hitch. Elsie was coming home from the hospital with the baby when she saw a car
parked in front of the house. When Elsie got out of her own car, holding Nancy Lee Ann, a woman in uniform approached her
holding out the familiar yellow telegram. Elsie started to shake. Everyone knew what was in those yellow envelopes. Either
her husband or her brother…

“It’s not bad news,” said the woman in uniform quickly, seeing Elsie’s face turn pale.

No one was killed. It was simply Cliff’s telegram asking about the baby.

It was a very warm sidelight to a very grim war.