cliffs right outside the gate, we would watch as the Japanese celebrated Obon, a summer festival honoring the dead, its last day marked by a moving and beautiful ceremony. The Buddhists believe that at death the spirits cross the river to the other side, but that once a year they return silently and, for the several days of Obon, visit the living. To guide the dead back across the water, Japanese families would use tiny straw boats, and in the bow they would place a candle to light the way. To entice the dead into their boats, the living leave messages and elaborate treats. That last night of Obon the little boats would be set out on the river, and the landscape would gleam with the tiny flames and then gleam again with reflection of those flames in the water and on the white paper sails of some of the boats. The beauty and the glory of this image never left me, not just of the image but of the sense that all these souls, thousands of them, were being led by the delicacies their families had prepared and by the lights in their bows glistening above the black water, and that all of the souls were traveling together to be on the other side of the river, together. Even if in life they may not have known each other, these souls crossing back across the river formed a great and glorious, even a joyous, community. It was like the title of Mark Yakich’s book of poetry, Unrelated Individuals Forming a Group Waiting To Cross. Although I am Christian, this Buddhist tradition made it easier for me when we sat in the base chapel for the memorials when Lieutenant Commander Decker and three others died in May 1959, and when in November another VQ-1 plane crashed and again four men died, and again we all sat in the chapel, with our friends and their mothers, some beaten, some stoic, all filled with grief, alone in the front pew. I would stare at the still backs of the necks of my now fatherless schoolmates and imagine them bent over their boats and pushing them out to sea, sending the souls of their fathers home—until the next year. For children who were used to their fathers being gone, it was almost enough.
I nearly had to test the redemptive power of that image with my own father.
One night in June 1959, only a few weeks after April had left our house, my father didn’t come home. We didn’t worry. It was not unusual. The pilots and crew of VQ-1 could never tell their families when they were leaving for a reconnaissance flight or how long they would be gone. If Dad didn’t come home for dinner, we knew he was in the air somewhere. We could sometimes tell where he had been, or at least where he had refueled, by what he brought back to us. If he brought home bananas, he had been to Taiwan; a piece of jewelry for my mother, we decided, was Thailand. If he had landed at Midway, it was the best treat of all—pictures and stories about the gooney birds, heavy waddling albatrosses. Dad would delight us mimicking a gooney bird’s outstretched neck and graceless dance. We made a game of guessing.
But on this mission, something went wrong. My father and Commander Donald Mayer, Daryl’s father, were piloting a P4 Mercator along the coast of North Korea. A large, heavy four-propeller bomber, built for nine men, with a gun turret in the back, it was holding fourteen men, and most of the guns had been replaced with cameras and surveillance equipment. My father was piloting the plane. As the Mercator made her maneuvers trying to set off—and thereby expose the location of—communist radar stations, two MiG jet fighters with red stars emblazoned on them made a pass. Dad and Commander Mayer weren’t surprised to see them. Chinese or Korean jets often flew close to watch the maneuvers near their coastlines, perhaps to intimidate.
But this time they weren’t just watching. This time they were shooting.
As the MiGs passed the converted Navy bomber, the sharp report of gunfire tore through my father’s plane. The crew scrambled, while the MiGs circled back to make another pass. The Navy gunner, Donald Corder, rushed to his only gun, but he never even got a shot