Just before we kissed the first swell the engine quit dead. We skipped once, I rolled the trim all the way back, pulled the yoke back even though the damn cables were severed, and the Sea Witch pancaked. She must have stopped dead in about ten feet. I kept traveling forward until my head hit the instrument panel, then I went out.
POTTINGER:
The ensign wasn’t strapped in. In all the excitement he must have forgotten. The panel made a hell of a gash in his forehead, so he was out cold and bleeding profusely.
The airplane was settling fast. I opened the cockpit hatch and pulled him out of his seat. I couldn’t have gotten him up through the hatch if Hoffman hadn’t come up to the cockpit. The ensign weighed about 120, which was plenty, let me tell you. It was all Hoffman and I could do to get him through the hatch, then we hoisted ourselves through.
The top of the fuselage was just above water. It was a miracle that the Jap float fighter didn’t set us on fire, and he probably would have if we had been carrying more fuel.
“What about the others?” I asked Hoffman.
“Huntington is dead. The Zero got him. So is Amme. I don’t know about Tucker or Svenson.”
We were about to step off the bow to stay away from the props when a wave swept us into the sea. I popped the cartridges to inflate my vest, then struggled with the ensign’s. I also had to tighten the straps of his vest, then attend to mine — no one ever put those things on tightly enough. I was struggling to do all this and keep our heads above water when I felt something hit my foot.
The ensign was still bleeding, and these waters were full of sharks. A wave of panic swept over me, then my foot hit it again. Something solid. I put my foot down.
The bottom. I was standing on the bottom with just my nose out of the water.
“Hoffman! Stand up!”
We were inside the reef. A miracle. Delivered by a miracle. The ensign had gotten us just close enough.
The Sea Witch refused to go under, of course, because she was resting on the bottom. Her black starboard wingtip and vertical stabilizer both protruded prominently from the water.
When we realized the situation, Hoffman worked his way aft and checked on the others. He found three bodies.
We had to get ashore, so we set out across the lagoon toward the beach, walking on the bottom and pulling the ensign, who floated in his inflated life vest.
“He took a hell of a lick,” I told Hoffman.
“Maybe he’ll wake up,” Hoffman said, leaving unspoken the other half of it, that maybe he wouldn’t.
HOFFMAN:
The only thing that kept me sane was taking care of the ensign as we struggled over the reef.
Maybe he was already dead, or dying. I didn’t know. I tried not to think about it. Just keep his head up.
Oh, man. I couldn’t believe they were all dead — Lieutenant Modahl, Chief Amme, Swede Svenson, Tucker, Huntington, Varitek. I tried not to think about it and could think of nothing else. All those guys dead!
We were next. The three of us. There we were, castaways on a jungle island in the middle of the ocean and not another soul on earth knew. How long could a guy stay alive? We’d be ant food before anyone ever found us. If they did.
Of course, if the Japs found us before the Americans, we wouldn’t have to worry about survival.
POTTINGER:
Fighting the currents and swells washing over that uneven reef and through the lagoon while dragging the ensign was the toughest thing I ever had to do. The floor of the lagoon was uneven, with holes in it, and sometimes Hoffman and I went under and fought like hell to keep from drowning.
We must have struggled for an hour before we got to knee-deep water, and another half hour before we finally dragged the ensign and ourselves up on the beach. We lay there gasping, desperately thirsty, so exhausted we could scarcely move.
Hoffman got to his knees, finally, and looked around. The beach was a narrow strip of sand, no more than ten yards wide; the jungle began right at the high-water mark.
At his urging we crawled into the undergrowth out of sight. The ensign we dragged. He was still breathing, had a pulse, and thank God the bleeding had stopped, but he didn’t look good.
The Witch was about a mile out on the reef. The tail stuck up prominently like an aluminum sail.
“I hope the Japs don’t see that,” Hoffman remarked.
“If we can’t find water, it won’t matter,” I told him. “We’ll be praying for the Japs to come along and put us out of our misery.”
After some discussion, he went one way down the beach and I went the other. We were looking for freshwater, a stream running into the sea … something.
At some point I became aware that I was lying in sand … in shade … in wet clothes … with bugs and gnats and all manner of insects eating on me.
My head was splitting, so I didn’t pay much attention to the bugs, though I knew they were there.
I managed to pry my eyes open … and could barely make out light and darkness. I thrashed around awhile and dug at my eyes and rubbed at the bugs and passed out again.
The second time I woke up it was dark. My eyes were better, I thought, yet there was nothing to see. I could hear waves lapping nervously.
The thought that we had made it to the island hit me then. I lay there trying to remember. After a while most of the flight came back, the flak in the darkness, the Zero on floats, settling toward the water with one engine dead and the other dying …
I became aware that Pottinger was there beside me. He had a baby bottle in his survival vest, which he had filled with freshwater. He let me drink it. I have never tasted anything sweeter.
Then he went away, back for more I guess.
After a while I realized someone else was there. It took me several minutes to decide it was Hoffman.
“Are we the only ones alive?” I asked, finally.
“Yes,” Hoffman said.
SIX
The next day, our first full day on the island, I was feeling human again, so Pottinger, Hoffman, and I went exploring. Fortunately, my head wasn’t bleeding, and the headache was just that, a headache. We had solid land — okay, sand — under our feet, and we had a chance. Not much of one, but a chance. I was still wearing a pistol, and all of us had knives.
We were also hungry enough to eat a shoe.
We worked our way east along the beach, taking our time. As we walked we discussed the situation. Hoffman was for going out to the plane and trying to salvage a survival kit; Pottinger was against it. There was a line of thunderstorms off to the east and south that seemed to be coming our way. Still hours away, the storms were agitating the swells. Long, tall rollers crashed on the reef, and smaller swells swept through the lagoon.
Watching the swells roll through the shallows, I thought the wreck of the Sea Witch too far away and the water too dangerous. Then we saw a group of shark fins cruising along, and the whole idea of going back to the plane sort of evaporated. We certainly needed the survival kits; we were just going to have to wait for a calmer day.
I had seen the island from the air, though at a low angle, and knew it wasn’t small. Trying to recall, I estimated it was eight or nine miles long and a mile wide at the widest part. Probably volcanic in origin, the center of the thing reached up a couple hundred feet or so in elevation, if my memory was correct. I remembered the little hump that I flew toward when we were down low against the sea.
The creeks running down from that rocky spine contained good water, so we wouldn’t die of thirst. There was food in the sea, if we could figure out a way to get it. There were things to eat — birds and snakes and such — in the jungle, if we could catch them. All in all, I figured we could make out.