Doug Stanton

Writing In Harm's Way clarified for me who I am. There are moments when a writer, for whatever reasons, can feel of service in something larger than himself, something he or she hopes is enduring. This, for me, is one of those times. I say this because the response to the book has been both surprising and the most gratifying moment of my life as a writer.

Yesterday, I got a letter from Mr. James D. Price, a survivor of the sinking of the WWII cruiser USS Indianapolis; it's the story of this disaster and the crew's survival that is at the heart of In Harm's Way. "I want to thank you so very much for the book," Mr. Price told me. "It is the best book I have ever read. It will be handed down to our great grand-kids when I am gone. Hope to see you at the reunion. I hope and pray I am able to come. Thank you again, James D. Price, Survivor." Mr. Price, along with some 900 other sailors, lived through what can only be described as a nightmare, and what is considered to be our country's worst disaster at sea in naval history.

More than anything -- and I mean anything -- I am more than honored by this thought: that James D. Price will "hand this story down," that it will enter his family's history, just as Mr. Price's story of heroism and that of his fellow survivors has surely entered into my own family's. By meeting these men and writing their story, I've been given a gift far greater than anything I ever imagined: the realization that a writer can be of service, that storytelling as an art can be both incredibly public and private, and that we tell stories to stay alive…and to learn, among other things, how we ourselves might act honorably.

When I was writing, I never really looked forward to the book's publication. I was wholly focused on writing it -- I see now that I was living it, so much so that when I wrote the "recue chapters," I stood up and cheered at my desk. The story of the sinking of the USS Indianapolis had taken over my life. At one point, I swam out into Lake Michigan -- my nearby "ocean" -- to tread water in the midnight dark, curious to understand the terror the boys felt as they drifted through their nights and days in the Pacific. My conclusion: Even after 30 minutes, the darkness was not simply the absence of light but the absence of anything good, filled with the stabbing premonition of immense danger and pain.

The symmetry of this tragedy is hard to believe, but all true. I tell the story from the survivors' point of view, at eye-level with the pitching sea. I wanted the honesty and immediacy of books like E.B. Sledge's With the Old Breed, or Stephen Ambrose's D-Day, Rick Atkinson's The Long, Gray Line, James Bradley's Flags of Our Fathers, coupled with a novel's narrative grip, such as is found in Jim Harrison's Legends of the Fall. After delivering the components of the atomic bomb Little Boy to Tinian Island (the same bomb Paul Tibbets would soon drop over Hiroshima from the Enola Gay), the Indianapolis was torpedoed. Then, through a series of bureaucratic SNAFUs, and by the ever-magnifying hand of human error, this important ship was totally lost and forgotten by naval command. As life went on onshore, several hundred miles beyond the naval command's windows, boys were fighting off attacking sharks, drinking saltwater and whirling into comas, and swimming through the terror of their hallucinations brought on by exhaustion and fear.

If you've seen the movie "Jaws," you know that Captain Quint, the crazed shark-hunting captain, is a fictional survivor of the USS Indianapolis; his soliloquy about his survival -- inspired by the real-life story of the disaster -- is mesmerizing. And before writing In Harm's Way, what I knew about the crew's ordeal was basically gleaned from this movie. In other words, the story of the USS Indianapolis has taken on mythic proportions in American culture, and I wanted to know the truth behind the story: What had happened out there in the Pacific for five days, when about one boy every 10 minutes was dying?

The sinking isn't mentioned in many high school history books, or taught at the Naval Academy. The Indianapolis was the last major ship to be sunk during WWII; but, unlike Pearl Harbor, which began the war for the U.S., we know far less about the tragedy of the Indianapolis. Of the nearly 1,200 boys on board that night of July 30, 1945, only 317 survived the ordeal. That any survived at all is a miracle -- and I'm not being hyperbolic. It's a miracle. Marine private Giles McCoy, one of the principal people in the book, was so dehydrated and sunburned that he couldn't fit his enormously swollen tongue back into his mouth. His eventual rescue would feel more like a resurrection. The question that began to obsess me was this: How did these men survive?

Many of the men I met told me -- and the many letters I'm getting after the book's publication echo this -- that this story of their survival was an untold one. If we know anything about the Indy, the "Jaws" reference aside, we might know that it did deliver the atomic bomb components, or that the subsequent trial of Captain Charles McVay made him the only captain in U.S. history to be court-martialed for the losing of his ship as an act of war (this is all the more striking when you learn that more than 400 ships were sunk during WWII). Still haunted by the tragedy, and still receiving hate mail from the families of boys who'd lost loved ones in the disaster, Captain McVay committed suicide in 1968, in Litchfield, Conn. after dutifully taking his black Lab, Chance, for a daily walk. He shot himself with his own Navy-issue revolver. He was 70 years old.

That these ordinary men who survived something so extraordinary are still walking around today -- you see them in windbreakers at the mall, in the doctor's office -- astounded me at first. The feelings they harbor over this experience, which utterly scorched them and set a new path for their lives, are still very close to the surface. Yet because the war ended so quickly after their rescue (the war's end having been accelerated by the very atomic weapon the Indy had delivered into the 20th century) no one was interested in their story when they came home, and they weren't much interested in telling it.

In In Harm's Way, in addition to Giles McCoy, I follow closely Captain McVay and Dr. Lewis Haynes, the ship's medical officer, as they sail from California, are torpedoed, fight to survive, and are rescued. Afterward, McVay rarely spoke of the sinking. Dr. Haynes was troubled throughout his life by nightmares of the event, which set him to dog-paddling in his sleep even at the age of 88, just weeks before his death last March. Upon returning home, Giles McCoy spoke of the nightmare just once around his mother and father's kitchen table in St. Louis, Mo. He spoke for an hour, his sisters listening in awe as he recounted the horrific tale. And then he fell silent and tried to lock the memory away.

Still, as a family man in his 30s, McCoy would find himself sometimes slipping into a life vest -- much like the one he wore in the water as he floated through the days -- and while in its musty embrace, his present workaday travails never failed to snap into focus. Life, in other words, suddenly didn't seem so hard, a sentiment still echoed today by all the survivors I talked to. In 1960, McCoy organized the first reunion of the survivors, and thus began the group's attempt to exonerate their captain of the disaster.

I first met the men in July 1999, at one of these reunions held in Indianapolis, the namesake city of their ship. I was there to write a magazine story for Men's Journal, where I'm a contributing editor. But then something happened. I remember being up in a hotel room visiting with survivor Mike Kuryla and his wife, Lorrain, and I asked Mike how he'd abandoned ship as the vessel itself groaned and belched explosions, the night filled with screams. He then proceeded to tell me how the ship -- weighing as much as a 10-story office building -- slowly began to fall atop him while he hung for life from a dangling line. As he gripped it, he was being lowered closer and closer to the sea as the ship continued its roll. As he spoke, Mike started crying -- one minute we had been talking about the day's events, and in the next I was back in 1945, on a hot tropical night, the sea burning. I thought, I can't believe this. I couldn't believe that I was on the verge of tears, too.

Mike's tears weren't the tears of a man still finding his way back from a nightmare; there was something healthy and pure about them, something unabashed. He was both amazed to be a survivor of this disaster, and he still mourned the hundreds of boys who didn't make it home. I thought -- and this was a realization I would have many times as I interviewed different men: Here is real strength, humility, and wisdom. I felt that within these acts of heroism and endurance that there were hints about how I might live my own life. What I also learned was this: that nearly every boy at some point said, "I am going to live." He often said it out loud.

This is a startling existential moment -- the war is over for these men; they are fighting a battle now with their own minds to stay focused and optimistic in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. They had been afloat now for three days, attacked from above by the blistering sun, and from below by sharks -- the attacks themselves were random, heightening the terror. After a while, it seemed to the boys that everything around them was trying to kill them. Everything.

And yet what they remembered were those people back on land who cared for them, who'd told them at some point "never to give up and quit," or who'd admonished them to "always finish what they'd started." I learned that it was these very simple things that kept many, many boys alive. And I began to wonder if I'd ever said anything to my own son, to my daughter, to my wife, to any of my friends that would be such a balm -- a lifeline -- if they ever found themselves in a similar situation. I didn't know, but I hoped I had. And I resolved that if I hadn't, I would try to do things differently from now on. From these boys -- now our fathers and grandfather, uncles, cousins and brothers -- comes this realization, this reminder, that I am part of this world, lock, stock, and barrel. Their defining moment becomes our own.

There is a happy postscript to this story. In October, 2000, Congress passed a resolution declaring that Captain Charles Butler McVay should not be considered culpable for the sinking of the USS Indianapolis, and for the loss of so many lives.

And then, on April 27, 2001 -- due in part, I was told, to recent publicity about the disaster, including new attention garnered by the publication of In Harm's Way -- the Navy, which for 56 years summarily refused to review McVay's court-martial, announced that it was awarding a Commendation Unit to the crew for their service. Most astonishingly of all, however, the Navy announced that it would retrieve McVay's record for possible amendment. The survivors have never sought any kind of medal for themselves, but this last news has their full attention. They now await the Navy's next move concerning Captain McVay's record.

A former contributing editor at Esquire and Outside, Doug Stanton is now a contributing editor at Men's Journal. He received an MFA from the Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa. He lives in northern Michigan.