One Bush's War and Remembrance

By Hugh Sidey

As his son tries to sell the world on a new war against Iraq, former President George H.W. Bush this summer made a little-noticed trip to relive his combat memories of an earlier, less controversial conflict. A few weeks ago, Bush paid a visit to the watery grave of his Avenger bomber, downed by ground fire after a run on a radio tower on the South Pacific island of Chichi-jima in 1944. The President's trip to Iwo Jima's tiny sister island was stimulated by author James Bradley (Flags of Our Fathers), who accompanied him. "I was trying to relive what went before," said Bush. "My crewmen, Ted White and John Delaney, were killed, and I lived. To this day I have felt a responsibility for their deaths, even though I am confident I did what I could to see that they got out of our burning plane. Why did God spare my life and their lives were taken? I am not sure there is an answer. But I did feel closer to those lost friends."

This one was almost a stealth mission, witnessed by only a few friends, Japanese officials and U.S. Ambassador to Japan Howard Baker, along with the island's residents and a CNN crew, which recorded the event for broadcast later this fall. Bush flew by private jet to Iwo Jima, first walking the black sand beach where Marines landed in 1945 and helping raise a flag on Mount Suribachi, where Marines raised the U.S. flag in the famous war picture. "I choked back a tear," he said. Then Bush boarded a Japanese helicopter and retraced the route of his mission. "The waves and wind looked hauntingly familiar," he said. "We saw the place where my target had been, then turned out to sea, simulating the path that my disabled plane followed before I parachuted and it crashed." He took a 30-minute launch ride out to the point of impact, as calculated from Japanese historical records, and dropped two small wreaths of flowers into the water. "I watched the current take them away," he said. "It felt right." Then he climbed into the dinghy for a few minutes of solitude, though Secret Service agents in wet suits patrolled below the water.

On Chichi-jima Bush met a former Japanese soldier who claimed he actually saw the rescue of Bush when the submarine Finback surfaced and plucked him off his tiny dinghy. The old man related that one of his friends had remarked as they watched the swift rescue, "Surely America will win the war if they care so much for the life of one pilot." After the ceremonies, witnessed by cheering Japanese crowds waving U.S. flags, Bush said he felt some closure: "The visit was not only a very personal, emotional visit of remembrance, but it was about forgetting the brutal past."