“Welcome aboard, sir,” a sailor said as Bush was hauled on deck while the sub’s photographic officer recorded the scene on his 8mm camera.

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Aboard Finback that night, Bush slept fitfully and had the first of many nightmares about his Chichi Jima mission and the fate of his crew mates, John “Del” Delaney, who had been his radio operator the whole time aboard San Jacinto, and William “Ted” White, the son of a Bush family acquaintance and the ship’s ordinance officer, who had repeatedly asked Bush to take him on a bombing run for the experience. That morning, White had won approval from Bush and his squadron leader to replace Bush’s regular gunner, Leo Nadeau, on a single mission. Although Bush didn’t know it just after the crash, one crewman on his plane, according to the squadron commander’s action report, also had bailed out, but his parachute didn’t open and he fell to his death. The bodies of Delaney and White were never found.

Remarkably, the letter Bush wrote to his parents the next day from Finback was saved by his mother: “Yesterday was a day which will long stand in my memory….I will have to skip the details of the attack as they would not pass the censorship, but the fact remains that we got hit….There was no sign of Del or Ted anywhere around. I looked as I floated down and afterwards kept my eye open from the raft, but to no avail….I’m afraid I was pretty much a sissy about it cause I sat in my raft and sobbed for awhile….I feel so terribly responsible for their fate, Oh so much right now. Perhaps as the days go by it will all change and I will be able to look upon it in a different light….Last night I rolled and tossed. I kept reliving the whole experience. My heart aches for the families of those two boys with me.”

George lived aboard Finback for a month before being dropped off at Midway. Instead of taking his chance to rotate home, he hitched military rides back to San Jacinto and put in another eight bombing runs, including one he coolly completed even after a steady barrage of anti-aircraft fire tore a gaping hole in the wing of his Avenger. He rotated back to the states after 58 combat missions and 1,228 combat hours over not only Chichi Jima but also Saipan, Rota, Marcus Island, Guam, Manila Bay and Wake Island.

While awaiting orders to return to the Pacific to join in the invasion of Japan, he married Barbara and trained for return to combat. Then the Japanese surrendered, and his war was done. Nearly half the men in his squadron didn’t come home.

“My life was spared,” Bush once said, ever incredulous.

In 1966, when Bush was running for Congress in Texas, Finback’s photographic officer saw Bush on TV and recognized him as having been the skinny kid they’d rescued out of the sea. He sent Bush the film. Eventually the dramatic war story and his grainy, boyish visage wobbling on the deck of Finback would brag itself across the airwaves in campaign after campaign, undoubtedly to the chagrin of his dignified mother.

“My problem,” he says with a wry smile, “is that the longer you’re away from World War II, the more convinced you become that you single-handedly won the war in the Pacific, and the danger, being around veterans, the memories are so selective and so heroic that you’ve got to be very careful talking to guys like me.”

He has said before that he never understood why he was given a medal because he was shot out of the sky. “When I got down on the submarine, I was just a sick, scared, young kid,” he says. The heroes were the guys shot down and killed or the guys who hit the beaches and were slaughtered, the guys who didn’t come back to families and jobs—and to political campaigns in which they could boast about what they did in the war.

The cosmic question George Bush eventually began asking himself had nothing to do with heroism or glory or braggadocio.

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