I ask if the war gave him that kind of confidence.

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“I think it’s true,” he says. “I say it made a man out of me.”

Yet, from the vantage of old age, the lesson George Bush most takes from his war years is that the values his parents taught him turned out to be true north: honesty, empathy, kindness, hard work, accomplishment, not blowing on about yourself, giving something back to people and society. These values, he believes, served him well at Andover, at war, and later “when I became president.” Maybe you think it sounds corny or self-serving, maybe you question whether George Bush’s life and accomplishments live up to these values. Question all you want. It is what George Bush believes.

In the 1988 presidential race, a crewman in another Avenger over Chichi Jima that long-ago day told reporters that Bush had been the only man to bail out of his plane and it had not been on fire, implying that Bush could have made a water landing, but had panicked and left his crew mates to die. The claims contradicted other eyewitness accounts, the squadron commander’s action report and a later-discovered Japanese document from Chichi Jima reporting that a second man had bailed out of Bush’s plane and his chute hadn’t opened. The accusation, Bush has said, was painful, but that’s rough-and-tumble politics. Today, no doubt offending his mother’s proper sensibilities, he is less discreet.

“Well, that’s bullshit,” he says.

George Bush still has nightmares occasionally about his plane being shot up, going down, and his crewmen dying. “Every once in a while,” he says with a reflective tone, “I wake up in the middle of some horror. It’s not a pleasant dream. It’s not, ‘There’s the sun­set and everything’s coming nicely.’”

“So it is literally you reexperiencing it?” I ask.

“Yeah, but not a lot. It doesn’t happen a lot. Once in a while.”

“But, sir,” I say, “it has been 60 years.”

With that, George Bush’s reflective moment passes, and he says, “I’m not good at dreams, interpreting them, even remembering them.”

I think of his dead crew mates and the question Bush still asks himself: “Did I do everything I could to save them?” After so many years, for George Bush, could the war still come down to a few moments over a godforsaken volcanic island when he lived and Del Delaney and Ted White died?

“I assume you believe in heaven?” I ask.

“Yes, I do.”

“Have you ever thought that you will be reunited with those two men?”

“I do feel that way.”

“How do you think that conversation will go?”

“I felt a certain sense of guilt,” he says. Yet he believes that if he ever sees Del and Ted again, they already will know that the burning plane could have blown up at any second, that he gave them the order to “hit the silk” and banked the plane to lessen the slipstream pressure for their exit, that they already will know that he did all he could have done to save their lives.

“Would you want to hear them say that?” I ask.

“I would,” he answers.

After 62 years, after so remarkable a life, after all the evidence that he did everything he could, with the wisdom of age and the insight of experience, George Bush still wants to hear Del and Ted say he was not to blame.

“I think they’d know that,” he says, “and that would be reassuring.”

This article was written by Walt Harrington and originally published in the May 2007 issue of World War II Magazine. For more great articles, subscribe to World War II magazine today!

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