Jeff Spevak - 22 Minutes: The USS Vincennes and the Tragedy of Savo Island: A Lifetime Survival Story

22 Minutes

Jeff Spevak

LYONS PRESS

Guilford, Connecticut

An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.

Distributed by NATIONAL BOOK NETWORK

Copyright 2019 by Jeff Spevak

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Name: Spevak, Jeff, author.

Title: 22 minutes : the USS Vincennes and the tragedy of Savo Island : a lifetime survival story / Jeff Spevak.

Other titles: Twenty two minutes

Description: Lanham, MD : Lyons Press, An Imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc., [2019] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018052115 (print) | LCCN 2018054544 (ebook) | ISBN 9781493038282 (electronic) | ISBN 9781493038275 (cloth : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Coleman, Ernie. | Savo Island, Battle of, Solomon Islands, 1942. | Vincennes (Cruiser : CA-44) | World War, 19391945Personal narratives, American.

Classification: LCC D774.S318 (ebook) | LCC D774.S318 S64 2019 (print) | DDC 940.54/26593092 [B]dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018052115

TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Printed in the United States of America

Sailing is my life.

It is ninety-one steps to the top of El Castillo, amid the ancient ruins of Chichen Itza. Add up the steps on each of the four sides, plus the platform at the top, and it comes to 365. One step for each day in a year of anyones life. As both the steps and the years add up, the climb gets more difficult. I got to the top andfoof!I collapsed, the old guy says. Fellow tourists rushed up to him. Are you all right?

Leave me alone, he told them. I just need to lie here for a few minutes.

He did not believe that he might die there, at the top of a Mayan pyramid. Never considered that it could happenalthough perhaps such a climb in the Mexican sun was not the wisest expenditure of time for a man who was then eighty-two years old. A man out of his elementwater. Ernie Coleman sailed, an amateur racer who filled his home with decades of trophies. His boat wasnt always the fastest on Lake Ontario, but Ernie knew the tricks that could ease his craft over the finish line first, especially on days when the wind was elusive.

When I first met Ernie, he was sitting at a patio table beneath an enormous tulip tree. I sat in the chair on the other side of the table and studied the guy, my subject for the next few months, while he studied me, his biographer. Ernie was ninety-three and looked a little battered, but he moved about easily enough thanks to some rewiring and a few replacement parts hed acquired over the last decade. His mind seemed crisp as I prodded him for the details of his life. A man who had been caught up amid lifes largest moments, a child of the Great Depression, a graduate of the Greatest Generation. A carpenter, Ernie built things, and he rebuilt his life repeatedly, struggling through divorce and the deaths of two wives. With the marriages came one adopted child and seven stepkids. He adapted to change. He was a survivor.

A large part of the appeal of a guy like Ernie is that so many of us know a man or woman like hima grandfather, a distant auntthough we dont know their stories. Some of their experiences serve as modest life lessons. Others are remarkable adventures. In a metaphor to which any sailor can relate, each episode of Ernies life can be thought of as a thread. When gathered up and wound together, the threads create a strong ropea rope he unconsciously relied on in times of crisis. The more threads, the stronger the rope, the stronger the character.

The navy had taken Ernie to see the world, first during World War II, then the Korean War. He didnt always like what hed seen. Maui? It was so perfect, it was monotonous. And he refused to think of the Solomon Islands. Ernie was a short man, even before losing a few inches to age, but broad shouldered, with the large, knotted hands of his builders trade. When I first brought up the Battle of Savo Island, he waved his hands in front of him for a moment, as though pushing away the memory. It was not a story he shared, even though he lived in the shadow of that experience.

I know why those kids come back from Afghanistan and shoot themselves, he said sadly one morning, sitting on the shady patio at his home.

You lay awake at night, reacting, reacting, reacting. Because its so real.

His was a lifetime spent with one purpose in mind: to sail away, to exchange the nightmares for beautiful evenings sailing off the coast of Lake Ontario.

In his eighth decade, at an age when most men had settled down in front of the television to wait for the end, Ernie was still sailing. But the waters were increasingly uncharted. Hed climbed those ninety-one steps that day in 1998 because he was trying to impress the woman he was courtingMarilyn, twenty-five years his junior.

This guys really elderly, she remembers thinking when she first met him. Shed placed an ad in the personals section of the newspaper, seeking a man who liked sailing and travel. She checked out twenty-seven respondents. Nothing. He was the twenty-eighth.

Marilyn was a travel agent who was showing him the world, watching to see if Ernie could keep up. He could. He went to Rome with her several times, examining ancient aqueducts with his builders eye. He sailed the Caribbean on a five-masted clipper ship. Four hundred feet long, Marilyn says. Four hundred and thirty-nine feet, Ernie corrects. The captain had even let him take the wheel for a while, as tourists took pictures of Ernie. A real curiosity, they must have thought, like one of those water-skiing squirrels.

Marilyn took him snow skiing for the first time when he was eighty. After six lessons, I was skiing with her, Ernie insists. In fact, I was holding back.

No, you werent, Marilyn chides him.

Youre a pleasure skier, Ernie says. He was a competitor. He chased Marilyn, and he caught her. Now they were married, living in the Madison Terrace house Ernie rebuilt just a couple of hundred yards from Lake Ontario Beach. A house with a small window facing north. He looked out that window every morning to see what was happening on Lake Ontario. The view changed every day.

But first, he had to get off that Mexican pyramid. His fellow tourists were worried that the old man was dying at Chichen Itza, even as he marveled at how, while standing at one pyramid in the ruined complex, you holler and get seven echoes. And at the sacrificial pool, where they threw the maidens. And the precision of the architecture, functioning as a giant stone calendar, the sheer size of the project allowing him to dismiss the fact that they were off a little.