Cover Stories

The sea's surface rippled in dawn light. A page of newspaper floated by me on the wind. Quiet except for the bugling of sea gulls, the small barrier island where I lived seemed so peaceful. But I knew it was an illusion. From my perch atop the beachfront lookout tower, I scanned east to west, land's end to land's end. Then I scanned from the horizon line to shore. There was no sign of Nazi U-boats.

This wasn't completely unexpected, since it was 1961 and World War II had been over for sixteen years. But that was no excuse for slacking off. Could we be sure Hitler was dead? And even if he was, were we really safe? Maybe the Russians would mount a sneak attack, storming the late autumn sands of Long Beach, New York, to get at the secret Nike missile base located near my high school. A dinghy full of spies would drift in with the tide, barely visible in the slate gray waves and peppery light. Here on the front lines, I was the only man who could thwart them.

I was fourteen and had just read Stephen W. Meader's novel, The Sea Snake, for the third time. It was the story of teenaged Barney Cannon and his hometown heroics during the war. Barney lived on a small barrier island five hundred miles due south of mine, where he watched the Carolina coastline for Nazis. His lookout post was a small shelter dug into the sand rather than a concrete column, and he had a radio to communicate with naval personnel while all I had was a wrist watch through which I pretended to transmit messages. But like me, Barney had no binoculars and had to rely on eyesight, vigilance, and tenacity in order to protect his community.

During the course of a few weeks, Barney participated in a deep sea rescue, helped blow up a U-boat, identified Nazi saboteurs living anonymously near the Carolina coast, got kidnapped and taken aboard a U-boat, traveled to a camouflaged German facility in the Bahamas, was forced to accompany the German crew on a mission from which he escaped just in time to thwart their plan to bomb Atlantic City, New Jersey, from offshore, and ended up meeting a grateful president at the nation's capital.

I could do that. All right, first I might need to hone my skills a bit. Barney was observant, resourceful, brave, and daring, capable of figuring out the mystery of a U-boat's oil-free engine or remembering the layout of a Nazi fortification in the Caribbean. He routinely saved people's lives, a true and modest aw-shucks hero. He could also, apparently, swim forever. Barney was unflappable. I knew I was easily flapped. I was impulsive, naive, foolhardy, and wild. As a defensive back on the high school freshman football team, I'd repeatedly flung my 120-pound body at our opponent's 180-pound fullback until he knocked me unconscious and into convulsions. Barney Cannon did not get creamed by the big guys and he did not have convulsions.

He knew things, was savvy. I was baffled by much of what I saw. Also obsessed by guilt over my father's death in a swimming pool accident a few weeks earlier. I could swim, maybe not as many miles as Barney with my clothes and shoes on, but I could swim and had not saved my father's life. The fact that I had not been within two hundred miles of where he died did not relieve my sense of responsibility. I believed that if I were competent in the way Barney Cannon was, I might have found a way to be in that swimming pool at the moment my father needed me.

The important difference between us, the quality that made us virtual opposites, was that Barney paid full attention to the outside world and none, as far as I could tell, to his inner world. Paying attention, getting outside my own head, and gaining competence: that...