Ships
- USS Kidd (DD-661) Captain, 11 April 1945 – 12 April 1945
He is neither of those men. That is not a command tour. It is the day the list caught him.
The man those dates belong to is the officer whose Navy file number is 098206. Hall of Valor prints the same number as NSN 0-98206 on the Silver Star to Lieutenant Burdick Heinkel Brittin, United States Naval Reserve. The Register of Commissioned and Warrant Officers of 1 January 1950 puts that file number on Burdick Heinkel Brittin, lieutenant commander. The registers of 1 January 1961 and 1 January 1962 put the same full name on the captains' lineal list of the United States Navy, designator 1100, date of present rank 1 July 1960, date of birth 21 January 1917. Wartime he was a reservist. Both labels are his. They are not the same moment.
What follows is the life the registers, the Aylwin action reports, the Silver Star text, the Social Security death index, one State Department persons list, and his own later words will carry. The words are an interview Jon Guttman published in Military History in April 1995, and a shorter recollection, "We Four Ensigns," printed in Paul Stillwell's Air Raid: Pearl Harbor! in 1981. The 1981 book was not in hand. The sentences used from it are the ones the USS Constitution Museum quoted and footnoted. Where a cruise exists only in the interview, it is told as memory, not as a deck log. Where a date is an optical reading of a broken register column, it is labeled as that.
Origins
He told the interviewer he was born in 1917, in Lorraine, Ohio. The Social Security death index, which the memorial compilers say is the source of the dates, gives 21 January 1917 and 7 March 1999, and a last zip code of 22066. That zip is Great Falls, Virginia. The index does not print a town of birth, a wife, or a child. The Navy registers that can be read agree on the year and, in the cleaner books, on the day. On 1 July 1947, in the lieutenant commanders' section, the birth column on Burdick Heinkll — the optical text drops the final vowel — reads 21 January 1917. On 1 January 1961 the captains' line reads the same day: 1 21 17. On 1 January 1962 it reads it again. The Register of 1 January 1950, read by the same month-day-year grouping that yields 15 October 1900 for Frank Haywood Ball in that volume, puts 31 January 1917 in the birth column. Thirty-one is the odd reading. Twenty-one is the day in the death index and in the other three registers. Lorraine is a spelling that does not match the city of Lorain. No birth certificate, city directory, or obituary was found that would settle the town. The year 1917 is the fact all of them share. The place is what he said, spelled as the interviewer spelled it.
Nothing read here names a father, a mother, a brother, or a sister. It is not explained. It may be a family name. That is a guess, and it is not used.
The schooling is his account. A bachelor of arts in political science from Union College, in New York, in 1940. In his last year there he was a summer policeman at a resort on the New Jersey coast. That is where he said he met the woman he married, Trudi. He did not give her surname. No directory, citation, or death index supplies it. He said that even then, and later in law school, the courses had some use for ocean affairs, and that he had started writing and had published several articles. The articles were not found. No child is named in any source read for this essay. The absence is a blank, not a finding that he died without one.
Formation
When he graduated he did not know what he wanted. A Navy representative was in the area. He went with a friend. One program would commission him an ensign and, as he remembered the pitch, let him see the world in a year. He signed for ninety days of V-7, the reserve midshipman course the regulars called a ninety-day blunder. Combatant duty, if he could get it, was submarines or destroyers. He wanted the destroyer.
The registers date the paperwork, not the want. The Register of 1 January 1961, captains, carries after his birth date a digit group 1 01 41 that also sits on the 1 January 1962 line and that matches the pay-entry reading of the 1947 columns: 1 January 1941. The Register of 1 January 1950, in the column that for Ball is the date of first commission, reads 6 June 1941. That is the day a secondary list prints for his ensign's commission, citing the Naval Reserve register of 31 July 1944. That 1944 volume was opened. Its index is mirrored optical trash, and his name was not recovered from it. Six June 1941 is used here as the 1950 register's commission date, not as a line read in the 1944 book. A pay-entry day in January and a commission in June fit the shape of a winter class and a summer commission. They do not, by themselves, prove the ninety days. The ninety days are what he called the program.
He did not get the destroyer first. Torpedo school near Puget Sound, then orders to the submarine tender Vulcan. The other ten in his class, he said, went to combat ships. His stay on the tender was short. A district commandant, he remembered, decided a new ensign did not belong on a repair ship and had the orders changed to the destroyer Aylwin (DD-355), at Pearl Harbor. He reported as assistant torpedo officer. He dated that reporting, in the later interview, to November 1941. The action reports do not give his reporting day. They do put an ensign of his name on board on the morning of 7 December.
On 1 July 1947 the Navy still carried him, inside the lieutenant commanders' section, at permanent rank ensign. The date group repeated down that part of the page is 3 October 1945, which is also the date of rank the 1950 register gives him as lieutenant commander. The wartime rank he wore at sea was temporary. The permanent ensign's stripe stayed on the books after the war had ended. That is the formation the paper record keeps: a reservist commissioned in 1941, still an ensign in the permanent column six years later, a lieutenant commander by the temporary date of 3 October 1945.
The morning the ship left without her captain
Aylwin was moored in a nest in Pearl Harbor, head about north, with Monaghan, Dale, and Farragut. The commanding officer's report of 12 December 1941, and the longer report of 4 January 1942, are Lieutenant Commander R. H. Rodgers's. The attack began at 0755, with Utah torpedoed. Aylwin opened fire at 0758. Fires were lit under two boilers. Orders to get underway came at 0828. She slipped the chain and the stern wire and was moving at about 0858, still shooting. A bomb had exploded about seventy-five yards off the starboard bow. Rodgers was not on board for any of it.
Four reserve ensigns were the officers on the ship. The 12 December report names them in the work: Caplan in command, Anderson responsible for much of the handling, Reorden and Sutorowski on the directors, and "Ensign BRITTON" excellent as acting junior officer of the deck. The January report spells the fire-control officer W. K. Reordan and does not mention Brittin. The December spelling is the misspelling. The Constitution Museum, using his own later account, identifies the fourth ensign as Burdick H. Brittin, and the file number ties that name to the man in the registers. Rodgers wrote that Caplan had been at sea eight months and Anderson seven. He did not print how long Brittin had been aboard. Brittin's memory was: since November.
He told it twice, and the two tellings do not match on every point. In the 1995 interview he had been ashore the night of the 6th at a place he called Lawee Chow's, dinner and dancing, spending down to about a dollar, then back to the ship. The others stayed in Waikiki. He was asleep. Shells woke him. He thought it was a foolish hour for antiaircraft practice, looked out a porthole, and saw Utah rolling over. In the 1981 recollection, as the museum quotes it, the channel out was "a mass of bomb explosions," the officers aboard were sure they would not get through, and once outside "the marrow in our bones turned to water" at the sight of the harbor burning. The action report is cooler. It credits the machine guns and the main battery with a share in destroying about three planes, and it names the men who saw crashes. It does not put Brittin on a gun.
Rodgers got back to the harbor about 0900, took a motor launch with the other officers who had been ashore, and met Aylwin about 1000 off the entrance buoys. The Commander of Destroyer Squadron One refused to let her slow. The captain and the others went aboard Chew and came back to their own ship the next day. That is the report. In 1981 Brittin remembered the decision differently. The museum quotes him: the chance for an ensign to refuse his captain's request to come aboard, and then to sail off with the ship, was rare, and they did it. He added that the reason was not the rendezvous with Enterprise but fear of submarines off Pearl. The report says the squadron commander would not allow the ship to slow. His later memory says the ensigns would not stop. Both documents exist. They are not the same story. Caplan, he said in 1995, kept the course he had been given and did not stop. They did not see the captain again until late the next day.
Rodgers's praise in writing went to two of the four. The December report calls Caplan's thirty-six hours in command, on eight months at sea, an outstanding achievement. The January report says thirty-three hours, and recommends special commendation for Caplan and for Anderson. Brittin is "excellent as acting JOOD" on 12 December and absent from the January recommendations. Nothing in his later interview complains about that. He said Caplan deserved the citation Rodgers wrote. The paper record is simply uneven. Two ensigns were put up for commendation. The acting junior officer of the deck was not.
What he remembered of the next thirty-six hours is a high-speed scouting line to the southwest, thirty knots, no sleep, no real food, general quarters the whole time, and a night meeting with Farragut steaming the other way. They were about to shoot when Farragut identified herself and asked who they were and where they were going. The answer was the assigned scout. Farragut's captain told them to turn around and follow, or they might still be steaming south. The message that would have turned them, he said, was classified, and Caplan, as communications officer, was the only one on the bridge who could work the decoding machines. At the harbor buoy they picked up Commodore Ralph S. Riggs, the squadron commander, and Rodgers. Brittin's line for that moment, years later, was that it had never been so sweet to welcome the captain aboard. The reports do not use that sentence. They do say the captain was back the next day.
A near miss had nicked a propeller against the buoy. He had been in his bunk after thirty-three hours, by his count, when the captain sent him off in a whaleboat to Phelps, the squadron flagship, with a .45, because someone thought the Japanese might be landing. The landing was false. He went back and slept. Food, oil, a propeller, torpedo exploders, and they were out again. He thought they met Enterprise coming back from Wake, and that the first operation after that was a run down toward Tarawa in which Aylwin did not bombard and the carrier's planes did. That sequence is his memory. It was not checked against Aylwin's deck log.
The long memory of one destroyer
From Coral Sea to the day he left her, the cruise is the interview. He was not her captain. He was a junior officer who stayed. No log, no muster, and no Navy Directory page was found that tracks him month by month on Aylwin. The battles he described are the battles the ship is known to have been in. That is not the same as a record that he was on her for each of them. He said he was. The essay keeps his "I."
He remembered not seeing more than Enterprise until the Coral Sea in May 1942, then Lexington, which he called a proud ship, and then watching her sunk. Aylwin was in the screen, about 3,000 yards off, firing at planes that had already run on the carrier or were coming in low. He fired a .45 at aircraft going over, and said he was not the only one, and that it took imagination to think it mattered. That night a plane came over with a single exhaust. Their own planes, he remembered, had two. They reported it as Japanese. It was. Survivors came aboard. Minneapolis and New Orleans took many, and so did Anderson, Hammann, and Morris. Phelps finished Lexington with torpedoes. They were headed for Brisbane, he said, and about a hundred miles out the orders changed for Tongatabu. Then the race back with Yorktown trailing oil, a day and a half in Pearl, and north to Midway.
At Midway he placed Aylwin in the screen of Enterprise and Hornet, not Yorktown's, the circle opened out to about 4,000 yards, the shooting all antiaircraft, the five-inch guns the ones that counted, the 40 mm and 20 mm not, in his judgment, doing much. They picked up fliers from both battles. Afterward, a solitary escort job to a tanker or a supply ship and the Aleutians. Dutch Harbor was cold and they did not have the clothes. He saw a wrecked Zero on the coast and later heard that an intact Zero had been recovered. He did not know if it was the one he had seen. Three or four months, operating from Adak. One ship of the division off Kiska each day, and at night a five-inch gun fired now and then to keep the garrison awake, which kept them awake too. Ice on the ship in the morning, heavy enough to matter for stability. Williwaws that decided what a destroyer could do.
One night in a brutal storm Stan Caplan had the deck. Brittin was to relieve him and asked where they were. Caplan said, truthfully, that he did not know. Brittin would not take the deck. You do not relieve the officer of the deck until you know the position. He felt like an ass. Caplan agreed. The skipper, Lieutenant Commander R. E. Malpass, backed him. The story is small, and it is the only place in the interview where he describes a choice that made another officer stay on watch in weather. He does not say he was proud of it. He says he was by the book, and that he felt like an ass, and that the captain supported the book.
They had sonar contacts and did not drop on the good one, because a rough sea would not give a contact he trusted. Attu, in May 1943, he remembered as a real fight: screening transports, bombarding, fog on the day they went in, clearer weather a couple of days later. Kiska he called a shared failure. Aylwin had bombarded the island, and still the evacuation got past them on the night of 25 July, two light cruisers and six destroyers, unseen. He placed his ship as one of four destroyers in the van on the night the heavy ships fired at a radar pip that was not a fleet. Mississippi reported a contact and then that she was ready to fire. San Francisco, Portland, and New Mexico had pips. For about half an hour the big guns fired. The destroyers, with the older SC radar rather than SG, saw nothing but the wake ahead and were told to make a torpedo attack, turned in, and had the attack canceled. When the landing came on 15 August, he said, the island was empty except for three dogs.
Back in the Central Pacific the harbor at Pearl was full of a navy he did not recognize, and he felt lonesome in it. Kwajalein and Eniwetok at the end of January 1944. At one small island off Eniwetok the job was to knock the trees down with 40 mm and five-inch. Eniwetok easy, Kwajalein harder. Raids on Truk in February and April, so many of their own planes up that, he said, the Japanese did not get through. Yap, the Palaus, Hollandia. Hollandia was MacArthur's, and the troops walked ashore without opposition, and the pages of the order that the landing units talked about were the pages on snakes. In the Philippine Sea he was with the carriers. He remembered fifteen of them, and four big circles on a radar scope. On the second day the planes went out to the limit and came back in the dark. He thought Mitscher's decision to light the fleet was courageous. Aylwin picked up a couple of the crews. He did not name them.
They bombarded at Saipan, Tinian, and Guam. At Saipan, at night, destroyers were told off to fire starshells, and heavies were usually there. He heard later that a battleship captain complained the starshells were silhouetting his ship, and that the fleet commander answered that if the captain thought himself endangered he might leave. Brittin thought that was the right answer. The complaint and the reply are hearsay inside an interview. They are not an order this essay can cite. While Saipan was still being fought they escorted underwater demolition teams to Guam. He could see forest and not the beach, and the swimmers went in in little yellow boats, and nothing shot at them, and what he remembered thinking was that the destroyer was a sitting duck.
Leyte, 20 October 1944, he put the ship with the Third Fleet north of the gulf, worried about a Japanese fleet coming down the coast, and not much help to the landing. On 18 December the Third Fleet was in the typhoon. He had left two days earlier, under orders. A Dutch liner, Klipfontein, built for the South African trade, was loading men for Pearl at an atoll. The food, he said, was a change from a warship. He had married Trudi in 1943. The honeymoon was December 1944, Vancouver and Victoria. He does not say he asked to miss the storm. He says the orders moved him, and that when he came back the orders were to Kidd, at San Francisco, as executive officer. By then he was a lieutenant, and he had been executive officer of Aylwin when he left her. The registers do not print the day he became a lieutenant. The Silver Star citation, for 11 April 1945, calls him lieutenant. That is the rank the award and the list agree on for the last week of his war.
Eleven April
Kidd was a Fletcher, already through the Pacific before he joined her. Her later life as a museum ship is not his story. He said they worked fast at Pearl and went out for Okinawa at the end of March 1945. The carriers struck Japan. The destroyer's job, as he understood it, was to warn the force of planes coming south. Once, he said, the fleet turned and nobody told them, and they were at twenty-five knots until Kyushu was about fifteen miles off, and then they turned south on their own. That is his story of a staff that forgot a picket. It is not in the citation.
J. M. Caiella, writing in Naval History in August 2020 from the ship's action report, puts Destroyer Squadron 48's eight destroyers about thirty miles ahead of the Okinawa force by 16 March, as radar pickets. Kidd had screened battleships, stood by the burning Franklin on the night of 19 March, fought suicide planes, picked up aviators, and sunk mines. On the afternoon of 11 April, Caiella writes, Destroyer Division 96 was under numerous attacks, and the only hit was on Kidd. Shortly after 1345 Black had a raid on her radar. One plane went for Black and was shot down. Another dove on Bullard and was shot down by Bullard and Kidd. About ten minutes later a plane came out of the clouds at Kidd's port bow, strafed, and was fired on by the bow 20 mm crews. Off the starboard quarter two aircraft looked like a dogfight. The action report, in Caiella's reading, calls that a ruse. One plane dropped to the water and ran at Black, 1,500 yards off Kidd's starboard beam. At 1409 it popped over Black and came at Kidd. Neither ship could use its heaviest guns without hitting the other. The 20 mm and 40 mm hit the plane and did not stop it. It struck amidships at the main deck, about five feet above the waterline, went through the forward fireroom, and destroyed the number-one boiler. A delayed-action bomb kept going and exploded just outside the hull. The blast wrecked the radar room, the combat information center, and the port side up to the bridge. Thirty-eight men died. Fifty-five were wounded. The ship, Caiella writes, kept about twenty-two knots through most of what followed. Smoke drew more planes. Kidd and Hale fought them off.
Brittin was in the combat information center, which is where he said an executive officer belongs. Black was 1,500 to 2,000 yards on the beam, his range a little looser than the report's 1,500. The plane flew over Black, and Black could not fire for fear of hitting Kidd. About half the people in the CIC were killed, he thought, and the other half wounded. The lights went. Climbing to the bridge, his left leg would not work properly. Shrapnel was in the left leg, the left side of the stomach, and the back of the neck. The bridge was wrecked, with dead and wounded on it. The plane had come in at water level from starboard. The bomb went through and exploded just outside. He used the same totals Caiella uses: thirty-eight dead, fifty-five wounded. He relieved Commander Harry G. Moore, who could not get up, wounded in the legs and the back. Brittin said he was not as badly hurt as Moore was. The citation does not use Moore's name. It says he assumed command "from the badly wounded officer."
The Silver Star, as Hall of Valor prints it, is the government's sentence for the hour. Lieutenant Burdick Heinkel Brittin, Naval Reserve, executive officer of a United States destroyer, Western Pacific, 11 April 1945. Painfully wounded, he caused the ship to put out her fires and get power back after severe damage, and, having taken command, fought off another air attack with all the guns she still had. The original citation card was not opened. The text is the compilation's. In 1995 he quoted the opening clause and put the ship's name into it: executive officer of the USS Kidd. The published citation says "a United States Destroyer." He also said the medal was handed to him in 1946, at Guantanamo, when he was a lieutenant commander. The citation's rank is the rank of the day, lieutenant, not the rank of the ceremony.
What he did after he took her, in his own words, was find out that the damage-control people were good. They put out the fire around number-one fireroom and plugged holes. His main concern was the wounded. The doctor was badly wounded. Two or three corpsmen were still working, out of six or seven. He could still signal, and he asked the task force for a doctor. After dark a plane came in and they drove it off. He did not know if they had shot it down. In the morning they buried the dead. A couple of hours later he fainted from loss of blood. He woke on a hospital ship. They had also, he said, recovered major pieces of the Japanese pilot and buried him with military honors. The museum history at Baton Rouge, which is a ship's memorial rather than a deck log, agrees on the executive officer taking her south, on Moore and the doctor among the seriously wounded, and on a doctor coming across from Hale. Caiella's article, drawn from the action report, does not name Brittin at all. The citation and the man do.
He said he fainted the morning after the hit. Secondary commanding-officer lists give him 11 to 12 April and then another lieutenant as acting captain. Those lists were not treated as a cruise. The Navy's own sentence is that he assumed command and fought another attack. It does not print the hour he was carried off. The interview does: the next morning, after the burial, from loss of blood.
What it cost, and who was still there
He was operated on aboard the hospital ship and then taken to a hospital of tents on Guam, which he remembered as good. He said it was six months before he was operational again. On 2 September 1945 he was in a Navy hospital in Norfolk, walking with a cane. Caplan, between commands, came to see him. They sat through the surrender broadcast from Tokyo Bay. Trudi was with them. He remembered what she said: they were home, free, and safe, and they wanted to be out there. He does not say he answered her. The want is in her sentence, as he kept it.
He also said he received the Purple Heart, and thirteen battle stars on his campaign ribbons. Hall of Valor, for this man, shows the Silver Star and no other award. The Purple Heart and the stars are his count. They were not confirmed in an awards list opened for this essay. Thirteen stars would be a long war on the ribbons of a man who was a passenger in other people's commands until the last afternoon. The only afternoon the government wrote up is 11 April.
The dead of that afternoon are not a backdrop. Thirty-eight is the number he used, the number the ship's museum uses, and the number in the DANFS summary and in Caiella. He did not recite their names in the interview. One name the museum history adds, and that this essay does not take from a log, is the chief engineer, Lieutenant (junior grade) George P. Grieshaber, killed in the forward fireroom. The doctor the museum names is Broox C. Garrett, Jr. Those names are the memorial's, not Brittin's. What Brittin said was that the doctor was badly wounded and that there were not enough corpsmen, and that his own worry, once the fires were being fought, was the wounded. Then his body quit and other people carried the ship.
He had already practiced, in a smaller way, the habit of not taking a watch he could not justify. On Kidd the habit inverted. He took a command he had not been ordered into, because the man who had it could not stand, and he kept it until he fainted. The citation's adjectives are the Navy's. The sequence is his and the report's: wounded, up to the bridge, Moore down, fires out, power back, another plane, burial, collapse.
After
While he was still mending he took a semester at the Wharton School. He thought he was ready to be a civilian. The Navy asked if he wanted command of an APD, a destroyer escort cut down to a high-speed transport. At Guantanamo, emergency orders sent him to Burdo (APD-133), in China. He asked for a couple of days with his wife before he went. He said he had her for about five months. No log of Burdo was read. The five months, the China station, and the two days he bargained for are the interview.
He had already asked for law school. The orders changed to the Judge Advocate General's corps. In September 1946 he entered George Washington University, international law, comparative law, and admiralty. He finished in 1949 and was ordered to the U.S. mission in Ankara. In 1951, orders to command the destroyer Fitch, with the Sixth Fleet. He left Trudi in Italy and joined the ship at Crete. After sixteen months, orders to Fraser, out of Charleston, for exercises with NATO and with Latin American navies. Those ships and those intervals are his. A photograph index gives commanding-officer dates for Fitch and for Thomas E. Fraser that roughly fit the years he named, and another date range, August 1962 to June 1963, for him in command of the survey ship that had been Renate. That index is not a register and not a log. The dates are not used. The conflict with the next chapter of his own story is noted below, and no cruise is built on it.
The registers pick him up on shore in rank, not in billets. On 1 January 1950 he is a lieutenant commander, date of rank 3 October 1945, file 098206. On 1 January 1956 the body of the register still prints lieutenant commander, and the index of the same book prints commander, same file, designator 1100. On 1 January 1957 he is a commander, with a digit group 9 01 51 beside the designator. The same 9 01 51 sits on the badly aligned 1 January 1960 line, designator 1100, in the company of a lineal number in the 09126 series. On 1 January 1961 and 1 January 1962 he is in the captains' list, present rank dated 1 July 1960. If 1 September 1951 is the day he made commander, the 1956 body is the book that did not catch up, or that was still printing a permanent rank below the one he wore. The columns are optical. The direction is not. Ensign in 1941, lieutenant on the day of the citation, lieutenant commander by 3 October 1945 in the temporary column, commander in the books of the late 1950s, captain from 1 July 1960.
After what he called three years of sea duty he went back to the Judge Advocate General and asked for the international law of the sea. An admiral, he said, made an office for it and made him the director, ahead of the 1958 negotiations. He was adviser to the American delegate, a judge he thought did not know the subject, and he was arguing for the three-mile limit, with the British the only others on that side among the twelve governments at the International Law Commission session he described. He recommended sending people out to ask governments what they actually thought. He spent two months in Latin America. Then, in New York at the United Nations, orders came to the cruiser Northampton, operations officer on the Second Fleet staff and on the ship, a year in the Atlantic and the Mediterranean.
The book is not only his memory. International Law for Seagoing Officers, by Commander Burdick H. Brittin, U.S. Navy, with Liselotte B. Watson and Horace B. Robertson, was published by the Naval Institute in 1956, 256 pages. The American Journal of International Law noticed it in 1957. A fourth edition, Naval Institute Press, 1981, was noticed in the law reviews. He told Guttman that five editions appeared over the years. Two of them were found in print citations. The other three were not chased to title pages. The rank on the 1956 title page is commander, which fits the registers of that decade and not the captaincy of 1960.
From the policy and strategy division of the Chief of Naval Operations' staff he became, he said, Arleigh Burke's aide on the Joint Chiefs for a year and a half, until Burke retired. Then the National War College, class of 1962, and command of Destroyer Squadron 12, the courtesy rank of commodore that a squadron commander wears. He had meant to retire in 1963. People at the State Department wanted the ocean-law background and asked him over. He went because it looked like shore duty and time with his wife. He was out of the country, he said, about thirteen days a month, more than when he had been at sea. The Foreign Relations of the United States persons list for 1969–1976 identifies Burdick H. Brittin as Deputy Special Assistant for Fisheries and Wildlife. It identifies Donald L. McKernan, not Brittin, as Coordinator of Ocean Affairs after December 1970. Brittin told the interviewer that he retired in 1975 as Coordinator of Ocean Affairs, and that afterward he stayed active in a Council on Ocean Affairs. The deputy title is the government's list. The coordinator title and the 1975 retirement and the council are his. A July 1964 Navy retirement printed on a secondary officers' page was not found in any register read here, and it is not used. The registers stop, for this search, with him a captain on the active lineal list of 1 January 1962.
He died on 7 March 1999. The death index is the document. No obituary with survivors was found. No grave photograph was opened. The zip code is the last address the index kept. He was eighty-two if the birth day is 21 January 1917. The woman he called Trudi is not in the index. Neither is a child. What the paper trail keeps, at the end, is a file number, a captain's date of rank, a book on the law of the sea, a deputy's title at State, and the Silver Star for an afternoon when he was a lieutenant and could still climb a ladder with shrapnel in his leg.