Stories in the End

Just this morning I had a talk with my dad about stress, fatigue, fretfulness, and frustration and their unlikely but surest antidote—gratitude. It was a good reminder, and brought to mind Cicero’s line that gratitude “is not only the greatest of virtues, but the mother of all others.” That line should be this blog’s motto, by now.

I mention this because I think paying tribute, honoring a memory, is one of the best ways to express gratitude. It’s that kind of profound gratitude that pervades Stories in the End, a book just released by my friend Jay Eldred.

Stories in the End is a curious book. It’s narrated by Jay’s co-author, Tom Poole, a US Navy veteran and sportsman who died in 2017 at the age of 98. He tells his story in a series of letters to a young relative named “B.” Tom’s letters to B. take the reader through his life from his boyhood to old age.

Tom was a native of Goldsboro, North Carolina, but moved with his parents to New Bern when he was two and lived there—minus his years abroad in the Navy—for 96 years. There he met and married his wife Amber, a story told with great affection and warmth.

The bulk of Stories in the End covers Tom’s years in the Navy, particularly his extensive and harrowing service in World War II. He joined the Navy before the war and thus was at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. He saw action at Casablanca and in the Pacific and was part of the Operation Neptune fleet that supported the D-day landings in Normandy in June 1944. The day after D-day his ship, the destroyer USS Meredith, struck a mine. She sank while being towed back to England for repairs. “That night was the worst night in my life,” he writes. “Worse even than Pearl Harbor, worse than the day Amber died in 2006. We floated in the water—in the dark and in the fuel.”

He survived all of these incidents and spent another twelve years in the Navy—including what must have been a nice time as head of naval recruiting in his hometown—retiring in 1957 and taking a job first at the New Bern water plant and then Marine Corps Air Station Cherry Point as a civilian contractor and hunting, fishing, and turtling. His postwar letters are full of the details of this life—his successful effort to negotiate a pay raise for his employees, the art (and a little of the science) of fishing and trapping, and visits with friends and family.

I mentioned Jay and the curiosity of his project up front because I wanted to draw attention to his accomplishment with Stories in the End. Jay based the book on audio recordings of his conversations with Tom, which Tom permitted on two conditions: that he never know when or how he was being recorded and that Jay not begin writing the book until after he had died. Jay followed both of Tom’s strictures and, consulting boxes of documents and a few written reminiscences left behind by Tom, has produced a book that genuinely feels like conversations with Tom. By the end, I was sad to know he would be leaving, that this would be our last chat.

The narrative voice is perfect—warm, winsome, and by turns funny and profoundly moving. I’ve already quoted his terse summary of the night he spent in the Channel after the sinking of the USS Meredith. Here’s the moment at Pearl Harbor when he emerges from the USS Raleigh’s boiler room:

I’d wanted to make the Navy my career. Of course, Pearl Harbor kind of decided that for me. I think Pearl Harbor was like a bad dream. There was a lot of concussion and a lot of confusion, people running here and people running there, bodies in the water and ships on fire. The Utah was tied next to us and had rolled over. I knew there were men trapped inside.

And later, as the second wave of Japanese attackers come:

The Japanese flew so close I saw one shake his fist at us and could see he was wearing a red tassel. I shook my first back at him and wished I’d had a shotgun. Instead, we were sitting dead in the water. We kept firing though, and were credited with downing six planes. We were the lucky ones, too.

Tom’s memories brim with such details—there are many, many more remarkable moments not only from his war years but from the rest of his life, and I want to leave plenty for y’all to discover.

Tom’s story is simply and extraordinarily told, a credit both to Tom for his storytelling abilities and the incredible life he led, and to Jay for the difficult task of shaping audio recordings into such a solid and compelling narrative. The effort—a sign of the gratitude Jay has brought to this project—has paid off. Stories in the End is a loving, grateful tribute both to a generation—fewer than half a million World War II veterans are still living, the book reminds us—and to an individual man, an exemplar of hard, humble work, duty and loyalty, and faith.