Ernie Coleman survived the worst open-sea defeat in US Navy
history. But he paid a price and buried the horrific memories for
decades. In the manner of Mitch Albom's highly successful Tuesdays
with Morrie, 22 Minutes is a searing account of a survivor coming
to terms with an incident he had suppressed for sixty years and the
writer who painstakingly put together the clues about what had
happened. Author Jeff Spevak was confronted with a dilemma: How do
you tell the story of a man who can't bring himself to talk about
the most epic moment of his life? A clever fellow who'd scrapped to
survive in a fashion that seems quaint today, Coleman tested
himself as a teenager by swimming across lakes, building homes from
foraged lumber, running a Navy carpentry shop as though he were a
member of the scamming crew of McHale's Navy. He was a self-taught
sailor who'd become a legend on Lake Ontario. At age 96, Ernie was
still sailing. Ernie Coleman talked of his life frankly - his
honest remembrances of brawls and regrets. But he refused to talk
about the one thing that had haunted him for decades: the sinking
of his ship the Vincennes and his nightmares of men screaming in
the burning sea, of incinerated corpses still manning the
anti-aircraft guns. Through interviews with Coleman's family and
others who knew Coleman, and arduous research Spevak finally put
together what had occurred the night of the horrendous loss of his
ship, the USS Vincennes, a cruiser sunk during the World War II
Battle of Savo Island off Guadalcanal. Four big ships and more than
1,000 sailors were lost that night in a 22-minute battle, the worst
open-sea defeat in the history of the United States Navy. Gripping,
moving, highly personal, 22 Minutes is Coleman's story of the
incident he had buried for more than 60 years. Did Ernie pursue
sailing with such intensity, at a time when most men his age are
sitting in front of the television, waiting for the end, so that he
did not have to close his eyes and remember that night on the
Vincennes? "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 it's so real." 22 Minutes has enormous potential
to match some of the best-selling first-hand World War II memoirs
published in recent years.
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