Children Remembering Wartime Deaths – Reincarnation?

By James Donahue

There has been controversy over the case of four-year-old Andrew Lucas, a Virginia Beach boy who remembers being a marine and dying in a burning building in an earlier life.

Andrew’s parents say their son remembers details that strongly suggest he may be the reincarnated soul of U. S. Marine Sgt. Val Lewis, who died in a bombing explosion on October 23, 1983, in Beirut, Lebanon. But critics maintain that there is no such thing as reincarnation and that the boy’s story doesn’t follow the actual chain of events leading to the death of Sgt. Lewis. Also the link to Sgt. Lewis has not been clearly revealed.

Andrew’s mother, Michele Lewis, says the boy sometimes starts crying hysterically and asking her why she let him die in the fire. She said his story contains details that a child his age should not know.

The Lewis story received special attention after the family appeared on local television station WTKR to tell the boy’s story.

Andrew is not the first American youth to grow up with vivid memories of a wartime death in an earlier life.

James Leininger of Lafayette, La., had nightmares as a young child. He saw himself dying in a burning fighter plane as it fell into the sea. The details of his story and careful research by his parents linked James to an earlier life as Lt. James McCready Huston, a World War II fighter pilot who was shot down off Iwo Jima in 1945.

The Leininger family said James grew up with a fascination for World War II aircraft, he described the plane he flew as a Corsair that took off and landed from a carrier named Natoma. He said his aircraft was shot down by another plane with a red sun painted on its side and he remembered another flier in the squadron named Jack Larson.

The boy’s father used this information to research war data from the Pacific Theater. He found that there was a small escort carrier called the Natoma Bay which participated in the Battle of Iwo Jima. Twenty-one members of the ship’s crew died in the battle including pilot James Huston.

Huston died when his plane was hit in the engine by Japanese fire and it went down in flames. Another pilot on the ship, Jack Larson, witnessed the crash.

That these two boys were born with vivid memories of dying in wartime conflicts is apparently unique, but perhaps it should not be surprising. If they chose to return in new bodies, perhaps the way they perished in their earlier lives was so embedded in their subconscious that the event resurfaced in their minds while they were children.

With all of the men and women who have died violently in either peace or war over the years, it seems that many more children like Andrew Lucas and James Leininger have experienced similar memories but they never made the news.

Their stories certainly make a strong case for reincarnation.