By Bob Krauss
Advertiser Columnist

The saga of Nobuaki "Warren" Iwataki began 60 years ago on Maui. The final chapter will appear on CNN and in a book next year, but the Sept. 23 issue of Time magazine gives you a preview.

Iwataki was a Japanese army draftee digging a cave on the island of Chichi Jima on Sept. 2, 1944, when he watched a submarine rescue an American pilot who had been shot down. That pilot later became U.S. President George Bush Sr.

The two met for the first time last June, when Bush returned to Chichi Jima to pay his respects to two fellow crew members who died when the plane went down.

"Thank you for making the visit take on much more meaning," Bush later wrote in a letter to Iwataki, who is leaving for Japan today after a visit with former Maui High classmate David Peters, former aide to U.S. Sen. Dan Inouye.

They reminisced Friday over lunch at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel Surf Room.

Iwataki was a high school senior when his fisherman father was lost at sea late in 1940. An uncle in Japan offered to care for the mother and five sons. Iwataki stayed behind to finish school, then joined his family in Japan.

A teacher advised him, "Whatever you do, don't join the Japanese army. If you do, you can't come back to the U.S."

But eventually, he had no choice. He was drafted. Iwataki found himself on board a tramp steamer with other members of an artillery unit bound for Iwo Jima.

A U.S. submarine sent three torpedoes into the ship and sank it. Iwataki jumped overboard in a life preserver and was picked up by a ship on which survivors sat packed together on deck. They landed on Chichi Jima, and were not sent on because all their equipment had sunk.

Iwataki was put to work digging defensive caves. One day in early September a shout went up: "An American plane is shot down." Iwataki saw the pilot in a rubber boat, U.S. carrier planes hovering overhead to ward off a Japanese patrol, and a U.S. submarine arriving to pick him up.

Iwataki thought to himself, "Surely America will win the war if they care so much for one pilot."

He became close friends with another American pilot captured on Chichi Jima, Warren Vaughn. When Vaughn was brutally executed, Iwataki promised himself he would do what he could to improve relations between Japan and the United States after the war.

For 35 years, he worked in the U.S. Embassy in Tokyo, in the press office. When George Bush became vice president under Ronald Reagan, Iwataki learned he had been shot down off Chichi Jima on Sept. 2, 1944. The pilot had to be the man who would later become president of the United States.

Reach Bob Krauss at 525-0873.