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Van Kirk, a Pennsylvania boy, joined the Army Air Corps but washed out as a pilot. Six feet higher and he’d have been buried at sea. Some 300 sailors were either killed or wounded when a shell hit his ship. The shelling was so fierce “the dark of night became the light of day.” “We were the first ones who picked up the Japanese coming down the slot,” Starnes said. victory near Guadalcanal in October 1942. He served on the USS Boise, a light cruiser severely damaged in a U.S. Starnes, an Atlanta native and Emory University student, enlisted in 1940 thinking that “seeing the world was great sport.” He can’t remember how he came to be a navigator, other than being good at math. “Our being there was the consequences of the choices we made earlier,” he said. But it was not destiny that placed them in their respective seismic events, Starnes said. Maybe fate put the veterans together in their twilight. And both raised large families (four children for Van Kirk, seven for Starnes). Both had successful careers after the war and retired in 1986 (real estate and banking for Starnes a 35-year career as a DuPont executive for Van Kirk). Both saw lots of combat and then came stateside to teach navigation. The two have many things in common other than expertise with a sextant. “We figured it’s a real coincidence: two navigators of historical events to have ended up in the same place, same time,” Starnes said. Starnes asked around and “I found out he lives down the street.” The two didn’t meet until 2005 (Van Kirk gets popular every five years at the Hiroshima anniversary) when Starnes read an article in Time that mentioned that Van Kirk lived Stone Mountain. “He was very responsible for the success of the bomb drop.” “I like to say Dutch ended the war, and I made it official - got them to sign on the dotted line,” Starnes said. He worried the peg-legged foreign minister, Mamoru Shigemitsu, might tumble down the stairs. 2, 1945, Starnes, navigator of USS Missouri and the mighty battleship’s officer of the deck, dressed in a crisp pair of khakis and greeted Japanese military officials as they boarded to sign the papers of surrender.