As a boy, Navy ensign helped clear WWII skipper

PENSACOLA - During his senior year in 2003, Hunter Scott was chosen Most Likely To Succeed by his Pensacola High School classmates.

Well, considering young Scott had already been on David Letterman's television program twice, testified before Congress and been honored with Hunter Scott Day in Hawaii and Florida, it wasn't like his classmates went out on a limb.

Scott gained fame as a youngster, attracting national media attention with a middle school history project that he hoped would clear the name of a World War II skipper unfairly tarnished by the Navy and history. He succeeded.

Today, Scott, now 22, is back in Pensacola, launching a new career inspired by the work with the Navy veterans he befriended as a child. He's Navy Ensign Hunter Scott and is undergoing flight training at Pensacola Naval Air Station.

His military commitment is at least 11 years, and then, Scott said, he might consider politics. But now, his focus is the Navy.

"I never considered joining the Navy until I met the men of the USS Indianapolis," Scott said. "When I started hearing their sea stories, that's when I started thinking about it."

It was those stories of adventure, along with sad tales of death and grief and blame, that brought Scott to the national stage.

While a Ransom Middle School student, the youngster watched the movie Jaws with his father, educator Alan Scott, and heard actor Robert Shaw's colorful character, Quint, recount the story of the USS Indianapolis.

Two weeks before the end of World War II, shortly after the cruiser delivered components for the first atomic bomb to the island of Tinian, the ship was sunk by a Japanese torpedo.

An estimated 300 of the 1,196 men on board died in the attack. The nearly 900 survivors floated in the waters of the Philippine Sea without lifeboats. It was four days before rescue ships arrived, and by then, only 316 men were alive.

The others died from lack of food and fresh water, exposure and, according to the Discovery Channel, the most shark attacks on humans in history.

The ship's commander, Capt. Charles McVay III, was wounded but survived. Court-martialed in 1945, he was convicted of "hazarding his ship by failing to zigzag." He retired from the Navy as a rear admiral in 1949 and committed suicide in 1968.

The young Scott decided to research the tragedy of the Indianapolis for a sixth-grade history fair project. He scoured through reference material, collected artifacts and eventually interviewed more than 100 survivors, many of whom believed McVay was wrongly blamed for the ship's sinking.

Scott lobbied hard for McVay's exoneration, eventually testifying before Congress and appearing on every major network's news programs, and even Letterman's show.

McVay was exonerated by Congress in 2000.

[Last modified January 21, 2008, 00:48:41]