On June 5, 1944, while Americans were girding themselves for news of what would soon be called D-Day, the little town of Jonesboro, Arkansas, got a headline of its own that must’ve felt like resurrection. There, walking through the front door like a man who’d merely gone to the corner store, came Adolph “Renny” Creighton; presumed dead, but very much alive.

Two years earlier, Renny had been serving aboard the USS Sculpin (SS-191), a battle-hardened submarine with eight war patrols and dozens of enemy ships sent to the deep. But in November 1943, during her ninth patrol near the Caroline Islands, the Sculpin went silent. After a desperate engagement involving depth charges and a surface battle against a Japanese destroyer, she was lost along with the brave Captain John Cromwell, who famously chose to go down with the boat rather than risk enemy capture and compromise Allied operations. Some crewmen survived the ordeal only to suffer as POWs—some dying en route to Japan when their transport was sunk by a sister submarine, the USS Sailfish. A twist of fate, darkly poetic.