The Aaron Ward received the Presidential Unit Citation for her actions on May 3, 1945, and for other operations during the Okinawa campaign. Her survival against the sustained kamikaze attack, and the survival of the majority of her crew despite the fires and flooding, were later described in accounts of the battle as remarkable. The effort required to keep her afloat — to fight fires and flooding simultaneously, in a ship that was circling without power or steering while being attacked — represented some of the most intense damage-control work of the Pacific campaign.
Robert Nichols received his Purple Heart for the wounds he sustained that night. He was nineteen years old. He survived by doing the work that firefighters do on ships: moving toward the fires, working in the heat and the noise and the smoke, doing what could be done to preserve the ship and the people on it.
What he carried home from those hours is not something the record can fully account for. What the record shows is that he burned his uniforms after returning from the war, and that two decades later he walked away from everything he had built.
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## New Albany, Indiana: The Place He Left
New Albany, Indiana sits on the southern bank of the Ohio River, across the water from Louisville, Kentucky. It is a small city that was once more significant — a center of glass manufacturing and river commerce in the nineteenth century — and that by the mid-twentieth century had settled into the patterns of a modest Midwest industrial town.