Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience and Redemption (25 page)

It was frightening to imagine what might await them on those islands. The strafing had confirmed what they’d heard about the Japanese. But it was good to feel oriented, to know that they were drifting toward land somewhere out there, on the far side of the earth’s tilt. The bomber had given them something to ground their hope.

Mac didn’t join in on the prognostication. He was slipping away.

S ixteen

Singing in the Clouds

LOUIE SAT AWAKE, LOOKING INTO THE SEA. PHIL WAS ASLEEP. Mac was virtualy catatonic.

Two sharks, about eight feet long, were placidly circling the raft. Each time one slid past, Louie studied its skin. He had banged sharks on the nose many times but had never real y felt the hide, which was said to feel like sandpaper. Curious, he dropped a hand into the water and laid it lightly on a passing shark, feeling its back and dorsal fin as it slid beneath him. It felt rough, just as everyone said. The shark swished on. The second shark passed, and Louie again let his hand fol ow its body. Beautiful, he thought.

Soon after, Louie noticed something odd. Both sharks were gone. Never in four weeks had the sharks left. Louie got up on his knees and leaned out over the water, looking as far down as he could, puzzled. No sharks.

He was kneeling there, perched over the edge of the raft, when one of the sharks that he had touched leapt from the water at terrific speed, mouth wide open, lunging straight at his head. Louie threw both hands in front of his face. The shark col ided with him head-on, trying to get its mouth around his upper body. Louie, his hands on the animal’s snout, shoved as hard as he could, and the shark splashed back into the water. A moment later, the second shark jumped up. Louie grabbed an oar and struck the shark in the nose, and it jerked back and slid away. Then the first shark lunged for him again. Louie was recoiling when he saw an oar swing past, sending the animal backward into the ocean. To Louie’s surprise, it wasn’t Phil who had saved him. It was Mac.

Louie had no time to thank him. One of the sharks jumped up again, fol owed by the other. Louie and Mac sat side by side, clubbing each shark as it lunged at them. Mac was a new man. A moment before, he had seemed almost comatose. Now he was infused with frantic energy.

For several minutes, the sharks took turns bel ying onto the raft with gaping mouths, always launching themselves from the same spot. Final y, they gave up. Louie and Mac col apsed. Phil, who had been startled awake but had been unable to help because there were only two oars, stared at them in groggy confusion.

“What happened?” he said.

Louie looked at Mac with happy amazement and told him how grateful and proud of him he was. Mac, crumpled on the bottom of the raft, smiled back.

He had pushed himself beyond his body’s capacities, but the frightened, childlike expression had left his face. Mac had reclaimed himself.

——

Louie was furious at the sharks. He had thought that they had an understanding: The men would stay out of the sharks’ turf—the water—and the sharks would stay off of theirs—the raft. That the sharks had taken shots at him when he had gone overboard, and when the raft had been mostly submerged after the strafing, had seemed fair enough. But their attempt to poach men from their reinflated raft struck Louie as dirty pool. He stewed al night, scowled hateful y at the sharks al day, and eventual y made a decision. If the sharks were going to try to eat him, he was going to try to eat them.

He knelt by the raft wal and watched the sharks, searching for a beatable opponent. One that looked about five feet long passed. Louie thought he could take it. Louie and Phil made a plan.

They had a little bait on the raft, probably the remains of their last bird. Phil hung it on a fishhook and strung it into the water at one end of the raft. At the other end, Louie knelt, facing the water. Smel ing the bait, the shark swam toward Phil, orienting itself so that its tail was under Louie. Louie leaned as far overboard as he could without losing his balance, plunged both hands into the water, and grabbed the tail. The shark took off. Louie, gripping the tail, flew out of the raft and crashed into the water, sending a large serving of the Pacific up his nose. The shark whipped its tail and flung Louie off. Louie bolted back onto the raft so quickly that he later had no memory of how he had done it.

Soaking and embarrassed, Louie rethought his plan. His first error had been one of appraisal: Sharks were stronger than they looked. His second had been to fail to brace himself properly. His third had been to al ow the shark’s tail to stay in the water, giving the animal something to push against. He settled in to wait for a smal er shark.

In time, a smal er one, perhaps four feet long, arrived. Louie knelt at the raft’s side, tipping his weight backward and keeping his knees far apart to brace himself. Phil dangled a baited hook in the water.

The shark swam for the bait. Louie clapped his hands around the tail and heaved it out of the water. The shark thrashed, but could neither get free nor pul Louie into the water. Louie dragged the animal onto the raft. The shark twisted and snapped, and Phil grabbed a flare cartridge and jammed it into the shark’s mouth. Pinning the shark down, Louie took the pliers and stabbed the screwdriver end of the handle through the animal’s eye. The shark died instantly.

In his Honolulu survival course, Louie had been told that the liver was the only part of a shark that was edible. Getting at it was no mean feat. Even with a knife, sharkskin is about as easy to cut as a coat of mail; with only the edge of a mirror to cut with, the labor was draining. After much sawing, Louie managed to break the skin. The flesh underneath stank of ammonia. Louie cut the liver out, and it was sizable. They ate it eagerly, giving Mac a larger portion, and for the first time since breakfast on May 27, they were al ful . The rest of the shark reeked, so they threw it overboard. Later, using the same technique, they caught a second shark and again ate the liver.

Among the sharks, word seemed to get around; no more smal sharks came near. Large sharks, some as long as twelve feet, lumbered alongside the raft, but Louie thought better of taking them on. The men’s stomachs were soon empty again.

Mac was in a sharp downward spiral. He rarely moved. Al three men had lost a staggering amount of weight, but Mac had shriveled the most. His eyes, sunken in their sockets, stared out lifelessly.

——

It was nightfal somewhere around the thirtieth day. The men went through their usual routine, bailing water into the raft and entwining themselves for warmth. The sky was clear and starry, and the moon shone on the water. The men fel asleep.

Louie woke to a tremendous crash, stinging pain, and the sensation of weightlessness. His eyes snapped open and he realized that he, Mac, and Phil were airborne. They flopped down together onto the raft and twisted about in confusion. Something had struck the bottom of the raft with awesome power.

The garden-variety sharks that made up their entourage weren’t large enough to hit them with such force, and had never behaved in this way.

Looking over the side of the raft, they saw it. Swel ing up from under the water came a leviathan: a vast white mouth, a broad back parting the surface, and a long dorsal fin, ghostly in the moonlight. The animal was some twenty feet long, more than three times the length of the raft. Louie recognized its features from his survival school training. It was a great white shark.

As the castaways watched in terrified silence, the shark swam the length of one side of the raft, then bent around to the other side, exploring it. Pausing on the surface, it swished its tail away, then slapped it into the raft, sending the raft skidding sideways and splashing a wave of water into the men. Louie,

Mac, and Phil came up on their knees in the center of the raft and clung to one another. The shark began to swim around to the other side. Louie whispered, “Don’t make a noise!” Again came the mighty swing, the shower of water, the jolt through the raft and the men.

Around and around the shark went, drenching the raft with each pass. It seemed to be playing with the raft. With every pass, the men cringed and waited to be capsized. Final y, the great back slid under, and the sea smoothed behind it. It did not surface again.

Louie, Phil, and Mac lay down again. The water around them was now cold, and none of them could sleep.

——

The next morning, Mac could no longer sit up. He lay on the floor of the raft, little more than a wrinkled mummy, his gaze fixed far away.

One last albatross landed. Louie caught it, wrenched its head off, and handed it to Phil. Phil turned it upside down over Mac and let the blood flow into his mouth. As Louie and Phil ate the meat, dipping it into the ocean to give it flavor, they fed bits to Mac, but it didn’t revive him.

In subsequent days, Mac became a faint whisper of a man. His water tins ran dry. When Phil opened his tin and took a sip of the little he had left, Mac asked if he could drink from it. For Phil, thirst had been the cruelest trial, and he knew that the water left in his tin, essential to his own survival, couldn’t save Mac. He gently told Mac that he didn’t have enough left to share. Louie was sympathetic to Phil, but he couldn’t bring himself to refuse Mac. He gave him a smal sip of his own water.

That evening, Phil heard a smal voice. It was Mac, asking Louie if he was going to die. Louie looked over at Mac, who was watching him. Louie thought it would be disrespectful to lie to Mac, who might have something that he needed to say or do before life left him. Louie told him that he thought he’d die that night. Mac had no reaction. Phil and Louie lay down, put their arms around Mac, and went to sleep.

Sometime that night, Louie was lifted from sleep by a breathy sound, a deep outrushing of air, slow and final. He knew what it was.

Francis McNamara on May 26, 1943, the day before the crash. Courtesy of Louis Zamperini

——

Sergeant Francis McNamara had begun his last journey with a panicked act, consuming the rafts’ precious food stores, and in doing so, he had placed himself and his raftmates in the deepest jeopardy. But in the last days of his life, in the struggle against the deflating raft and the jumping sharks, he had given al he had left. It wasn’t enough to save him—it had probably hastened his death—but it may have made the difference between life and death for Phil and Louie. Had Mac not survived the crash, Louie and Phil might wel have been dead by that thirty-third day. In his dying days, Mac had redeemed himself.

In the morning, Phil wrapped Mac’s body in something, probably part of the ruined raft. They knelt over the body and said aloud al of the good things they knew of Mac, laughing a little at his penchant for mess hal pie. Louie wanted to give him a religious eulogy but didn’t know how, so he recited disjointed passages that he remembered from movies, ending with a few words about committing the body to the sea. And he prayed for himself and Phil, vowing that if God would save them, he would serve heaven forever.

When he was done, Louie lifted the shrouded body in his arms. It felt as if it weighed no more than forty pounds. Louie bent over the side of the raft and gently slid Mac into the water. Mac sank away. The sharks let him be.

The next night, Louie and Phil completed their thirty-fourth day on the raft. Though they didn’t know it, they had passed what was almost certainly the record for survival adrift in an inflated raft. If anyone had survived longer, they hadn’t lived to tel about it.

——

The raft bobbed westward. Petulant storms came over now and then, raining enough to keep the water supply steady. Because the water ration was now divided by two instead of three, each man had more to drink. Louie made a hook out of his lieutenant’s pin and caught one fish before the pin broke.

Phil and Louie could see the bend of their thighbones under their skin, their knees bulging in the centers of birdlike legs, their bel ies hol ow, their ribs stark. Each man had grown a weedy beard. Their skin glowed yel ow from the leached raft dye, and their bodies were patterned with salt sores. They held their sun-scorched eyes to the horizon, searching for land, but there was none. Their hunger dimmed, an ominous sign. They had reached the last stage of starvation.

One morning, they woke to a strange stil ness. The rise and fal of the raft had ceased, and it sat virtual y motionless. There was no wind. The ocean stretched out in al directions in glossy smoothness, regarding the sky and reflecting its image in crystal ine perfection. Like the ancient mariner, Louie and Phil had found the doldrums, the eerie pause of wind and water that lingers around the equator. They were, as Coleridge wrote, “as idle as a painted ship upon a painted ocean.”

It was an experience of transcendence. Phil watched the sky, whispering that it looked like a pearl. The water looked so solid that it seemed they could walk across it. When a fish broke the surface far away, the sound carried to the men with absolute clarity. They watched as pristine ringlets of water circled outward around the place where the fish had passed, then faded to stil ness.