Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience and Redemption (26 page)

outward around the place where the fish had passed, then faded to stil ness.

For a while they spoke, sharing their wonder. Then they fel into reverent silence. Their suffering was suspended. They weren’t hungry or thirsty. They were unaware of the approach of death.

As he watched this beautiful, stil world, Louie played with a thought that had come to him before. He had thought it as he had watched hunting seabirds, marveling at their ability to adjust their dives to compensate for the refraction of light in water. He had thought it as he had considered the pleasing geometry of the sharks, their gradation of color, their slide through the sea. He even recal ed the thought coming to him in his youth, when he had lain on the roof of the cabin in the Cahuil a Indian Reservation, looking up from Zane Grey to watch night settling over the earth. Such beauty, he thought, was too perfect to have come about by mere chance. That day in the center of the Pacific was, to him, a gift crafted deliberately, compassionately, for him and Phil.

Joyful and grateful in the midst of slow dying, the two men bathed in that day until sunset brought it, and their time in the doldrums, to an end.

——

Given how badly the men’s bodies were faring, it would seem likely that their minds, too, would begin to fail. But more than five weeks into their ordeal, both Louie and Phil were enjoying remarkable precision of mind, and were convinced that they were growing sharper every day. They continued quizzing each other, chasing each other’s stories down to the smal est detail, teaching each other melodies and lyrics, and cooking imaginary meals.

Louie found that the raft offered an unlikely intel ectual refuge. He had never recognized how noisy the civilized world was. Here, drifting in almost total silence, with no scents other than the singed odor of the raft, no flavors on his tongue, nothing moving but the slow procession of shark fins, every vista empty save water and sky, his time unvaried and unbroken, his mind was freed of an encumbrance that civilization had imposed on it. In his head, he could roam anywhere, and he found that his mind was quick and clear, his imagination unfettered and supple. He could stay with a thought for hours, turning it about.

He had always enjoyed excel ent recal , but on the raft, his memory became infinitely more nimble, reaching back further, offering detail that had once escaped him. One day, trying to pinpoint his earliest memory, he saw a two-story building and, inside, a stairway broken into two parts of six steps each, with a landing in between. He was there in the image, a tiny child toddling along the stairs. As he crawled down the first set of steps and moved toward the edge of the landing, a tal yel ow dog stepped in front of him to stop him from tumbling off. It was his parents’ dog, Askim, whom they had had in Olean, when Louie was very little. Louie had never remembered him before.*

——

On the fortieth day, Louie was lying beside Phil under the canopy when he abruptly sat up. He could hear singing. He kept listening; it sounded like a choir.

He nudged Phil and asked him if he heard anything. Phil said no. Louie slid the canopy off and squinted into the daylight. The ocean was a featureless flatness. He looked up.

Above him, floating in a bright cloud, he saw human figures, silhouetted against the sky. He counted twenty-one of them. They were singing the sweetest song he had ever heard.

Louie stared up, astonished, listening to the singing. What he was seeing and hearing was impossible, and yet he felt absolutely lucid. This was, he felt certain, no hal ucination, no vision. He sat under the singers, listening to their voices, memorizing the melody, until they faded away.

Phil had heard and seen nothing. Whatever this had been, Louie concluded, it belonged to him alone.

——

On the men drifted. Several days passed with no food and no rain. The raft was a gelatinous mess, its patches barely holding on, some spots bubbling outward, on the verge of popping. It wouldn’t bear the men’s weight much longer.

In the sky, Phil noticed something different. There were more birds. Then they began to hear planes. Sometimes they’d see a tiny speck in the sky, sometimes two or more together, making a distant buzz. They were always much too far away to be signaled, and both men knew that as far west as they had probably drifted, these planes were surely Japanese. As the days passed, more and more specks appeared, every day arriving earlier.

Louie had come to love sunrise and the warmth it brought, and each morning he’d lie with his eyes on the horizon, awaiting it. On the morning of July 12, the forty-sixth day, the day that Phil had picked for their arrival at land, no sunrise came. There was only a gradual, gloomy il umination of a brooding sky.

Phil and Louie looked up apprehensively. The wind caught them sharply. The sea began to arch its back under the raft, sending the men up to dizzying heights. Louie looked out over the churning water and thought how lovely it was. Phil was fond of rol er-coastering over the big swel s that came with storms, thril ed as he skidded down one and turned his face up to see the summit of the next, but this was ominous.

To the west, something appeared, so far away that it could be glimpsed only from the tops of the swel s. It was a low, gray-green wiggle on the horizon.

Phil and Louie would later disagree on who saw it first, but the moment the sea tossed them up, the horizon rol ed westward, and their eyes grasped it, they knew what it was.

It was an island.

* Askim was notorious for his kleptomania; the Zamperinis lived above a grocery, and the dog made regular shoplifting runs downstairs, snatching food and fleeing. His name was a clever joke: When people asked what the dog’s name was, they were invariably confused by the reply, which sounded like “Ask him.”

S eventeen

Typhoon

ALL DAY, UNDER A DARK, GYRATING SKY, LOUIE AND PHIL rode the swels, straining their eyes westward and feeling a weary thril as the bump on the horizon peeked into view. Slowly, as the current carried them toward it, the island became more distinct. They could see a bright white line where waves dashed against something, maybe a beach, maybe a reef. In the afternoon, one island became two, and then a dozen or so, lined up like railcars. The castaways had expected that if they ever saw land, they’d be rapturous. Instead, they discussed it matter-of-factly. They were too weak for anything more, and there were pressing worries. Overhead, a huge storm was gathering.

In training, Louie and Phil had memorized the geography of the central Pacific. They knew that the islands ahead had to be part of the Gilberts or Marshal s, enemy territory. Between them, the two island groups had dozens of atol s and islands, so there was a good likelihood that there were places unoccupied by the Japanese. Louie and Phil decided to hang offshore until they found an island that looked uninhabited, or inhabited only by natives. They began rowing over the wind-chapped sea, turning paral el to the islands so they could wait until night to slip ashore.

The sky broke al at once. A sudden, slashing rain came down, and the islands vanished. The ocean began heaving and thrashing. The wind slapped the raft in one direction, then another, sending it spinning up swel s, perhaps forty feet, then careening down into troughs as deep as canyons. Phil and Louie had drifted into what was almost certainly a typhoon.

Wave after wave slammed into the raft, tipping it sideways and peeling it upward, on the verge of overturning. To try to stop it from flipping, Louie and Phil bailed in water as bal ast, positioned themselves on opposite sides to balance their weight, and lay on their backs to keep the center of gravity low.

Knowing that if they were thrown loose, they’d never get back in, Louie reeled in the raft cord, looped it around the cushion sewn into the center of the raft, threaded it through a grommet, then wound it around his waist and Phil’s waist, pul ing it taut. They pushed their feet under the cushion, leaned back, and held on.

Night fel , and the storm pounded. The raft raced up and down hundreds of mountains of water. At times, in the darkness, they felt the strange lightness of flying as the raft was swept into the air off the tops of the waves. Louie felt more intensely afraid than he had felt as Green Hornet was fal ing. Across from him, Phil lay in grim silence. Both men thought of the nearness of the land they could no longer see. They feared that any second, they’d be flung into a reef.

Sometime in the night, the storm sagged and softened, then moved on.* The swel s remained, but their tops became smooth. Louie and Phil freed themselves from the raft cord and awaited daylight.

In the dark, they could smel soil, greenness, rain washing over living things. It was the smel of land. It flirted with them al night, growing stronger. As dawn neared, they could hear the hiss of water scouring a reef. Exhausted, they decided to take turns napping, with one man on the lookout for land.

Somewhere along the way, they both fel asleep.

——

They woke in a new universe. They had drifted into the embrace of two smal islands. On one island, they saw huts, trees heavy with fruit, but no people.

They had heard of the Japanese enslaving native populations and moving them en masse off their home islands, and they thought that perhaps this had been the fate of this island’s inhabitants. They pul ed their shoes over their sore-pocked feet and began rowing for shore. From overhead came the whine of engines. They looked up and saw Zeros looping through combat maneuvers, far too high for their pilots to notice the raft below. They rowed on.

Louie had predicted that they’d find land on the forty-seventh day. Phil had chosen the day before. Because they had spotted land on the day Phil had chosen and were about to reach it on the day Louie had chosen, they decided that they had both been right.

They could see more islands now. Louie spotted a tiny island to their left and pointed it out to Phil, describing it as having one tree on it. Then a strange thing happened. The lone tree became two trees. After a moment’s confusion, the men suddenly understood. It wasn’t an island, and those weren’t trees. It was a boat. It had been perpendicular to them, leaving only one mast visible, and then it had turned, bringing the rearward mast into view.

Louie and Phil ducked. They rowed as fast as they could, trying to get to shore before the sailors spotted them. They were too late. The boat made a sharp turn and sped toward them. The weakened men couldn’t row fast enough to escape. They gave up and stopped.

The boat drew alongside the raft, and Louie and Phil looked up. Above them was a machine gun, mounted on the boat’s bow. Along the deck stood a line of men, al Japanese. Each one held a weapon, pointed at the castaways.

One of the Japanese opened his shirt and pointed to his chest. He seemed to want the Americans to do the same. As Louie opened his shirt, he braced himself, expecting to be shot, but no shot came. The man had only wanted to see if they were armed.

One of the sailors threw a rope at the raft, and Louie caught it. Louie and Phil tried to climb onto the boat, but their legs were too weak. The sailors brought out a rope ladder, tied the castaways to it, and dragged them up, then pul ed the raft aboard. On the deck, Louie and Phil attempted to rise, but their legs buckled. The Japanese were impatient for the men to move across the deck, so the Americans crawled on al fours. When they reached the mast, they were picked up and lashed to it. Their hands were bound behind their backs.

One of the sailors began speaking to them in Japanese. He seemed to be asking questions. Louie and Phil offered responses, trying to guess what the man wanted to know. A soldier waved a bayonet past Louie’s face, trying to hack off his beard. Another man cracked a pistol across Phil’s jaw, then moved to do the same to Louie. Louie tipped his head forward in hopes that the sailor would aim for the front of his face; when the sailor swung, Louie jerked his head back. The man missed, but Louie smacked his head against the mast.

The boat’s captain approached and chastised the crewmen. The mood changed, and Louie’s and Phil’s hands were untied. Someone gave the castaways cigarettes, but the ends kept lighting their beards on fire. Someone else brought them cups of water and one biscuit each. Louie took a bite of the biscuit and held it in his mouth, caressing it, feeling the flavor. He ate slowly, savoring each crumb. It was his first food in eight days.

——

A second boat pul ed alongside the first. Louie and Phil were helped onto it, and it began moving. As it sailed, a crewman came to the castaways and fed them more biscuits and some coconut. Then a young sailor approached, Japanese-English dictionary in hand, and asked questions. Phil and Louie gave brief accounts of their journey.

In time, the boat drew up to a large island. A sailor approached with two blindfolds and tied them around Louie’s and Phil’s heads. Men got on either side of them, grabbed their arms, and half-dragged, half-carried them off the boat. After a few minutes, Louie felt himself being laid down on something soft. His blindfold was taken off.

He was inside an infirmary, lying on a soft mattress on an iron bed. Phil was on a bed beside his. There was a smal window nearby, and through it, he could see Japanese soldiers thrusting bayonets into dummies. An officer spoke to the Japanese surrounding the castaways, then spoke in English, apparently repeating his statement so Louie and Phil would understand him.

“These are American fliers,” he said. “Treat them gently.”

A doctor came in, smiled warmly, and examined Phil and Louie, speaking English. He smoothed ointment on their salt sores and burned lips, palpated their abdomens, took their temperatures and pulses, and pronounced them healthy. Louie and Phil were helped to their feet and led to a scale. They took turns standing on it, each with a man ready to catch him if his legs failed.

Phil had weighed about 150 pounds when he had stepped aboard Green Hornet. Louie’s war diary, begun shortly after he arrived in Hawaii, noted that he weighed 155 pounds. He believed that weight training had added another 5 pounds by the time of the crash. Now Phil weighed about 80 pounds.