Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience and Redemption (52 page)

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In May, Cynthia and her parents made a deal. Cynthia could visit Louie, on the condition that they not marry until the fal , in a ceremony at the Applewhite mansion. Cynthia threw her clothes into a suitcase and went to the airport. As she left, her brother Ric felt a pang of worry. He was afraid that his young sister, dashing off to be with a man she hardly knew, might be making an enormous mistake.

At Burbank Airport on May 17, a plane stopped on the tarmac, the stairway unfolded, and Louie bounded up the steps to embrace Cynthia, then squired her home to meet his family. The Zamperinis fel for her, just as Louie had.

Driving away after the visit, Louie sensed that Cynthia was drawing backward. Maybe during the visit there had been a word or a look that hinted at al she didn’t know, or maybe impulsive decisions made in the fog of lovesickness were becoming real. Whatever it was, Louie thought he was losing her. He lost his temper and abruptly said that maybe they should cal off the engagement. Cynthia panicked, and they argued, overwrought. When they calmed down, they made a decision.

On Saturday, May 25, the same day that the papers quoted Louie as saying he’d marry Cynthia at the summer’s end, Louie and Cynthia drove to the Church of Our Savior, where the Zamperinis were waiting. He wore his dress uniform; she wore a simple off-white suit. One of Louie’s col ege buddies walked Cynthia down the aisle, and Louie and Cynthia said their vows. There had been no time to bake a wedding cake, so Pete’s birthday cake, made by Sylvia the day before, did double duty.

Suspecting that Louie’s friends would pul wedding night pranks, the newlyweds stole off to an obscure hotel, and Cynthia cal ed home. Her announcement prompted an explosion. Cynthia hung on the phone al evening, crying, while her mother, who’d gone to great effort to plan a fal wedding, bawled her out. Louie sat by, listening as his bride was excoriated for marrying him, trying in vain to get her to hang up. Eventual y he picked up a bottle of champagne, popped it open, drank it dry, and went to sleep by himself.

* Tojo was found in his home that day, sitting in a chair, blood gushing from a self-inflicted bul et wound in his chest. Whispering “Banzai!” and saying he’d rather die than face trial, Tojo was given a pint of American blood plasma, then taken to a hospital. When he recovered, he was housed at Omori, sleeping in Bob Martindale’s bunk. He complained about lice and bedbugs. He was tried, sentenced to death, and, in 1948, hanged. He and 1,068 other convicted war criminals were later honored in Tokyo’s Yasukuni Shrine, memorializing Japanese who died in the service of the emperor.

Thirty-five

Coming Undone

FROM ACROSS THE ROOM, THEY LOOKED LIKE THREE ordinary men. It was an evening in the latter half of 1946, and Louie sat at a table in the Florentine Gardens, a dinner club in Hol ywood, with Cynthia nestled near him. Phil and Cecy had come from Indiana for a visit, and Fred Garrett had motored across town to join them for dinner. Phil and Louie were grinning at each other. The last time they’d been together was March of ’44, when Phil was being shipped out of Ofuna and neither man knew if he’d live to see the other again.

The men smiled and talked. Fred, who was soon to become an air traffic control er, had a new prosthetic leg. In a festive mood, he bumped out to the dance floor to show the room that he could stil cut a rug. Phil and Cecy were about to move to New Mexico, where Phil would open a plastics business.

Louie and Cynthia were glowing from their honeymoon, spent sharing a sleeping bag in Louie’s beloved mountains, where Cynthia, for al her finishing schools, had proven game for getting dirty. Louie was running again, ful of big plans, as garrulous and breezy as he’d been before the war. As the men leaned together for photographs, al that they had been through seemed forgotten.

Sometime amid the laughing and conversation, a waiter set a plate in front of Fred. On it, beside the entrée, was a serving of white rice. That was al it took. Fred was suddenly raving, furious, hysterical, berating the waiter and shouting with such force that his face turned purple. Louie tried to calm him, but Fred was beyond consolation. He had come completely undone.

The waiter hurried the rice away and Fred pul ed himself together, but the spel was broken. For these men, nothing was ever going to be the same.

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At the end of World War I , thousands of former prisoners of the Japanese, known as Pacific POWs, began their postwar lives. Physical y, almost every one of them was ravaged. The average army or army air forces Pacific POW had lost sixty-one pounds in captivity, a remarkable statistic given that roughly three-quarters of the men had weighed just 159 pounds or less upon enlistment. Tuberculosis, malaria, dysentery, malnutrition, anemia, eye ailments, and festering wounds were widespread. At one chain of hospitals, doctors found a history of wet beriberi in 77 percent of POWs and dry beriberi in half. Among Canadian POWs, 84 percent had neurologic damage. Respiratory diseases, from infections and exposure to unbreathable air in factories and mines, were rampant. Men had been crippled and disfigured by unset broken bones, and their teeth had been ruined by beatings and years of chewing grit in their food. Others had gone blind from malnutrition. Scores of men were so il that they had to be carried from camps, and it was common for men to remain hospitalized for many months after repatriation. Some couldn’t be saved.

The physical injuries were lasting, debilitating, and sometimes deadly. A 1954 study found that in the first two postwar years, former Pacific POWs died at almost four times the expected rate for men of their age, and continued to die at unusual y high rates for many years. The health repercussions often lasted for decades; a fol ow-up study found that twenty-two years after the war, former Pacific POWs had hospitalization rates between two and eight times higher than former European POWs for a host of diseases.

As bad as were the physical consequences of captivity, the emotional injuries were much more insidious, widespread, and enduring. In the first six postwar years, one of the most common diagnoses given to hospitalized former Pacific POWs was psychoneurosis. Nearly forty years after the war, more than 85 percent of former Pacific POWs in one study suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), characterized in part by flashbacks, anxiety, and nightmares. And in a 1987 study, eight in ten former Pacific POWs had “psychiatric impairment,” six in ten had anxiety disorders, more than one in four had PTSD, and nearly one in five was depressed. For some, there was only one way out: a 1970 study reported that former Pacific POWs committed suicide 30 percent more often than controls.

Al of this il ness, physical and emotional, took a shocking tol . Veterans were awarded compensation based on their level of disability, ranging from 10

percent to 100 percent. As of January 1953, one-third of former Pacific POWs were categorized as 50 to 100 percent disabled, nearly eight years after the war’s end.

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These statistics translated into tormented, and sometimes ruined, lives. Flashbacks, in which men reexperienced their traumas and were unable to distinguish the il usion from reality, were common. Intense nightmares were almost ubiquitous. Men walked in their sleep, acting out prison camp ordeals, and woke screaming, sobbing, or lashing out. Some slept on their floors because they couldn’t sleep on mattresses, ducked in terror when airliners flew over, or hoarded food. One man had a recurrent hal ucination of seeing his dead POW friends walking past. Another was unable to remember the war.

Milton McMul en couldn’t stop using Japanese terms, a habit that had been pounded into him. Dr. Alfred Weinstein, who had infected the Bird with dysentery at Mitsushima, was dogged by urges to scavenge in garbage cans.* Huge numbers of men escaped by drinking. In one study of former Pacific POWs, more than a quarter had been diagnosed with alcoholism.

Raymond “Hap” Hal oran was a navigator who parachuted into Tokyo after his B-29 was shot down. Once on the ground, Hal oran was beaten by a mob of civilians, then captured by Japanese authorities, who tortured him, locked him in a pig cage, and held him in a burning horse stal during the firebombings. They stripped him naked and put him on display at Tokyo’s Ueno Zoo, tied upright in an empty tiger cage so civilians could gawk at his filthy, sore-encrusted body. He was starved so severely that he lost one hundred pounds.

After liberation and eight months in a hospital, Hal oran went home to Cincinnati. “I was not the same 19-year-old Raymond whose mother kissed him goodbye that fal morning in 1942,” he wrote. He was intensely nervous and wary of anything approaching him from behind. He couldn’t sleep with his arms covered, fearing that he’d need to fight off attackers. He had horrific nightmares, and would wake running in his yard, shouting for help. He avoided hotels because his screaming upset other guests. More than sixty years after the war, he was stil plagued by “poor inventory control,” keeping eight pil ows and six clocks in his bedroom, buying far more clothes and supplies than he’d ever need, and stockpiling bulk packages of food. And yet Hal oran was fortunate. Of the five survivors of his crew, two drank themselves to death.*

Some former POWs became almost feral with rage. For many men, seeing an Asian person or overhearing a snippet of Japanese left them shaking, weeping, enraged, or lost in flashbacks. One former POW, normal y gentle and quiet, spat at every Asian person he saw. At Letterman General Hospital just after the war, four former POWs tried to attack a staffer who was of Japanese ancestry, not knowing that he was an American veteran.

Troubled former POWs found nowhere to turn. McMul en came out of Japan racked by nightmares and so nervous that he was barely able to speak cogently. When he told his story to his family, his father accused him of lying and forbade him to speak of the war. Shattered and deeply depressed, McMul en couldn’t eat, and his weight plunged back down to ninety pounds. He went to a veterans’ hospital, but the doctors simply gave him B12 shots.

As he recounted his experiences to a military official, the official picked up a phone and began talking with someone else. After two years, McMul en got his feet under him again, but he would never real y recover. Sixty years after VJ Day, his dreams stil carried him back to the camps. Recounting his war

experiences was so painful that it would leave him off-kilter for weeks.

The Pacific POWs who went home in 1945 were torn-down men. They had an intimate understanding of man’s vast capacity to experience suffering, as wel as his equal y vast capacity, and hungry wil ingness, to inflict it. They carried unspeakable memories of torture and humiliation, and an acute sense of vulnerability that attended the knowledge of how readily they could be disarmed and dehumanized. Many felt lonely and isolated, having endured abuses that ordinary people couldn’t understand. Their dignity had been obliterated, replaced with a pervasive sense of shame and worthlessness. And they had the caustic knowledge that no one had come between them and tragedy. Coming home was an experience of profound, perilous aloneness.

For these men, the central struggle of postwar life was to restore their dignity and find a way to see the world as something other than menacing blackness. There was no one right way to peace; every man had to find his own path, according to his own history. Some succeeded. For others, the war would never real y end. Some retreated into brooding isolation or lost themselves in escapes. And for some men, years of swal owed rage, terror, and humiliation concentrated into what Holocaust survivor Jean Améry would cal “a seething, purifying thirst for revenge.”

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The honeymoon in the mountains had been Cynthia’s idea. Louie loved her for being so sporting, and for choosing something so dear to his heart. “You must look about you and remember what the trees + hil s, streams + lakes look like,” he wrote to her before their wedding. “… I wil see you among them for life.” Drifting off beside Cynthia each night, Louie stil saw the Bird lurking in his dreams, but the sergeant hung back as if cowed, or perhaps just waiting. It was the closest thing to peace that Louie had known since Green Hornet had hit the water.

The drive back to Los Angeles carried them from the great wide open to the confines of Harry Read’s mother’s house. Cynthia was uncomfortable living there, and Louie wanted to give her the home she dreamed of. He needed to find a career, but was unprepared to do so. Having left USC a few credits short, he had no col ege degree, a critical asset in a job market glutted with veterans and former war production workers. Like many elite athletes, he had focused on his sport throughout his school years and had never seriously contemplated life after running. Now nearly thirty, he had no idea what to do for a living.

Cynthia Zamperini on her honeymoon. Courtesy of Louis Zamperini

He made no effort to find a real career or a nine-to-five, salaried job. His celebrity drew people into his orbit, many of them hawking ventures in which he could invest his life insurance payoff, which he’d been al owed to keep. He went to military-surplus sales, bought Quonset huts, and resold them to movie studios. He did the same with iceboxes, then invested in a telephone technology. He turned respectable profits, but each investment quickly ran its course. He did, however, earn a steady enough income to rent an apartment for himself and Cynthia. It was only a tiny place in a low-rent quarter of Hol ywood, but Cynthia did her best to make it homey.