Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience and Redemption (23 page)

There were times when Phil seemed lost in troubled thoughts, and Louie guessed that he was reliving the crash, and perhaps holding himself responsible for the deaths of his men. Louie wanted to reassure Phil that he’d done nothing wrong, but he decided that raising the issue would deepen Phil’s preoccupation. So he said nothing.

——

As Louie and Phil gril ed each other, Mac usual y sat in silence. Sometimes he’d ask Louie to describe a recipe, and occasional y he would interject, but getting him to ful y participate was rough going. He shared few memories, and though the other two encouraged him, he couldn’t imagine a future. To him, it seemed, the world was too far gone.

Given the dismal record of raft-bound men, Mac’s despair was reasonable. What is remarkable is that the two men who shared Mac’s plight didn’t share his hopelessness. Though Phil was constantly wondering how long this would go on, it had not yet occurred to him that he might die. The same was true for Louie. Though they both knew that they were in an extremely serious situation, both had the ability to warn fear away from their thoughts, focusing instead on how to survive and reassuring themselves that things would work out.

It remains a mystery why these three young men, veterans of the same training and the same crash, differed so radical y in their perceptions of their plight. Maybe the difference was biological; some men may be wired for optimism, others for doubt. As a toddler, Louie had leapt from a train and watched it bear his family away, yet had remained cheerful y unconcerned about his safety, suggesting that he may have been a born optimist. Perhaps the men’s histories had given them opposing convictions about their capacity to overcome adversity. Phil and Louie had survived Funafuti and performed uncommonly wel over Nauru, and each trusted the other. “If there was one thing left, he’d a given it to me,” Phil once said of Louie. Mac had never seen combat, didn’t know these officers, and was largely an unknown quantity to himself. Al he knew about his ability to cope with this crisis was that on the first night, he had panicked and eaten the only food they had. As time passed and starvation loomed, this act took on greater and greater importance, and it may have fed Mac’s sense of futility.

For Phil, there was another source of strength, one of which even Louie was unaware. According to his family, in his quiet, private way, Phil was a deeply religious man, carrying a faith instil ed in him by his parents. “I had told Al several times before to always do his best as he knew how to do it,”

Phil’s father once wrote, “and when things get beyond his skil and ability to ask the Lord to step in and help out.” Phil never spoke of his faith, but as he sang hymns over the ocean, conjuring up a protective God, perhaps rescue felt closer, despair more distant.

From earliest childhood, Louie had regarded every limitation placed on him as a chal enge to his wits, his resourcefulness, and his determination to rebel. The result had been a mutinous youth. As maddening as his exploits had been for his parents and his town, Louie’s success in carrying them off had given him the conviction that he could think his way around any boundary. Now, as he was cast into extremity, despair and death became the focus of his defiance. The same attributes that had made him the boy terror of Torrance were keeping him alive in the greatest struggle of his life.

Though al three men faced the same hardship, their differing perceptions of it appeared to be shaping their fates. Louie and Phil’s hope displaced their fear and inspired them to work toward their survival, and each success renewed their physical and emotional vigor. Mac’s resignation seemed to paralyze him, and the less he participated in their efforts to survive, the more he slipped. Though he did the least, as the days passed, it was he who faded the most. Louie and Phil’s optimism, and Mac’s hopelessness, were becoming self-fulfil ing.

——

Two weeks had passed. The men’s skin was burned, swol en, and cracked. Mysterious white lines striped their fingernails and toenails, and salt sores were marching up their legs, buttocks, and backs. The rafts were decomposing in the sun and salt water, bleeding vivid yel ow dye onto the men’s clothing and skin and making everything sticky.

The men’s bodies slowly winnowed. Each day, Louie noticed incremental differences in his weight, and the weight of his raftmates, from the day before: the pants looser, the faces narrower. As they passed the fortnight mark, they began to look grotesque. Their flesh had evaporated. Their cheeks, now bearded, had sunken into concavity. Their bodies were digesting themselves.

They were reaching a stage of their ordeal that for other castaways had been a gruesome turning point. In 1820, after the whaling ship Essex was sunk by an enraged whale, the lifeboat-bound survivors, on the brink of death, resorted to cannibalism. Some sixty years later, after nineteen days adrift, starving survivors of the sunken yacht Mignonette kil ed and ate a teenaged crewman. Stories of cannibalism among castaways were so common that the British gave a name to the practice of choosing a victim, dubbing it the “custom of the sea.” To wel -fed men on land, the idea of cannibalism has always inspired revulsion. To many sailors who have stood on the threshold of death, lost in the agony and mind-altering effects of starvation, it has seemed a reasonable, even inescapable solution.

For Louie, the idea of consuming a human being was revolting and unthinkable. To eat a human being, even if the person had died natural y, would be abhorrent for him. Al three men held the same conviction. Cannibalism wouldn’t be considered, then or ever.

The two-week mark was a different kind of turning point for Louie. He began to pray aloud. He had no idea how to speak to God, so he recited snippets of prayers that he’d heard in movies. Phil bowed his head as Louie spoke, offering “Amen” at the end. Mac only listened.

The rafts slid on the current, their tethers snaking behind them. It seemed that they were stil drifting west, but without any points of reference, the men weren’t sure. At least they were going somewhere.

——

The second albatross fluttered onto Louie’s head sometime around the fourteenth day. Again Louie slowly raised his hand, snatched it, and kil ed it. The men sat there looking at it, remembering the stench of the first albatross. When Louie opened it up, they were happily surprised to find that it didn’t smel that bad. Stil , no one wanted to eat it. Louie portioned the meat and insisted that everyone eat. Al three men forced the meat down. Because Mac seemed to need food the most, they gave him al of the blood.

In the bird’s stomach they found several smal fish, which they decided to use as bait, and with them, Louie caught one more fish. He saved some of the bird meat for bait and set the bones out to dry in hopes that they might be useful as fishhooks.

——

Time spun out endlessly. Louie caught a few fish, once parlaying a tiny one, thrown into the raft by a whitecap, into bait that yielded a comparatively fat pilot fish. Rains came intermittently, leaving the men sucking up every drop that fel into their rain catchers. Louie and Phil took turns leading prayers each night. Mac remained in his own world.

The men grew thinner. Phil was gradual y regaining his strength after his initial state of concussed exhaustion; Mac’s body grew weaker, fol owing his broken spirit. Then the rains stopped and the water tins dried up. They reached day twenty-one. They caught a fish and had a little celebration for passing what they thought was Rickenbacker’s mark.

For some time, Louie had noticed a stomach-turning reek wafting to and fro over them. It was coming from Phil’s head. The blood on his T-shirt bandage was rotting, and cakes of it were chipping off and fal ing into the raft. Phil couldn’t smel it, but Louie couldn’t bear it. Louie untied the T-shirt and gently unwrapped it. Beneath a thick cake of dried blood, the wounds had knit neatly. The bleeding didn’t resume. The T-shirt could go.

A few days later, Louie saw something bizarre. The edge of the sea, flush to the horizon, was peeling upward. A vast black rim formed, rose up, and began speeding toward them with a tumbling motion. Louie shouted a warning and the other two men wheeled around toward it. They dropped down, getting their weight as low as possible so they wouldn’t be flipped over. As the wave closed in, they braced themselves.

Just as the wave reached them, they realized it wasn’t a wave at al . It was a giant school of dolphins, swimming with astonishing speed. The dolphins rushed at the rafts and were soon muscling al around them. Looking into the water, Phil saw smal fish, thousands of them, seeming to fil the ocean. The dolphins were chasing them. The men thrust their arms into the water and tried to grab some, but the fish slipped through their fingers. If they had had a net, they could have whisked it through the water and fil ed the rafts. But with only their fingers, they couldn’t snare even one.

Louie was out of bait. Other than the sharks, the only fish that ventured near the rafts were pilot fish, which hugged the sides of the sharks as they circled. They were within easy reach, only when Louie tried to grab them, they squirted away. The sharks had stolen every hook smal enough to fit in the mouths of pilot fish, so Louie tried albatross bones, but the fish spat them out.

Looking at the fish line that he had left, he got an idea. He cut off smal portions of line, tied them to the large fishhooks, and then tied three hooks to the fingers of one hand, one on his pinkie, one on his middle finger, one on his thumb, orienting them as if they were claws. He held his hand over the water’s surface and waited.

A shark, attended by a pilot fish, swam by. Once its head had passed, Louie sank his hand into the water. When the unsuspecting pilot fish moved under his hand, he snapped his fingers shut around its back. The hooks dug in. Louie yanked the fish out of the water, jubilant.

Sometime that week, a smal tern landed on the wal of the raft, right between the men. It was closest to Phil, and without speaking, the men indicated to each other that he’d catch it. Phil clapped down on the bird. It was tiny, and offered little meat, but not long after, another tern settled on the raft. This time, Mac caught it. Louie was so famished that he went at it with his teeth, ripping the feathers loose and spitting them out in whuffs. Almost immediately, he felt a crawling sensation on his chin. The tern had been covered in lice, which were now hopping over his face.

Something about the tickle of lice on his skin rattled Louie more than anything he had yet encountered. He began scratching and rubbing at his face, but he couldn’t get at the lice, which had burrowed into his beard and were moving up his head and into his hair. He pitched his upper body into the water. Phil and Mac, realizing that Louie was going to get his head ripped off, grabbed the oars and bumped the sharks away while Louie splashed about, trying to drown the lice. After about half a dozen dunks, the tickle was gone.

As the days passed, the men caught three, perhaps four more birds. One bird kept dipping low over the raft, then soaring off again. Mac suddenly shot his hand up and snagged the bird by the leg in midair, then handed the squirming animal to Louie, who was amazed at Mac’s alacrity. The men ate every morsel of the bird, and every other bird that they caught, leaving only feathers and bones.

——

For days, Louie lay over the side of the raft, fishhooks tied to his fingers, trying to catch another pilot fish. He caught none. The water ran out again, and the thirst was agonizing. Day after day passed with no rain. Twice, the men rowed toward distant squal s, but each time, the rain sputtered out just as they reached it, leaving them exhausted and demoralized. When the next squal inched along the horizon, none of them had the strength to chase it.

The intense thirst and overheating drove Phil to do something almost suicidal. He waited for the sharks to wander a short distance away, then pul ed himself overboard. Louie and Mac knelt near him, jabbing at sharks with the oars as Phil hung on the raft, savoring the cool water and swishing big mouthfuls of it over his tongue before spitting them out. He only just had the strength to drag himself back in. Since Phil had gotten away with it, the other two thought it worth a try, and took their turns in the water. The men were able to keep the sharks away long enough for al three to have a dip.

On the sixth day without water, the men recognized that they weren’t going to last much longer. Mac was failing especial y quickly.

They bowed their heads together as Louie prayed. If God would quench their thirst, he vowed, he’d dedicate his life to him.

The next day, by divine intervention or the fickle humors of the tropics, the sky broke open and rain poured down. Twice more the water ran out, twice more they prayed, and twice more the rain came. The showers gave them just enough water to last a short while longer. If only a plane would come.

*In 1942, Poon Lim survived for 133 days alone on a raft after his ship was sunk by a German submarine. Lim’s feat was a record, but his vessel was a large, wood-and-metal “Carley float boat” raft, equipped with ten gal ons of water, a fair amount of food, an electric torch, and other supplies.

Fifteen

Sharks and Bullets

ON THE MORNING OF THE TWENTY-SEVENTH DAY, A PLANE came.

It began with a rumble of engines, and then a spot in the sky. It was a twin-engine bomber, moving west at a brisk clip. It was so far away that expending the flares and dye was questionable. The men conferred and voted. They decided to take a shot.

Louie fired one flare, reloaded, then fired a second, drawing vivid lines across the sky. He opened a dye container and spil ed its contents into the ocean, then dug out the mirror and angled a square of light toward the bomber.

The men waited, hoping. The plane grew smal er, then faded away.

As the castaways slumped in the rafts, trying to accept another lost chance, over the western horizon there was a glimmer, tracing a wide curve, then banking toward the rafts. The bomber was coming back. Weeping with joy, Louie, Phil, and Mac tugged their shirts over their heads and snapped them back and forth in the air, cal ing out. The bomber leveled off, skimming over the water. Louie squinted at the cockpit. He made out two silhouettes, a pilot and copilot. He thought of Palmyra, food, solid ground underfoot.