Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience and Redemption (51 page)

There was one other possible clue. The man at Mitsushima mentioned something he had overheard Mutsuhiro say: He would rather kil himself than be captured. It seemed no idle threat; that fal , during a roundup of suspected war criminals, there was a wave of suicides among those sought. Perhaps the Bird was already dead.

While investigators combed Japan for Mutsuhiro, prosecutors were inundated with some 250 POW affidavits concerning his actions in camps. These would be distil ed into an 84-count indictment. Even with each count stated with maximum brevity, in single spacing, the indictment stretched over eight feet of paper. It would reflect only a tiny fraction of the crimes that POWs said Watanabe had committed; Louie’s accusations of myriad attacks would make up only one count. Investigators believed that they had far more evidence than they needed to have Watanabe convicted and put to death. But nothing could go forward. The Bird was stil at large.

——

As his tormenter disappeared into darkness, Louie was pul ed into blinding light. With his Odyssean saga featured in newspapers, magazines, and radio shows, he was a national sensation. Two thousand people wrote him letters. Press photographers tailed him. His attempts to sleep were invariably interrupted by a ringing phone. Strangers teemed around him, pushing for news on what he’d do next. Everyone wanted him to tel his story. The War Department booked him on a speaking tour, and he was inundated with speaking invitations that usual y came with an award, making them impossible to decline. In his first weeks home, staying with his parents, he gave ninety-five speeches and made countless radio appearances. When he went to dinner clubs, the managers begged him to regale the guests. For Louie, al of the attention was drenching, a great noise, overpowering.

When Payton Jordan first saw Louie again, he was reassured by his old friend’s familiar impish grin and the springy cadence of his speech. But when Louie spoke of the war, Jordan sensed something rustling just behind his eyes, a clamoring emotion pent up in a smal space. He spoke not with anger or anguish but with bewilderment. Sometimes he’d pause and drift off, a troubled expression on his face. “It was like he got hit real hard,” Jordan recal ed,

“and he was trying to shake it off.”

Louie was struggling more than Jordan or anyone else knew. He was beginning to suffer bouts of suffocating anxiety. Each time he was asked to stand before a crowd and shape words around his private horror, his gut would wring. Every night, in his dreams, an apparition would form in his head and burn there. It was the face of the Bird, screaming, “Next! Next! Next!”

Very early one morning, Louie tiptoed from his room without tel ing anyone where he was going, slid into his Plymouth, put his foot on the gas, and didn’t stop until he was high in the mountains. He spent the day walking among the trees, thinking of his dead friends and his own survival, drawing from the wilderness the peace that it had given him since his boyhood summer on the Cahuil a reservation. The moment he nosed the car back in the driveway, the whirling began again.

Shortly after returning home, Louie found himself sitting in the audience at a gala held by the Los Angeles Times, which was giving him an award.

Louie forked through his dinner, waiting for his name to be announced, apprehensive over having to relive his ordeal before al these people. Drinks were set before him, and he sipped them and felt his nerves unwinding. By the time he rose to speak, he was in a haze, and he rambled on for much too long.

When he got back to his seat, he felt relieved. The alcohol had brought him a pleasant numbness.

One day not long after, as he sat at breakfast and fretted over the prospect of another speech, he broke out a bottle of Canadian Club whiskey and poured a shot into his coffee. That gave him a warm feeling, so he had another shot. It couldn’t hurt to have a third. The whiskey floated him through that speech, too, and so began a routine. A flask became his constant companion, making furtive appearances in parking lots and corridors outside speaking hal s. When the harsh push of memory ran through Louie, reaching for his flask became as easy as slapping a swatter on a fly.

——

One afternoon in the middle of March 1946, Louie was at a bar at the Deauvil e Club in Miami Beach, chatting up a stewardess. He had just completed the latest of many surreal liberation experiences, traveling to New York to fire the starting gun for Madison Square Garden’s Zamperini Invitational Mile, the race conceived to honor him when almost everyone thought he was dead. After the race, he’d come to Miami Beach for the two weeks of R&R

awarded to returning servicemen. A USC classmate, Harry Read, had accompanied him.

Across the room, a door opened. Louie glanced up. Flitting into the club was an arrestingly beautiful young woman, her hair a tumble of blondness, her body as quick and gracile as a deer’s. Those who knew her spoke of a shimmer about her, an incandescence. Louie drank in one long look and, he later told Sylvia, had the astounding thought that he had to marry this girl.

The next day, Louie and Harry returned to the club, vaulted the fence surrounding its private beach, and spread their towels near a pair of sunbathing women. When one of the women turned, Louie saw that it was the beauty from the bar. He was hesitant to speak to her, afraid that he’d come off as a wolf, but Harry charged right in, regaling the women with Louie’s history. When Harry mentioned the 1938 NCAA Championships, when rival runners had spiked Louie’s legs, the pretty woman stopped him. She said that when she was twelve, her mother had taken her to a theater to see Errol Flynn in Robin Hood, and there she’d watched a newsreel showing the NCAA mile winner and his bandaged legs. The sight had stuck in her mind.

Her name was Cynthia Applewhite, and she was a few weeks past her twentieth birthday. Louie spoke with her for a while, and the two discovered that they had geography in common; as a child, she had lived near Torrance. She seemed to like him, and he thought her bright and lively and so beautiful.

When they parted, Louie grumbled something about how she probably wouldn’t want to see him again. “Maybe,” she said playful y, “I want to see you again.”

Louie wasn’t the first guy to be fel ed by Cynthia. Dense forests of men had gone down at the sight of her. She was dating two guys at once, both named Mac, and each Mac was trying to outlast the other. Since the Macs had Cynthia booked for every evening, Louie asked her for a daytime date, to go fishing. Showing up in blue jeans rol ed up to the knee, she took up a fishing pole, smiled gaily for photographs, and braved seasickness with cheer.

When Louie asked if he could take her out again, she said yes.

Cynthia Applewhite, on the day after Louie met her. Courtesy of Louis Zamperini

They seemed an unlikely pair. Cynthia was wealthy and pedigreed; she’d been educated in private schools, then an elite finishing academy. But for al of her polishing, she was not a buttoned-up girl. A friend would remember her as “different”—passionate and impulsive. At thirteen, when her family lived in New York State, she developed such a fever for Laurence Olivier that, unbeknownst to her parents, she hopped a train to Manhattan to see him in Wuthering Heights. At sixteen, she was drinking gin. She dressed in bohemian clothes, penned novels, painted, and yearned to roam forgotten corners of the world. She was habitual y defiant and fearless, and when she felt control ed, as she often did, she could be irresistibly wil ful. Mostly, she was bored sil y by the vanil a sort of boys who trailed her around, and by the stodgy set in Miami Beach.

Along came Louie. Here was someone exotic, someone who answered her yearning for adventure, understood her fiercely independent personality, and was from nowhere near Miami Beach. She was impressed with this older man, introducing him with his ful name, as if he were a dignitary. On one of their first dates, he raced her through his hotel, snatching up toilet paper rol s and streaming them down the side of the building, earning the hotel manager’s wrath and Cynthia’s exhilaration. She gave up the Macs, and she and Louie swept around Miami.

At the end of March, just before he was to leave for his speaking tour, Louie led Cynthia onto a beach and confessed that he was in love with her.

Cynthia replied that she thought she loved him but wasn’t sure. Louie was undiscouraged. Before their walk was done, he had talked her into marrying him. They had known each other for less than two weeks.

After Louie left, Cynthia broke the news to her parents. The Applewhites were alarmed that their daughter was flinging herself into marriage with a twenty-nine-year-old soldier whom she’d known for just days. Cynthia couldn’t be swayed, so Mrs. Applewhite refused to give her money to fly to California to get married. Cynthia vowed to get the money somehow, either by borrowing it or, in defiance of her mother, getting a job.

Louie wrote to Cynthia almost every day, and every morning at ten-thirty, he sat waiting for the mailman to bring him a pink envelope from Cynthia.

Though the letters were adoring on both sides, they reveal how little the two knew about each other. Cynthia had no idea that Louie was losing his emotional equilibrium. From Harry, she knew a little about his time as a POW, but Louie had said almost nothing. In his letters, the closest he came to addressing it was to joke that he hoped that she’d go easy on rice and barley in her cooking. On one of their dates, Louie had gotten very drunk, but he had apologized and curbed himself from then on. Louie’s drinking may have struck Cynthia as harmless, but it was in fact a growing problem. In critical ways, she was engaged to a stranger.

Louie seemed to be aware that in marrying her, he was asking more of her than she knew, and he frequently warned her of how much she was taking on. Stil , he wanted a wedding as soon as possible. “We have got to set a date early in June,” he wrote in mid-April, “or I’l just go plain crazy.” Soon after, he wrote that they had to marry in May. She told him that she’d help him forget his past, and he grasped her promise as a lifeline. “If you love me enough,”

he wrote back, “I’l have to forget it. How much can you love?”

——

As Cynthia worked on her parents, Louie went into wedding overdrive. He tracked down reception sites, invitations, a caterer, and a jeweler. He found the Church of Our Savior, which Cynthia had attended as a child. He bought a used Chevy convertible and overhauled it to impress Cynthia. Trying to make a new man of himself, he quit drinking and smoking. He took terminal leave from the air force, meaning that he formal y ended active duty but would stil wear his uniform and draw pay until his accumulated leave ran out in August, at which point he’d become a captain in the Air Force Reserve. He began a low-paying job at the Warner Brothers studios, teaching actors how to ride horses.

What he didn’t have was a proper place to live. Because Los Angeles was teeming with repatriated soldiers, inexpensive housing was al but impossible to find, so Louie was stil living with his parents. Cynthia wrote of how badly she wanted a home of her own, but Louie, in some distress, wrote back to explain that he didn’t have the money. The best he could do was to move into the house that Harry Read shared with his mother and promise Cynthia that he’d do whatever he could to earn enough money for a home. He bought an air mattress for Cynthia; he’d sleep on the floor. After POW

camp, he said, he didn’t mind sleeping on floors.

The Applewhites’ opposition to the marriage, the pressure to make a good life for Cynthia, and his black memories left Louie taut with stress. He had little appetite. He was emerging from years in which the only constants were violence and loss, and his letters show how much he feared something terrible befal ing Cynthia. He clung to the thought of her as if, at any moment, she might be torn from his hands.

He was especial y worried about her parents’ views of him. He felt certain that they objected to him personal y, finding his Italian ethnicity and middle-class origins repel ent. He wrote earnest letters to her father, trying to win him over. When he kept seeing the same car parked by the Reads’ house, he became convinced that it was a detective hired by Cynthia’s father. According to Cynthia’s brother, Ric, his parents had no objection to Louie, only to a hasty marriage. As for the spying, Ric said, such an act would be unlike his easygoing father, and would have made no sense, as Mr. Applewhite liked Louie. Right or wrong, Louie’s suspicions il ustrated how sensitive he was to the idea that he was unworthy of Cynthia. Perhaps it wasn’t the Applewhites he was trying to convince.

Six months after returning from Japan, Louie began to feel a familiar pul . It had just been announced that the summer Olympic Games, which hadn’t been held since 1936, were set to return. They’d be held in London in July 1948. Louie’s bad leg felt passably sound, and he final y felt healthy. He began testing himself with long hikes, borrowing a dog for company. The leg felt sturdy, the body strong. July of ’48 was more than two years away. Louie began training.