Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience and Redemption (27 page)

According to different accounts, five-foot, ten-inch Louie weighed 67 pounds, 79.5 pounds, or 87 pounds. Whatever the exact number, each man had lost about half of his body weight, or more.

On the doctor’s orders, in came a bottle of Russian cognac and two glasses, which Louie and Phil quickly emptied. Then came a platter of eggs, ham, milk, fresh bread, fruit salad, and cigarettes. The castaways dug in. When they were done, they were helped into another room and seated before a group of Japanese officers, who gaped at the shrunken, canary yel ow men. An officer, speaking English, asked how they had ended up there. Louie told the story as the Japanese listened in silent fascination, tracing the journey on a map.

Louie and Phil knew where their journey had begun, but did not yet know where it had ended. The officers told them. They were on an atol in the Marshal Islands. They had drifted two thousand miles.

As Japanese servicemen crowded around, the raft was spread out and the bul et holes counted. There were forty-eight. The curious servicemen pressed toward the Americans, but the officers kept them back. An officer asked Louie where the bul et holes had come from. Louie replied that a Japanese plane had strafed them. The officer said that this was impossible, a violation of their military code of honor. Louie described the bomber and the attack. The officers looked at one another and said nothing.

Two beds were made up, and Louie and Phil were invited to get as much rest as they wished. Slipping between cool, clean sheets, their stomachs ful , their sores soothed, they were deeply grateful to have been received with such compassion. Phil had a relieved thought: They are our friends .

Louie and Phil stayed in the infirmary for two days, attended by Japanese who cared for them with genuine concern for their comfort and health. On the third day, the deputy commanding officer came to them. He brought beef, chocolate, and coconuts—a gift from his commander—as wel as news. A freighter was coming to transport them to another atol . The name he gave sent a tremor through Louie: Kwajalein. It was the place known as Execution Island.

“After you leave here,” Louie would long remember the officer saying, “we cannot guarantee your life.”

——

The freighter arrived on July 15. Louie and Phil were taken into the hold and housed separately. The captain had bountiful portions of food sent to them.

The prisoners ate al they could.

One of the cruelties of starvation is that a body dying of hunger often rejects the first food it is given. The food on the atol had apparently agreed with the castaways, but not the food on the freighter. Louie spent much of that day hunched over the ship railing, vomiting into the sea, while a guard held him.

Phil’s meal left him almost as quickly, but by a different route; that evening, he had to be taken on at least six runs to the head.

As the freighter drew up to Kwajalein on July 16, the Japanese became harsh. On came the blindfolds, and Louie and Phil were taken onto what seemed to be a barge. When the barge stopped, they were picked up, heaved over men’s shoulders, and carried. Louie felt himself bobbing through the air, then slapped down on a hard surface. Phil was dropped beside him. Louie said something to Phil, and immediately felt a boot kick into him as a voice shouted, “No!”

An engine started, and they were moving. They were on the flatbed of a truck. In a few minutes, the truck stopped, and Louie was tugged out and flung over a shoulder again. There was walking, two steps up, a darkening, the sense that Phil was no longer near him, and the disorienting feeling of being thrown backward. Louie’s back struck a wal , and he fel to a floor. Someone yanked off his blindfold. A door slammed, a lock turned.

At first, Louie could barely see. His eyes darted about uncontrol ably. His mind raced, flitting incoherently from thought to thought. After weeks of endless openness, he was disoriented by the compression of the space around him. Every nerve and muscle seemed in a panic.

Slowly, his thoughts quieted and his eyes settled. He was in a wooden cel , about the length of a man and not much wider than his shoulders. Over his head was a thatched roof, about seven feet up. The only window was a hole, about a foot square, in the door. The floor was strewn with gravel, dirt, and wiggling maggots, and the room hummed with flies and mosquitoes, already beginning to swarm onto him. There was a hole in the floor with a latrine bucket below it. The air hung hot and stil , oppressive with the stench of human waste.

Louie looked up. In the dim light, he saw words carved into the wal : NINE MARINES MAROONED ON MAKIN ISLAND, AUGUST 18, 1942. Below that were names: Robert Al ard, Dal as Cook, Richard Davis, Joseph Gifford, John Kerns, Alden Mattison, Richard Olbert, Wil iam Pal esen, and Donald Roberton.

In August 1942, after a botched American raid on a Japanese base at Makin in the Marshal Islands, nine marines had been mistakenly left behind.

Captured by the Japanese, they had disappeared. Louie was almost certainly the first American to learn that they had been taken to Kwajalein. But other than Phil and Louie, there were no prisoners here now. Louie felt a wave of foreboding.

He cal ed to Phil. Phil’s voice answered, distant and smal , somewhere to the left. He was down the hal in a squalid hole like Louie’s. Each man asked the other if he was okay. Both knew that this was likely the last time they would talk, but if they wished to say good-bye, neither had the chance. There was shuffling in the corridor as a guard took up his station. Louie and Phil said nothing else.

Louie looked down at his body. Legs that had sprung through a 4:12 mile over bright sand on that last morning on Kualoa were now useless. The vibrant, generous body that he had trained with such vigilance had shrunken until only the bones remained, draped in yel ow skin, crawling with parasites.

All I see, he thought, is a dead body breathing.

Louie dissolved into hard, racking weeping. He muffled his sobs so the guard wouldn’t hear him.

* Several days later, a catastrophic typhoon, almost certainly the same storm, plowed into the coast of China, col apsing homes, uprooting telephone poles, and causing extensive flooding.

E ighteen

A Dead Body Breathing

SOMETHING FLEW THROUGH THE WINDOW IN THE DOOR of Louie’s cel and struck the floor, breaking into white bits. It was two pieces of hardtack, the dry biscuit that was the standard fare of sailors. A tiny cup of tea—so weak that it was little more than hot water, so smal that it constituted a single swal ow

—was set on the sil . Phil received food also, but no water. He and Louie crawled about their cel s, picking up slivers of biscuit and putting them into their mouths. A guard stood outside.

There was a rustle outside Louie’s cel , and a face appeared. The man greeted Louie cheerful y, in English, by name. Louie stared up at him.

The man was a Kwajalein native, and he explained that the American castaways were the talk of the island. A sports fanatic, he had recognized Louie’s name, which Louie had given to his captors. Prattling about track, footbal , and the Olympics, he paused only rarely to ask Louie questions. Once Louie got one or two words off, the native bounded back into his narrative.

After a few minutes, the native glanced at his watch and said he had to leave. Louie asked him what had happened to the marines whose names were carved into the wal . In the same chipper tone, the native replied that the marines were dead. Al of the POWs held on that island, he said, were executed.

As the native walked out, the guard looked chal engingly at Louie, lifted a flattened hand to his throat, and made a slashing gesture. He pointed to the names on the wal , then to Louie.

That night, Louie rested his head next to the door, trying to get as far as possible from the waste hole. He had only just settled there when the door swung open and the guard grabbed him and spun him around, pushing his head against the hole. Louie resisted, but the guard became angry. Louie gave up and lay as the guard ordered. He could see that the guard wanted him to lie in this position so he could see him through the window in the door.

Every few minutes, al night long, the guard peered in, making sure that Louie didn’t move.

——

The morning of the second day began. Phil and Louie lay in sweltering silence, thinking that at any moment they’d be dragged out and beheaded. The guards stalked back and forth, snarling at the captives and drawing the sides of their hands across their necks with sadistic smiles.

For Louie, the digestive miseries continued. His diarrhea became explosive, and cramps doubled him over. He lay under a blanket of flies and mosquitoes, keeping his buttocks over the waste hole for as long as he could, until the guard snapped at him to move his face back to the hole.

The day passed. Three times, a single wad of rice, a little bigger than a golf bal , sailed through the door window and broke against the floor. Once or twice, a swal ow of tea in a cup was left on the sil , and Louie sucked it down. Night came.

Another day came and went, then another. The heat was smothering. Lice hopped over the captives’ skin. Mosquitoes preyed on them in swarms so thick that when Louie snapped his fingers into a fist, then opened his hand, his entire palm was crimson. His diarrhea worsened, becoming bloody. Each day, Louie cried out for a doctor. One day, a doctor came. He leaned into the cel , looked at Louie, chuckled, and walked away.

Curled up on the gravel y floor, both men felt as if their bones were wearing through their skin. Louie begged for a blanket to sit on, but was ignored. He passed the time trying to strengthen his legs, pul ing himself upright and standing for a minute or two while holding the wal , then sinking down. He missed the raft.

Two sips of water a day weren’t nearly enough to replace Louie’s torrential fluid loss. His thirst became worse than anything he’d known on the raft. He crawled to the door and pleaded for water. The guard left, then returned with a cup. Louie, grateful, drew close to the door to take a drink. The guard threw scalding water in his face. Louie was so dehydrated that he couldn’t help but keep begging. At least four more times, the response was the same, leaving Louie’s face speckled with blisters. Louie knew that dehydration might kil him, and part of him hoped it would.

One day, as he lay in misery, Louie heard singing. The voices he had heard over the raft had come to him again. He looked around his cel , but the singers weren’t there. Only their music was with him. He let it wash over him, finding in it a reason to hope. Eventual y, the song faded away, but silently, in his mind, Louie sang it over and over to himself. He prayed intensely, ardently, hour after hour.

Down the hal , Phil languished. Rats were everywhere, climbing up his waste bucket and wal owing in his urine pail, waking him at night by skittering over his face. Periodical y, he was prodded outside, halted before a pan of water, and ordered to wash his face and hands. Phil dropped his face into the pan and slurped up the water.

Louie often stared at the names of the marines, wondering who they were, if they’d had wives and children, how the end had come for them. He began to think of them as his friends. One day he pul ed off his belt and bent the buckle upward. In tal , block letters, he carved his name into the wal beside theirs.

Louie couldn’t speak to Phil, nor Phil to him, but occasional y one of them would cough or scuff the floor to let the other know that he was there. Once, the guards left the cel s unattended, and for the first time, Phil and Louie were alone. Louie heard Phil’s voice.

“What’s going to happen?”

Louie had no answer. There was a beating of boots in the hal and the Americans fel silent.

——

The guards maintained a fixed state of fury at the captives, glaring at them wrathful y, making threatening gestures, shouting at them. Virtual y every day, they flew into rages that usual y ended in Phil and Louie being bombarded with stones and lit cigarettes, spat upon, and poked with sticks. Louie always knew that he was in for it when he heard a guard arriving in a stomping fit—a consequence, he hoped, of an American victory. The situation worsened when the guard had company; the guards used the captives to impress each other with their cruelty.

The pretext for many of the outbursts was miscommunication. The captives and their guards came from cultures with virtual y no overlap in language or custom. Louie and Phil found it almost impossible to understand what was being asked of them. Sign language was of little help, because even the cultures’ gestures were different. The guards, like nearly al citizens of their historical y isolated nation, had probably never seen a foreigner before, and probably had no experience in communicating with a non-Japanese. When misunderstood, they often became so exasperated that they screamed at and beat the captives.

For self-preservation, Louie and Phil studied everything they heard, developing smal Japanese vocabularies. Kocchi koi meant “come here.” Ohio was a greeting, used by the occasional civil guard. Though Louie soon knew what it meant, his stock reply was “No, California.” Phil learned that mizu meant water, but the knowledge got him nowhere; his cries for mizu were ignored.