Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption

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 playfully, “I want to see you again.”
    Louie wasn’t the first guy to be felled 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 rolled 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 all 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 habitually defiant and fearless, and when she felt controlled, as she often did, she could be irresistibly willful. Mostly, she was bored silly by the vanilla 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 independentpersonality, and was from nowhere near Miami Beach. She was impressed with this older man, introducing him with his full name, as if he were a dignitary. On one of their first dates, he raced her through his hotel, snatching up toilet paper rolls 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. Still, 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’ll 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 herpromise as a lifeline. “If you love me enough,” he wrote back, “I’ll have to forget it. How much can you love?”
    ——

    As Cynthia worked on her parents, Louie went into wedding