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

consumed with guilt over what he had done.
    As hunger bleated inside them, the men experienced a classic symptom of starvation, the inability to direct their thoughts away from food. They stared into the ocean, undulating with edible creatures; but without bait, they couldn’t catch even a minnow. Occasionally, a bird passed, always out of reach. The men studied their shoes and wondered if they could eat the leather. They decided that they couldn’t.
    Days passed. Each evening, the roasting heat gave way to cold.Sleep was elusive. Phil, alone in his raft and lacking the heat of another man to warm the water around him, suffered particularly badly. He shook through each night, too cold to sleep. In the daytime, exhaustion, heat, and the lolling of the raft made all of them drowsy. They slept through much of each day and spent the rest lying back, saving their precious, evaporating energy.
    It occurred to Phil that from the point of view of the birds, their still forms, obscured by canvas hoods, must have looked like lifeless debris. He was right. One day, nine or ten days into their odyssey, Louie felt something alight on his hood, and saw its shadow fall before him. It was an albatross. With Louie’s head hidden, the bird hadn’t recognized that he was landing on a man.
    Slowly, slowly, Louie raised his hand toward the bird, his motion so gradual that it was little more noticeable than the turning of a minute hand on a clock. The bird rested calmly. In time, Louie’s hand was beside the bird, his fingers open. All at once, Louie snapped his hand shut, clamping down on the bird’s legs. The bird pecked frantically, slashing his knuckles. Louie grabbed its head and broke its neck.
    Louie used the pliers to tear the bird open. A gust of fetid odor rose from the body, and all three men recoiled. Louie handed a bit of meat to Phil and Mac and took one for himself. The stench hung before them, spurring waves of nausea. Gagging, they couldn’t get the meat into their mouths. Eventually, they gave up.
    Though they couldn’t eat the bird, they finally had bait. Louie took out thefishing gear, tied a small hook to a line, baited it, and fed it into the water. In a moment, a shark cruised by, bit down on the hook, and severed the line, taking the bait, the hook, and a foot or two of line with him. Louie tried with another hook, and again, a shark took it. A third try produced the same result. Finally, the sharks let a hook hang unmolested. Louie felt a tug and pulled up the line. On its end hung a slender pilot fish, about ten inches long. As Louie pulled it apart, everyone felt apprehensive. None of them had eaten raw fish before. They each put a bit of meat into their mouths. It was flavorless. They ate it down to the bones.
    It was the first food to cross their lips in more than a week. Between three men, a small fish didn’t go far, but the protein gave them a push of energy. Louie had demonstrated that if they were persistent and resourceful, they could catch food, and both he and Phil felt inspired. Only Mac remained unchanged.
    Phil felt uneasy about the albatross. Like many schoolboys of his era, he had read Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” In the poem, a sailor kills a friendly albatross that, it is said, had made the winds blow. In consequence, the sailor and his crew are stranded in infernal, windless waters, tormented by thirst and monstrous creatures. The crewmen all die, and the sailor is left in a hellish limbo, the albatross hung about his neck, his eyes closed against the accusing stares of his dead crewmen.
    Louie wasn’t superstitious, but he’d grown fond of albatrosses on that Christmas he’d spent watching them crash-land on Midway. He felt sorry for the bird. Phil reminded Louie that killing an albatross was said to bring bad luck. After a plane crash, Louie replied,what more bad luck could they have?
    ——

    Several more days passed. Louie caught nothing, and his hook supply dwindled. No more birds landed on the raft. Periodically, rain replenished the water tins, but only partway.
    The men floated in a sensory vacuum. When the weather was calm, the ocean was silent. There was nothing to touch but water, skin, hair, and canvas. Other than the charred smell of the raft, there were no odors. There was nothing to look at but sky and sea. At some point, Louie stuck his finger in his ear and felt wax there. He smelled his finger, and by virtue of being new, the