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

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 all 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-fulfilling.
    ——

    Two weeks had passed. The men’s skin was burned, swollen, 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 yellow 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 tocannibalism. Some sixty years later, after nineteen days adrift, starving survivors of the sunken yacht
Mignonette
killed and ate a teenaged crewman. Stories of cannibalism among castaways were so common that the British gave a name to the practice ofchoosing a victim, dubbing it the “custom of the sea.” To well-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 naturally, would be abhorrent for him. All 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 still 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 killed 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 smell that bad. Still, no one wanted to eat it. Louie portioned the meat and insisted that everyone eat. All three men forced the meat down. Because Mac seemed to need food the most, they gave him all of the blood.
    In the bird’s stomach they found several small 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 fell 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 gradually regaining his strength after his initial state of concussed exhaustion; Mac’s body grew weaker, following his broken spirit. Then the rains stopped and the water tinsdried 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