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

a deep outrushing of air, slow and final. He knew what it was.

    Francis McNamara on May 26, 1943, the day before the crash.
Courtesy of Louis Zamperini

    ——

    Sergeant Francis McNamara had begun his last journey with a panicked act, consuming the rafts’ precious food stores, and in doing so, he had placed himself and his raftmates in the deepest jeopardy. But in the last days of his life, in the struggle against the deflating raft and the jumping sharks, he had given all he had left. It wasn’t enough to save him—it had probably hastened his death—but it may have made the difference between life and death for Phil and Louie. Had Mac not survived the crash, Louie and Phil might well have been dead by that thirty-third day. In his dying days, Mac had redeemed himself.
    In the morning, Phil wrapped Mac’s body in something, probably part of the ruined raft. They knelt over the body and said aloud all of the good things they knew of Mac, laughing a little at his penchant for mess hall pie. Louie wanted to give him a religious eulogy but didn’t know how, so he recited disjointed passages that he remembered from movies, ending with a few words about committing the body to the sea. And he prayed for himself and Phil, vowing that if God would save them, he would serve heaven forever.
    When he was done, Louie lifted the shrouded body in his arms. It felt as if it weighed no more than forty pounds. Louie bent over the side of the raft and gently slid Mac into the water. Mac sank away. The sharks let him be.
    The next night, Louie and Phil completed their thirty-fourth day on the raft. Though they didn’t know it, they had passed what was almost certainly the record for survival adrift in an inflated raft. If anyone had survived longer, they hadn’t lived to tell about it.
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    The raft bobbed westward. Petulant storms came over now and then, raining enough to keep the water supply steady. Because the water ration was now divided by two instead of three, each man had more to drink. Louie made a hook out of his lieutenant’s pin and caught one fish before the pin broke.
    Phil and Louie could see the bend of their thighbones under their skin, their knees bulging in the centers of birdlike legs, their bellies hollow, their ribs stark. Each man had grown a weedy beard. Their skin glowed yellow from the leached raft dye, and their bodies were patterned with salt sores. They held their sun-scorched eyes to the horizon, searching for land, but there was none. Their hunger dimmed, an ominous sign. They had reached the last stage of starvation.
    One morning, they woke to a strange stillness. The rise and fall of the raft had ceased, and it sat virtually motionless. There was no wind. The ocean stretched out in all directions in glossy smoothness, regarding the sky and reflecting its image in crystalline perfection. Like the ancient mariner, Louie and Phil had found thedoldrums, the eerie pause of wind and water that lingers around the equator. They were, as Coleridge wrote, “as idle as a painted ship upon a painted ocean.”
    It was an experience of transcendence. Phil watched the sky, whispering that it looked like a pearl. The water looked so solid that it seemed they could walk across it. When a fish broke the surface far away, the sound carried to the men with absolute clarity. They watched as pristine ringlets of water circled outward around the place where the fish had passed, then faded to stillness.
    For a while they spoke, sharing their wonder. Then they fell into reverent silence. Their suffering was suspended. They weren’t hungry or thirsty. They were unaware of the approach of death.
    As he watched this beautiful, still world, Louie played with a thought that had come to him before. He had thought it as he had watched hunting seabirds, marveling at their ability to adjust their dives to compensate for the refraction of light in water. He had thought it as he had considered the pleasing geometry of the sharks, their gradation of color, their slide through the sea. He even recalled the thought coming to him in his youth, when he had lain on the roof of the cabin in the Cahuilla Indian Reservation, looking up from Zane Grey to watch night settling over the earth. Such beauty, he thought, was too perfect to have come about by mere chance. That day in the center of the Pacific was, to him, a gift crafted deliberately, compassionately, for him and Phil.
    Joyful and grateful in the midst of slow dying,