Devil at My Heels: The Story of Louis Zamperini (13 page)

On the third day we heard another plane. I spotted a B-25 flying
north, just a dot in the sky at about ten thousand feet. We fired flares, tossed dye into the sea, and said a prayer. The B-25 never swerved from her path.

Being stranded was bad enough, but now we had another worry. From the B-25’s position and course I could tell that we had drifted west, beyond the usual air lanes between islands. It meant that unless another miracle occurred, we had run out not only of chocolate but of chances for a quick rescue, and perhaps for a rescue at all.

With Phil incapacitated and Mac a mental wreck, both now depended on me. I had to muster all my resources and training because without food and with only a little fresh water remaining, I had no idea how long we could last. Imprisoned by the ocean, our only choice was to accept and adapt to the situation. I knew the trade winds came in from the east and were pushing us toward the Marshall or Gilbert Islands. But those were still a couple of thousand miles and many, many days away.

For a moment anxiety clutched me; the sea could swallow us all. But rather than give in, I made myself a promise: no matter what lay ahead, I’d never think about dying, only about living. Despite our situation, I felt so fortunate to be alive that I was actually happy. Maybe it seems odd now, but it didn’t then.

A
fter a week, I started thinking about the chocolate, especially when Mac panicked and I had to crack him again. He’d fallen apart; all he talked about was death. I tried to reason with him and reassure him, but he had lost his vision of the future and it usually took another hard slap to shut him up. Then he’d sleep.

There was good news, too: Phil had rallied.

Drifting west, beyond the air lanes, I adapted myself to my fate instead of resisting it. Rescue would be nice, but survival was most important.

TO LIVE, A
man needs food, water, and a sharp mind.

We’d begun with eight half-pint tins of water in the survival kit, but we soon ran out. We were, of course, surrounded by water that never stopped moving, waves turning into new waves, rising and falling. If you’ve seen movies of men in our situation, one character, scruffy and burned by the sun, always says, “All this water and not a drop to drink!” as if facing down a great temptation. We never thought of it that way. You can’t. Drinking salt water is deadly, and we knew it. At best, I could wet my tongue occasionally. Otherwise, I pictured us adrift on a desert. No one in his right mind would drink sand.
Soon, what water we had came only from afternoon squalls and single, low-hanging clouds that drifted across the sky. Sometimes the showers missed us, but when we got lucky we caught the rainwater in the canvas pump cover. It was about six inches wide and two feet long, and I’d ripped it open along one seam so it became a funnel-shaped container. Other times the cover doubled as a hood to shade us from the sun.

When it rained we’d drink first to quench our thirst. When our bellies were full we’d suck up any extra water from the hood and spit it into the empty cans. Sounds distasteful, but transferring water by mouth was the only way because who can pour water in a moving raft, on a rough sea, in a rainstorm? Even more important, this method protected the fresh water from being spoiled by the salty whitecaps that broke over the sides of the raft.

It didn’t always work. Sometimes we rode out a squall and never got more water than fell into our upturned and open mouths. At one point we went seven days without a drink. The clouds just seemed to know we were there and avoid us. Several times each day they would hover on the horizon, move toward the raft and then away and beyond us, leaving our lips to blister and swell and our throats to burn. Sometimes we’d chase clouds, rowing like mad, only to exhaust ourselves and still miss their life-giving bounty. As desperation set in, just to stay hydrated, two of us would keep the sharks away with the oars while the third hung in the water for a few minutes.

In the end, we resorted to prayer.

When I prayed, I meant it. I didn’t understand it, but I meant it. I knew from church that there was a God and that he’d made the heavens and the earth, but beyond that I wasn’t familiar with the Bible because in those days we Catholics, unlike the Protestants, weren’t encouraged to read it carefully—at least in my church we weren’t. Yet on the raft, I was like anybody else, from the native who lived thousands of years ago on a remote island to the atheist in a foxhole: when I got to the end of my rope, I looked up.

I said, “Fellows, we’ve been praying about everything else, so let’s just pray for water, and sit back and relax. Otherwise we’re going to kill ourselves.” I meditated and started speaking. My prayer sounded as
if I wanted to strike a bargain with God: “Answer my prayers now, and I promise if I get home through all this and whatever is to come, I’ll serve You for the rest of my life.” What else could I say? What would anyone say? Given our miserable situation, devotion was all we had left to offer.

Before an hour had passed, I saw a squall heading our way. This time it did not veer, but slowly moved overhead. Based on our recent luck I didn’t expect a drop, but suddenly the cloud burst and it poured. I held up the hood to catch the water, drinking as it collected, sharing this gift with Phil and Mac. With the first taste I knew I was the wealthiest man in the world. I could have swallowed five gallons, but of course my shrunken stomach couldn’t hold more than a pint.

Maybe God had answered our prayers; maybe the sudden rain was a coincidence. In either case, our daily conversations with the Almighty took on a new sincerity, and we recited the Lord’s Prayer more often. Clearly, it couldn’t hurt.

EVEN AFTER WEEKS
adrift on the ocean, my stomach never growled. My whole body did. Hunger is constant. Next to water, food is crucial because the alternative is deadly and inevitable: the body would eat itself.

Occasionally the waves threw tiny fish into the raft. Even though they were edible and Mac’s eyes opened as wide as his mouth, I said we weren’t going to eat them. “We’re going to invest them for bigger returns.” Using the tiny fish as bait, we caught a ten-inch pilot fish, a good reward for our risk.

Our survival gear included a can of different-size hooks and some fishing line. But almost every time we tried to fish, the sharks easily stole the hook and the bait. As a last resort, I tied hooks to my thumb, index, and little finger and hung my hand in the water. Sometimes I would leave it there for up to thirty minutes—always watching carefully for sharks—until I had to unwrap my fingers to let the blood circulate. Sharks hunt side by side with their pilot fish, and when a curious fish got close enough I’d grab it. As the pilot fish tried to escape, the hooks dug in, and soon we feasted.

I DON’T KNOW
on what day, but once we slept through a calm night and rose with the sun to find the ocean glassy smooth. I knew we had entered the doldrums, which often happens near the Equator. The seamless stillness was alien and yet exotic, and so quiet that we could hear small fish break the surface 150 feet away. I took advantage of the increased visibility to scan the horizon for a ship or submarine. Nothing.

The calm did not prevent sharks from tailgating us as usual. The smooth surface simply allowed us a better look at their graceful movements as they swam around the raft. As one glided by I reached in behind its head and allowed my hand to move down its back and up over the dorsal fin. The shark didn’t flinch. I was at one with nature, as they say.

I repeated this several times while Phil slept and Mac lay back, unconcerned. As the shark made another orbit, I got on my knees for a better perspective. Suddenly, the shark shot up, shattering the surface, with its mouth agape. It looked like a demon out of hell and tried to snatch me out of the raft. I reacted instinctively and thrust both my palms against its nose, which stuck out about a foot past the mouth, and was able to shove the ravenous creature back into the sea. Then, as its companion tried the same stunt, I grabbed an aluminum oar and jabbed it in the nose. Mac, much to my surprise, hoisted the other oar, and we worked together warding off the predators until they’d had enough.

I congratulated Mac and thanked him for his help. The incident had scared us both, but because of his response to the hairy situation, Mac’s attitude took a turn for the positive. As weak as he was, he performed excellently and had for the first time done something commendable. Now I considered him a credit, not a liability. I was proud of him and told him so.

I also told him I’d never heard of sharks jumping into rafts or even boats. It seemed unbelievable, but later I learned it wasn’t uncommon.

ANY ANIMAL IS
dangerous when hungry. That goes double for man because he’s got the brains and the ingenuity to get what he wants. After days without food, our utter lack of sustenance took a menacing turn. I don’t mean cannibalism. That’s sick. I could never have lived with eating another human being.

I’d been thinking about those two miserable sharks who tried to jump into the raft. They still hung around and had become a thorn in our side, trying to eat us when we weren’t even part of their food chain. But when you’re famished, you take what you can get, and they had tried to take us. I had an idea.

“Turnabout is fair play,” I said to Phil. “The sharks wanted to take us; let’s take them. From now on they’re part of
our
food chain.”

I had it all figured out. Phil would hold the bait, dipping it in and out of the water to get a shark’s attention. Then I’d grab the shark’s tail, haul it into the raft, and kill it.

When the bait tempted a small one, I leaned over the raft and grabbed the tail. Big mistake. Sharks are gritty like sandpaper, and I couldn’t hold on because a five-foot shark is stronger than a six-foot man. It quickly pulled me out of the raft. I forget how I got back in, but I shot out of that water like a Polaris missile. I thought it would turn around and attack me, but I guess it was just as scared as I was.

After that I said let’s forget the five-foot sharks.

A couple of days later we saw some three-and four-footers, and no larger ones. We hung the bait again. This time I decided to get lower in the raft. I grabbed a passing tail and, as quickly as I could, pulled the shark out of the water. Its mouth opened, but Phil was ready, holding an empty flare cartridge. He shoved it in. The shark instinctively closed its mouth and wouldn’t let go of the cartridge. I took the screwdriver end of the pliers, rammed it through the shark’s eye, into its brain, and killed it.

Ripping a shark open without a knife is a very tough job. I’d used the pliers to fashion sawlike teeth on one corner of our chromed-brass mirror. Though sharp enough to open a man’s arm like butter, the shark skin put up a fight. It took almost ten minutes to cut through the belly.

Because of my survival course, I knew that eating raw shark meat
would make us sick. The smell, a bit like ammonia, was bad enough. The only edible part was the liver, a great source of vitamins. On two different occasions we had a luscious, gooey, bloody meal.

Meanwhile, the larger sharks remained our constant companions, often thrusting their heads up out of the water, trying to avenge their brothers by eating us.

OUR ONLY OTHER
source of food came from the sky. Gooney birds—albatrosses—are beautiful and graceful creatures in flight, with six-to eight-foot wingspans. We admired the way they took advantage of the warm tropical breezes to maneuver in all directions, foraging for small fish. Their colors, going from a pure, dominant white to a gorgeous chestnut or black, made them works of art.

Now and then we’d see an albatross fly by, but we never expected to catch one. The sailors’ superstition about killing an albatross was written of in Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” and it seemed a shame to think about eating one, but when the time came we knew it had to be done, superstition or not. I remembered the scene in
Mutiny on the Bounty
when Captain Bligh spots a bird on top of the mast and hits it with an oar. That made sense. Ocean birds will land on whatever’s available. Too bad we didn’t have a mast.

One afternoon, while Phil and Mac slept and I dozed lightly under the sun hood, I saw a shadow and felt something land on my head. I knew that gooney birds usually settle in just after they’ve fed, so if I could catch one, its stomach might still contain small fish. Some we could eat, some we could use for bait.

I lay very still and made my plan. I had to be careful. Any quick movement and the bird would take off. I must have taken two minutes to move my hand into position, though it seemed longer. Then I shot out and grabbed a leg. The gooney sliced at me repeatedly with its razor-sharp beak in an attempt to break free. An albatross beak is serrated, like a knife, and the end is comparable to an eagle’s claw. I still have the scars on my knuckles, and remember the sharp pain. To make it stop I wrung the bird’s neck.

By then, Phil and Mac were awake. We were so hungry that I
immediately tore the gooney apart. I ripped off the feathers and used the mirror teeth to cut the flesh open, dismember it like a chicken, and distribute the parts.

We had only one problem: we couldn’t eat it. The smell was unbearable, gamey, like a dead horse, and the warm blood—gah!—threw our stomachs. An unexpected effect of drifting in a raft on the ocean is that we’d lost our sense of smell. We had no fresh donuts, hot coffee, sizzling steaks, potatoes, or onions to keep that sense stimulated. But it doesn’t really go away, as I discovered when I smelled the raw bird. Nauseated by the pungency, I tossed it overboard.

To remind us of more familiar smells we developed the weird habit of sticking our little fingers in our ears and sniffing the earwax. Very satisfying.

Hunger, of course, prevailed. When we caught the second albatross I said, “Hey, we’re going to have to try and eat at least the breast.”

I didn’t even let it sit in the sun to warm up, perhaps cook a bit. I just tore into the raw meat, and boy, was it hard to swallow. I was also concerned about Mac again. He didn’t look good, and I feared he had begun to fade. By the time I caught the third gooney bird, we weren’t so finicky. I tore off its head and put the bleeding neck into Mac’s mouth and allowed the blood to flow. I squeezed that gooney’s carcass until the last drop went down his throat. We were now so starved that we ate the entire bird with gusto. This time it tasted like a hot fudge sundae with nuts and whipped cream on top. I ate the eyeballs and all the rest, dipping the legs into the salty ocean to give it flavor. It was so delicious we made a humorous vow to eat raw meat the rest of our lives.

ONE MORNING I
caught a dark gray tern and was so famished that while I was killing it I was simultaneously tearing off its feathers with my teeth. Later, my beard itched. At first I couldn’t figure it out, but there was only one explanation: a bird way out in the middle of the clean, beautiful ocean—with lice! I went crazy. I had to get Phil to keep the sharks away while I stuck my head in the water five or six times and tried to wash the bugs out of my beard.

TO COMPENSATE FOR
not having enough real food, I cooked us make-believe meals. This required exhaustive and extensive planning. First I’d create the whole menu. We’d have salad, soup, gnocchi, chicken cacciatore, omelets, steaks, desserts—whatever I’d watched my mother make when I was young and learned to do myself. I’d include bread, wine, olive oil; if I eliminated any step or detail of the preparation, the guys would pounce. “You forgot to grease the skillet,” Phil once chided me. Or “What about the butter? Don’t you need butter in gravy?” I had to say how much salt, how much baking powder—“Just a teaspoon”—how long to bake at what temperature, how much to knead the dough, how to make the crust crispier, how to make spaghetti sauce, or turkey stuffing, how long to bake the turkey. I cooked breakfast every morning, lunch every afternoon, and dinner every evening. I drew the line when they got selfish and wanted brunch—except on Sundays. I did it by the seat of my pants, and it was great because it killed time, it acknowledged but deflected our hunger, and it exercised everyone’s mind, especially mine.