Unbroken

This past summer was undoubtedly the most difficult stretch of weeks of my life, both personally and professionally.  On the job, I was in the throes of a very difficult training program in an occupation fraught with danger, both physical and liability wise.  And things were not going real great.  At home, my wife was pregnant with our second child who was determined to force his entry into this world long before we expected him.  As a result, my wife had to be hospitalized, but the baby still came 10 weeks early and had to stay in the hospital for five weeks.  I took six weeks off of work and ended up deciding to take a voluntary demotion to be assured I could hold onto my health insurance and a job (remember, the training wasn't going great).

In the midst of all that, my parents gave me Laura Hillenbrand's latest book, Unbroken.  My dad had just finished it himself and gave it to me as an encouragement that even the most daunting of obstacles could be overcome.  After reading it, my problems this summer seem like the smallest of small potatoes.

Unbroken is the story of Louie Zamperini, son of Italian immigrants in post-war (as in WWI) Southern California.  At every stage of his life, Louie seems to be something out of a work of fiction.  As a child, he was as unruly as they come.  Smoking at five, drinking at eight, and an accomplished thief before junior high, his parents worked as hard at setting and enforcing boundaries as Louie did at breaking them.  He was the bane of his teachers and neighborhood windowsill pie coolers.  As big-hearted as he was mischievous, his older brother Pete once commented that Louie would give anything away, whether it was his or not.  More clever than your average pint-sized scamp, he once cut a deal with a rival to stage fights at the circus when he discovered adults would give quarters to kids to convince them to stop.

By the time he was nearing high school, Louie decided he had had enough of people trying to restrain him. After an argument with his father Louie packed a bag and left. It took only a few days before Louie realized his mistake and returned home, vowing to do better.

In high school, Pete, a star athlete himself, convinced Louie to go out for track. He saw potential in Louie, but even he could not have imagined the wealth of talent Louie had for running (a skill no doubt honed by years of running from his victims of thievery). Louie would go on to become one the greatest high school runners in American history, specializing in the mile.  He finished high school in 1935 and set his sights on making the Olympic team for the 1936 Berlin Summer Games.  However, there wasn't time to train sufficiently to make it as a miler, but Pete convinced him to attempt to qualify for the 5,000 meters, a race Louie had never run competitively.  Amazingly Louie qualified.  In the medal race Louie struggled early, but finished so fantastically that Hitler himself wanted to meet him and shake his hand.

After the 1936 Olympics Louie returned home with thoughts of college and training for the 1940 Games in his preferred field, the mile.  History had other plans.  The 1940 Olympics were to held in Tokyo, but were cancelled because of WWII.  Louie was crushed.  With the United States hurtling towards war, Louie enlisted in the Army, but washed out of the Army Air Corps and got a job as a movie extra.  What happened next was classic Louie:

He was working on the set of They Died with Their Boot On,...when a letter arrived.  He'd been drafted.  The induction date fell before the [film] would wrap, and Louie stood to earn a bonus if he stayed through the shoot.  Just before his army physical, he ate a fistful of candy bars; thanks to the consequent soaring blood sugar, he failed the physical.  Ordered to return a few days later to retake the test, he went back to the set and earned his bonus.  Then, on September 29, he joined the army.

Ironically, Louie ended up in the Air Corps anyway, as the bombardier on a B-24 Liberator, or as it was affectionately named by it's crews The Flying Coffin.  Louie and his crew were sent to the Pacific which, as fairly incredible as his life had already been, is where the story of Louie Zamperini really begins.

Louie flew a number of harrowing bombing and reconnaissance missions in the flying coffin, including one where the crew counted 594 bullet holes in their plane after they returned.  The beauty of his tropical island base was balanced by the horrors of war and the possibility that the next mission would be the last.  But the terrors of a bombing mission were nothing compared to what Louie was soon to endure.

The inevitability eventually caught up to Louie and his crew mates and their flying coffin finally lived up to its billing.  Shot down over the Pacific, Louie survived the crash with only two of the other nine crew members. Given what they were to face in the coming months, it may have seemed a better option to have been killed in the crash.  It's hard to imagine a worse scenario than three men, two badly injured, one physically and one mentally, on a tiny raft in the middle of the Pacific Ocean with virtually no provisions, but it did in fact get worse.  Progressively worse.  Just when you think it couldn't possibly, it somehow impossibly does.

The three survivors were punished with scorching sun in the daytime and bitter cold at night.  If they caught a scrawny bird to eat they considered it a feast.  And then there were the sharks.  From the very outset the shark attacks were unrelenting.  The accounts of these battles with the sharks would sound completely implausible had they not actually occurred.  Then when they spotted a plane and thought rescue was assured, they were met with strafing machine gun fire, filling their already dilapidated raft full of holes and making the men even more vulnerable to shark attacks.

When rescue did come, it was emblazoned with the Rising Sun.  Taken to a Japanese internment camp Louie may have expected to find some bit of respite despite being in the hands of the enemy.  At least there would be no sharks.  But man is often crueler than nature, and Louie was tormented by his captors.  They beat him, starved him, humiliated him and then did it again the next day.  One guard in particular, already widely known among Allied prisoners as being especially sadistic, made Louie his personal plaything.  The Bird, as he was called by his charges, took a kind of sick pleasure in treating Louie as mercilessly as possible.  It went beyond physical torment.  The Bird would beat Louie within inches of his life one day and the next day invite him to his bunk for tea and treat him cordially.  When it was discovered by the Japanese that Louie was a famous Olympian, they tried to use him as a propaganda tool.  The Bird took even greater pleasure in humiliating the once great, but now frail and mostly defenseless athlete.  For nearly two years Louie endured the worst treatment imaginable, and its hard to imagine him not longing for the days of shark attacks.

Miraculously, Louie never gave in to what had to be an unrelenting urge to just quit.  Either to let himself be beaten down (figuratively, as well as literally) and give up the will to live, or to take matters into his own hands and end the suffering.  But the boy who would not be contained or repressed was alive and well in Louie the man and he soldiered on.  After the war Louie was rescued and reunited with his family, who never gave up hope even though they were told he had been killed in action.

Understandably, Louie's return to normal life was anything but normal.  Haunted by his experiences, Louie drank and became an angry, surly soul.  The War Department sent him on countless speaking engagements around the country, which only served to grind down on him further.  He married not long after returning home, to a girl whose affluent parents were not thrilled by her daughters choice.  The strain that put on the marriage only made Louie drink more.  Between that and The Bird following him in his dreams, Louie sank further into depression and hatred, bent on returning to Japan someday, finding The Bird, and murdering him.

However, his emotional state became just another obstacle that Louie would overcome in his incredible life.  At the prodding of his wife he attended a Billy Graham crusade and eventually gave his life to Christ.  Louie became a different person.  He quit drinking and took to speaking about his recent transformation.  He was still determined to return to Japan, but not for his original purpose.  He had experienced forgiveness firsthand, and was now willing and able to forgive those who had made his life a living hell.

That's where I'll leave it.  I don't consider any of this to be spoilerish, as with a title like Unbroken you would expect there to be an uplifting ending.  Besides, Louie is a fairly well known personality, having carried the Olympic torch at a number of Games, including those in Nagano, Japan.  And yes, he is, not surprisingly I suppose, in his 90's and very much alive.

The book serves the purpose my parents had in mind, serving to encourage anyone facing long odds that success or survival is possible.  But it also serves as a motivator.  This guy went through all this and then had the will to remake his life when throwing in the towel would have seemed a reasonable option.  What am I doing with my life.

The book reads easy and you want to turn from one unbelievable page to the next to see what awful horrors Louie had to endure and how he endured them.

There are some pretty good videos on YouTube about Louie, including a profile CBS News did on him that aired (I think) during the Nagano Olympics.  I'd wait until reading the book to watch them, but if you're too lazy to read, I guess you could watch them instead.