Unbroken And The Tale Of Almost Broken And Hurt People

When Louie and Phil were helped onto the Japanese boat, the Japanese hurt them. A person came in and stopped the beating. They were given some food. Then they were moved to a different boat. The people on that boat gave them more food and some coconut. Someone came up to them and asked them questions about their journey.

When the boat approached an island, Louie and Phil were blindfolded and helped off the boat. Louie felt that he was being laid down on something soft. His blindfold was taken off. They were in an infirmary, a camp hospital, laying on beds. Japanese man spoke and repeated what he said in English. He said that Louie and Phil were American flyers, and to treat them gently.

A smiling doctor walked in and gave the men medicine for their wounds. The men each took turns standing on a scale. Once fit men that weighed over a hundred-five pounds, now weighed under ninety pounds. The doctor had a variety of food brought in. Louie and Phil ate. After they were finished eating, the men were sat down and asked how they ended up in the ocean. Louie told the story, while the Japanese men sat and listened.

The men knew where they had crashed, but did not know where they ended up. The Marshall Islands, they were told. They had drifted two thousand miles! Two beds were made for the men. They laid down to sleep. Slipping between the cool sheets of the beds, the men felt safe. Phil had a happy thought before drifting off into dreamland. “These people are our friends”. Louie and Phil stayed in the infirmary for two days, while being helped out by kind Japanese. On the third day, an officer came, bringing food and news. The men were being moved to another camp. When the name of the island was given to the men, they got scared. The name of the island was Kwajalein.

When the boat started heading to the new camp, Louie and Phil were treated well. But when they started nearing the island, the Japanese suddenly got rough. The men were blindfolded and were roughly carried off the boat. The Japanese dropped them on something hard. When Louie tried saying something to Phil, he was kicked.

An engine started and they were moving. They were on a truck. After a few minutes, Louie felt someone carrying him, and then he was being pushed. His back hit a wall and he slid down. Then someone roughly took off his blindfold, slammed the door and locked it.

At first, Louie couldn’t see. His mind was racing. He had been so used to having so much space around him and now he was confused with the tightness of the cell around him.

Slowly, his thoughts slowed down and his eyes focused. He was in a cell that was a little longer than his body and a little wider than his shoulders. There was a small window on the cell door. The floor was covered with dirt, gravel, sand, and maggots. There was a hole in the floor, with a bucket in it. The air still smelled like human waste. The air was filled with flies and mosquitoes that were already on him. The air was hot. The air was hot. Louie looked at the wall and saw something carved into it. On the wall were the words NINE MARINES MAROONED ON MAKIN ISLAND, AUGUST 12, 1942. Below it was nine names.

In August 1942, after an American air raid on Makin, nine marines had been accidentally left behind. When they were taken by the Japanese, the men disappeared. Louie was sure that he was the first one to know that they had been taken to Kwajalein. Louie called to Phil. he answered. They asked each other if they were okay. Phil was in a cell similar to Louie’s.the men knew that this could be the last time that they could talk to each other. Guards went to their stations at their doors. The men went quiet. Louie looked down at himself. All he saw were legs used to run that 4-minute mile, now useless. His ribs poked out from under his skin. He was bones covered in yellow skin. Louie started crying. He covered his sobs so the guard could not hear him.

Food was thrown into Louie’s cell and a small cup of tea was set on the windowsill. He drank the tea quickly and crawled around picking up crumbs and ate them. There was some noise outside. A native’s face appeared into his cell door window and greeted Louie by name and in English. Louie was confused. The native was a track fan and Louie was the talk of the island. After the native talked about sports and track, he looked at his watch and said that it was time for him to leave. Louie asked what happened to the men that were there. They died, the native said, all POWs on Kwajalein died. As the man left, the guard looked rudely at Louie, made a slashing gesture at his throat, pointed at the names on the wall, and then pointed to Louie.

Another day began. Louie became bent over with diarrhea. Flies, lice, and mosquitoes swarmed on him. Down the hall in Phil’s cell, rats played in his waste bucket and ran over his face. The guards would always beat up the men, leaving them in pools of spit, piles of rocks and sticks, and cigarette buds. Days passed, bringing less food and more diarrhea. Louie’s diarrhea was now bloody. He begged for water but got the same result every time, hot water splashed in his face. He kept begging and after a while, he gave up when his face blistered.

One day, Louie was taken out of his cell and into the interrogation room. They had a table full of food there to persuade him to give them answers. The people asked him questions about the planes, bombsight, and radar. When he gave the answer about the bombsight, they knew he lied. They sent him back to his cell with no food.

Knowing that he might be brought back again, he thought of questions that they would ask. He thought of the things that he could share and things he had to keep a secret. He made up lies and practiced telling them. Since he was sort of truthful the first time, they were most likely to trust his answers next time.

One day, Louie had a new guard at his cell. He felt upset. The guard asked Louie if he was Christian. Louie said yes. The guard said that he was Christian, too. He gave Louie and Phil two pieces of candy each. The guard’s name was Kawamura. The next day, Louie had a different guard. The guard threw himself at Louie with a stick, like he wanted to take his eyes out. When Kawamura saw Louie’s bloody face, he got mad. He asked who did it. Louie told him and Kawamura sped away. Later, Kawamura opened Louie’s cell door just a crack to show him that the guard that had hurt him was now in bandages.

One day, Louie and Phil woke up to screaming and yelling. There was a crew of men that were spitting on them, throwing rocks and sticks and were beating them up. Later when Kawamura found Louie in his cell, he was laying in pools of spit, piles of rocks and sticks, and bloody. Kawamura told the men that the people that had beat them up were a submarine crew stopping by. When they learned that Americans were being held there, they got really mad.

After about three weeks on Kwajalein, Louie and Phil were dragged out of their cells and taken to the interrogation room porch. There they were greeted by men in lab coats. They held needles filled with a muddy liquid. The men were going to be used for an experiment. When injected, Louie saw the room starting to spin and he was getting light-headed and dizzy. The doctors asked if there was anything wrong with the men. Louie shouted that he was going to pass out. The doctors took out the needle and sent the men back to their cells. The men started getting rashes. A few days later, the effects wore off. They would be injected again. This would go on for weeks until they had a full pint of liquid pumped into their body.

Bruised, beaten, and sick, Louie returned to the interrogation room for the last time. The interrogators pushed a map in front of Louie and told him to tell them where the exact location of the bases are. Louie did not want, but the interrogators pushed hard on him. Finally, Louie broke. He lowered his head and told them everything, the exact places of the bases, and how many planes that were there. The Japanese were happy. They opened a bottle of cola and gave it to him along with a biscuit and a pastry.

It was all a lie. The “bases” he pointed out, were fake airfields he had seen fooling around on Hawaii. The only planes that they would destroy, would be made out of wood. A few days later, Louie and Phil were told that they were being moved to a different camp in Japan. The men were led out of their cells for the last time. As Louie walked away from Kwajalein, he looked back for Kawamura. He was nowhere to be seen.

There was something odd about the new camp. It was a cold day in September 1943. Louie stood on Japanese soil for the first time. Louie’s nose was bloody. On the boat ride to Japan, drunk sailors came up to the men. One asked Phil if he thought that Japan was going to win the war. He had said no. someone smacked him the face. They then asked Louie who he thought would win the war. He had said America. The sailors jumped on the captives. A fist smacked Louie in the nose, and he heard a loud crunch. Someone ran in to stop the beating.

The new camp was worse than Kwajalein. He was not well fed, not well sheltered, and not tended for by the Red Cross. Each day began at six. A clanging bell woke them up and they ran outside. men counted off, bowed towards the palace, and ran off to the bathroom. They ate their horrible breakfast in their cell alone. They would then wash the aisle, do horrible activities outside, then stand outside no matter what. Phil was being moved to a different camp. There he was going to work in a copper mine, but he was told that he could write home there.

Louie was desperate for food. He would take any job to get some. He even stole some from the kitchen. That could have gotten him killed. One day, Louie saw a fish covered in maggots, in the place that the captives wash their feet in. When he saw it, he pulled back. A guard saw him and beat him. Later, the fish was given to him for the evening meal. He would not touch it until a guard made him eat it. Louie, Harris, and Tinker were going to escape. Just before they were going to escape, a captive from another camp escaped. They couldn’t leave now, without facing the dangers of it. One day Louie and a few other people were being moved to a different camp. One where Louie kept thinking that he would still be treated well. He was not.

In the POW camp, many of the POWs worked in factories and railways. What the POWs could steal, they might steal it. The POWs there started a “University” and the “Professors” there were the best stealers. One day Louie and 14 other officers were called out. They were going to a new camp. Louie and the other officers rode in a train to get where they were going. When they got there, they realized that they were at a high cliff, and it was covered in snow. The officers were told to walk to a shack and stand at attention. Then a door slammed open and a man ran out, screaming Japanese. It was the Bird. Louie fainted.

For the next weeks or month or months, Louie was beaten by the Bird. He could tell that the Bird had hand-picked him from the other camp. One day, a group made a plan. They were going to kill the Bird. They were tired of him screaming and yelling at them. One group was in charge of a plan to drag the Bird to the top floor of the barracks. Another group was in charge of getting a giant rock that they would latch him to. Louie was in charge of getting the rope. The plan was set. One day, the captives would jump on the Bird and drag him upstairs to the top floor of the barracks. They then would latch him to the rock with the rope and push him out of the window and into the river. He would never breathe again.

A few weeks after that plan was made, the men were working when they realized that there were no guards there watching them. A captive stated waking through the halls of a factory and saw the guards in an office. They were listening to a radio. The captive walked up to a guard nicknamed Bad-Eye and asked what was going on. He was told that the war was over. He started crying. He ran off to find the other men and tell them. The others didn’t believe him. They had been lied to before about the war being over.

The next day, a high-ranked officer called out to the men. A translator was standing behind him. The officer said something and the translator told them what he said in English. The war was over. All the men still doubted it. The men were invited to the river to bathe. The men ran down to the river, stripped, and jumped in. Then they heard a roar of an engine. They looked up. A plane was headed straight for them. The plane was not Japanese, it was American. The pilot of the plane dropped a note and it said that food would be here soon. Then he dropped a pair of pants stuffed with chocolate and cigarettes. It had a magazine in it, too. On the front page was a massive cloud rising from the Earth. That was one of the atomic bombs that the Americans had dropped on Japan.

The next day, planes came by but they had no food, so the pilots put on an airshow instead. The airshow convinced the Japanese to give out food. A group of captives found relief boxes sent by the Red Cross, behind a bunch of crates. The men ate a lot of those relief boxes. The next day when the food came, it was just a bunch of duffel bags with barely any food in them. Worried that that couldn’t be enough for the men, someone had another captive write 700 POWS HERE on the roof of the barracks.

The next day, the Americans sent in the big boys. 6 loaded B-29s. Crates dropped from the sky swinging from red, white, and blue parachutes. The men feasted. The men crammed their stomachs full and then had seconds and then thirds. The men slept well that night. When the B-29s returned with more food, someone had another captive write DROP HERE in the road to prevent disaster. Then someone wrote THANKS, NO MORE on the barracks roof.

One day, most of the men finally left. Someone staying with the rest of the men to make sure that they get home safely. As Louie walked away from the camp, he left the war behind him.