Devil at My Heels - Louis Zamperini [140]
Ignoring the handrail—and my age—I came down snappy. I knew I had to try.
I walked briskly onto the tarmac. The colonel in command saluted and shook my hand, then escorted me and Cissy to a room and presented us with a book on Kwajalein.
“This is our gift to you,” he said.
I thanked him and reached into my bag and brought out a bottle of French champagne. They’d had a little contest among the four hundred passengers on our flight over: “We’ve been flying at a certain air speed, head winds have been this much—how long have we been aloft?” Easy. I wrote down two hours and twenty-eight minutes. Half an hour later they announced, “The French champagne has been won by the person sitting in seat 41-E.”
I wasn’t paying attention, but Cissy said, “Daddy, you won the champagne!”
The flight attendant brought me a bottle wrapped in a white cloth napkin. I’d put it in my bag and had forgotten about it until now.
“Here,” I said to the colonel. “I won this on the flight over. My gift to you.”
THEY LEFT US alone for a couple of hours, to relax. My room had cherry furniture with a high-gloss shine. A huge TV. Better than the Hilton. I lay on the very comfortable bed and kept thinking about the Kwajalein cell I’d once occupied. Now I was on cloud nine. It was my finest hour. The only thing missing was Cynthia.
Whatever Preston, the protocol chief, scheduled for us, I drank it all in. Would you like to play golf? Great! Can you get up at five-thirty? Sure! We had a ball. A lot happened. They found an old map of the island from before it had been bombed, pieced it together from sections, and ran it through a huge laminator. Preston asked if I could pick out my old prison quarters. I remembered coming off the boat, blindfolded, riding in a truck, driving to the right. I pointed to where I thought I’d lived for forty-three days, and Preston took me to the spot. Nothing was the same, of course. It was a well-paved street. Trees, houses, families.
Nothing was the same for me, either. I was greeted, honored, loved, fed.
Most of the workers live on Kwajalein, but a lot of people work on Roi-Namur, another island in the atoll, only a half-hour flight away. There all the old Japanese bunkers still stand, with the grass neatly mowed around them. It takes two hours to tour. We saw one building that hadn’t been hit by shells and had iron prison bars on the windows. Today the natives swear they once saw a tall, slender woman with blond hair and a work suit standing behind the bars just around the time Amelia Earhart disappeared. The old-timers today say they’ve never heard of Amelia Earhart but that there was a woman there who matched her description.
If the pleasure of my arrival was a big surprise, the difficulty saying good-bye was another. It was hard to leave those people. They were so gracious and wonderful. They couldn’t do enough for us. Every night a different family threw a dinner for us. We’d have a glass of wine and a toast, and great food. The guests were always fascinating.
Kwajalein was nothing short of a utopia. Everybody rides a bicycle. Nobody’s in a hurry. When I got back to Los Angeles I kept thinking, Would I like to go back? As soon as we hit the freeway and fought rush-hour traffic back to the house, I knew the answer.
Three days later I got a call from Preston. “The people here just love you and your daughter.” He told me that just before we left he’d gone to the colonel and said, “I’ve been doing this for fourteen years. All the people who came here, I couldn’t wait until they left. But as far as I’m concerned, Louie and Cissy can stay forever.”
I NEVER THOUGHT I’d return, but the next day I heard from a man based at Hickam Field on Oahu. “This is Tim Miles,” he said. “I’m in charge of military I.D. We have a staff of anthropologists here. We went to Makin, dug up the remains of fifteen marines there, and did a DNA test on them. Now we want to go to Kwajalein.”
“I just came back from Kwajalein four