Devil at My Heels - Louis Zamperini [141]
“What!?”
It seemed Miles had a report from a Kwajalein native who’d said, “Yeah, nine marines were here. They were executed. I saw one of them killed and buried.”
“How did you know they were marines?” he’d been asked.
“Because they were all white,” the native replied.
Miles wanted to look for the remains of the men whose names were carved into my cell wall.
I also got a not especially congenial call from Washington. “How do you know the nine marines were on that island?”
I said, “I’ll quote you what I wrote in my original report.”
“Were the names written in pencil, or were they inscribed?”
I said, “They were inscribed by a sharp object.”
“What happened to them?”
I told them what the native had told me in 1943: “They were all decapitated, samurai-style,” by two guards.
“Did you get the names?” he asked.
I said, “I looked at them every day and pretty well memorized them. But after that, I never had to use the names again, so now I can’t remember whether they were first names or last names. Seems to me they were last names, but I’ve never had any reason to think of them. After that, all I did was explain why the marines were there. But here’s an idea. You’ve got a list of twenty-four missing marines. You dug up the fifteen on Makin Island, so just subtract their names and you’ve got it.”
“Yeah, but there were a couple of other guys missing, too. Two guys on a raft; a plane from another island strafed them at Makin. One died from bullet wounds, the other hit the water and the sharks got him. So we still don’t know.”
Based on the native’s affidavit, Tim Miles thought he had a pretty good idea where to find the marines. He wanted to take a team down to dig and wanted me there when they did it.
In early 2002 I accompanied a National Geographic team to Kwajalein for a dig. I stayed a week but had to leave before they discovered anything more than an array of munitions, military artifacts, and bones of the Japanese and Marshallese. No marines.
As of now, they haven’t found any American remains. If they ever do, part of me would like to be on hand, but a bigger part of me wouldn’t. I’ve lived through a lot, but the thought of staring into a mass grave that could have easily been my final resting place is something I believe I can just live without.
I NEVER MET General MacArthur, but with all due respect, I have never agreed when he said, “Old soldiers never die, they just fade away.” Fade away? You should make your life count right up to the last minute. All I want to tell young people is that you’re not going to be anything in life unless you learn to commit to a goal. You have to reach deep within yourself to see if you are willing to make the sacrifices. Your dreams won’t always come true, but you’ll never know if you don’t try. Either way, you will always discover so much of value along the way because you’ll always run into problems—or as I call them, challenges. The first great challenge of my life was when, as a kid, I made the transition from a dissipated teenager to a dedicated athlete. Another was staying alive for forty-seven days after my plane crashed, then surviving prison camp. The best way to meet any challenge is to be prepared for it. All athletes want to win, but in a raft, in a war, you must win. Luckily, and wisely, I was prepared—and I did win.
I’ve gone through my life drawing from my experiences both positive and negative to try and influence others for the good. I never thought of myself as a hero, more a grateful survivor, and so the verse “To whom much has been given, much is expected” is the nucleus from which I deal with people. God has been so good to me. I didn’t know at first that I had anything to give, but when I see my influence and how appreciative people sometimes are, what can I do? There are no words more gratifying to hear than “The help you gave me is working out.”
GOD HAS GIVEN me so much. He expects much out of me.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Louis Zamperini
Whatever I have accomplished I owe to the sacrifices of my mother and father; to the support