Devil at My Heels - Louis Zamperini [26]
Los Angeles sportswriter Braven Dyer had called me “the greatest distance runner the Far West has ever produced.” Now I feared he’d been wrong and there would never be a four-minute mile for Louis Zamperini.
UNWILLING TO GIVE up, I kept training for the 1940 Olympics coming that September. But one day, while my dad timed me, I collapsed on the track. Then I fell in a race. Cromwell tried to help, but no one really knew what to do. He sent me to a dentist—why?—who diagnosed the problem as an infected wisdom tooth. He pulled it, but my chest still hurt. I saw another doctor, who took out a tonsil. No improvement. A third doctor punctured my sinuses and flushed them out. That didn’t work, either. My times just kept getting worse.
After graduating from USC, several of us went to Lockheed to find work. Even with college degrees we couldn’t get decent jobs. I wanted to work in an office, but they said, “You’ll do manual labor first, then apply for an office job.” They hired me as a spot welder, pending a physical. After the exam the doctor surprised me with the straight dope. “Do you realize your whole right lung is full of pus?” he said. “What?”
“You have pleurisy. You’ve had it for months. You’re the runner, right? I don’t know how you finished a race with a lung full of pus. You only used one lung.” The mystery of my pain solved, I got a shot, took antibiotics, and started working out again. Soon I felt like a tiger, but it was all for nothing. In the meantime, Japan had invaded Manchuria and taken island after island in the Pacific. The 1940 Olympic Games were canceled, and my dreams came crashing down.
4
ON A WING AND A PRAYER
It didn’t take long for me to move into to the Expediting Department at Lockheed. I got to dress in nice clothes, too. But it was just temporary. With the world at war, I knew America could be drawn in anytime. During lunch, I’d watch one P-38 after another fly in and out of the company airfield. I figured it would be exciting to be up there myself, so I applied to the army air corps.
MY PRIMARY TRAINING started on March 19, 1941, at the Hancock College of Aeronautics in Santa Maria, just south of San Luis Obispo, in California. They’d named the field after Captain G. Allan Hancock, a big oilman who built the Hancock Library of Biology and Oceanography at USC. He also created Hancock Park in Los Angeles, a famous mid-Wilshire neighborhood, on part of the land left to him by his father, Major Henry Hancock.
I drove north with a couple of buddies. The army took pictures of me in my tracksuit, posing in a racer’s starting-line crouch, on an airplane wing. Because of my track career, I was always good for some free publicity, and I was happy to help. After a few weeks of ground studies they finally put me in a training plane. What a shock. I’d flown to New York on commercial planes, but it’s different in a small craft. Some guys loved it. I didn’t. At first I got a little disoriented, twisting and turning, but when they put me through the “spins,” that was it.
I had a better time on the ground. We got weekends off, and most of us went into town to drink. That was fine as long as you didn’t come back drunk. If you did, the MPs would haul you to the infirmary and forcefully inject a 15 percent Argyrol solution straight up your penis. It burned and you’d scream your head off and not sleep well that night. They said it was for our own good, though. The air corps didn’t want anyone to catch VD from the girls in town. I heard more than one recruit protest, “No, I didn’t have any sex with any woman.” But who trusts a drunk?
I didn’t fool around, but one night I came back not walking a straight line, and I knew they wanted to give me the Argyrol. Instead,