Devil at My Heels - Louis Zamperini [43]
When my ears popped I knew I was about twenty feet beneath the surface. As I sank deeper I felt a pain in my forehead like I’d never experienced, much less ever imagined, as if someone had hit me with a huge sledgehammer. My sinuses seemed about to burst; the headache was unbearable. This is hopeless, I thought. What can I do? Nothing. I can’t budge the wires. I’m sinking. My air is about gone. I have to accept it.
I’m going to die.
I lost consciousness and everything faded to black.
AND THEN FOR some unexplained reason my eyes opened.
Was I dreaming? Maybe I’m dead, I thought. Maybe this is the afterlife.
I figured out pretty quickly that the afterlife—at least the one I’d counted on—was probably not a wet, cold, and gloomy place in which my lungs screamed for air. I was still underwater, some seventy feet down, but I found myself completely free of my death trap and floating upward. My arms reached out blindly, hands searching, and then I felt a tug. My USC ring had snagged on the right waist window. I immediately grabbed the frame with my left hand, and although I thought my lungs would burst, I arched my back and squeezed through the opening, scraping the skin off my back.
I knew I had to inflate my Mae West—my life jacket. I could do it either of two ways. In the plane we blew them up by mouth. I couldn’t do that underwater with no air. The other way was the CO2 cartridge packed into each vest. Sounds easy enough except that most vests didn’t have cartridges because the men always swiped them—sometimes even from other airplanes—so they could make soda water to go with their Scotch.
Luckily I still had a functioning cartridge and the jacket inflated. Then I rose toward the light for what seemed like forever, swallowing seawater mixed with gasoline, oil, hydraulic fluid, blood. When I broke the surface I gasped for air and threw up. The whole thing had taken maybe fifteen seconds; I had operated on pure instinct. All I could see was fire on the water. As I caught my breath it hit me that I was alone, floating in the vast Pacific, hundreds of miles from land, the ocean floor far below and my despair perhaps even deeper.
SUDDENLY I HEARD a cry for help. Through a break in the smoke to my left I saw an auxiliary gas tank float by, twenty feet away, with Phil and Francis P. McNamara, the tail gunner, clinging to the side. Their eyes were wild and strange. Blood gushed from a deep triangular gash on Phil’s head.
I looked around for any of the remaining eight crewmen but saw no one. We three were alone with the bobbing debris and our knowledge that with blood in the water the sharks would soon arrive en masse. That scared the heck out of me, especially when I saw two life rafts that had been automatically ejected from the plane drifting away from the wreckage on the current.
I wanted to help Phil and Mac, but to lose our only means of survival would be crazy. The guys could wait. I made for the nearest raft, but with clothes and shoes on I couldn’t keep up. It was a pointless chase; the rafts were moving farther away. I’d just about given up when I spotted the last three feet of the hundred-foot nylon parachute cord attached to the raft. I managed to grab the rope and reel in our new home.
I climbed in, unhooked the oars, and rowed back to the bomb-bay tank hoping Phil hadn’t passed out or bled to death. I helped him and Mac into the raft and immediately put pressure on Phil’s carotid artery. From my survival training I knew about the little dip in our jawbones and how to find the artery there. The bleeding slowed.
“Mac, take off your T-shirt and soak it in the