Devil at My Heels - Louis Zamperini [45]
We had no knife, and I couldn’t make one appear out of thin, warm salt air. As for provisions, between the two rafts, we had six bars of chocolate and eight half-pint tins of water. Designed as survival food, the chocolate bars were big, divided into six sections, and meant to last about a week. The instructions were to eat only one section a day, and to take thirty minutes to do it. The chocolate was fortified—it said so in big letters on the package—with all the vitamins, minerals, and protein anyone in an emergency would need.
I took the water and chocolate from Phil’s raft and placed it in mine. It didn’t seem like a lot, but that didn’t bother me. We were only two hundred miles—or ninety minutes—north of Palmyra, and eight hundred miles south of Hawaii. I was sure that the search-and-rescue planes would find us soon.
WHEN LIFE INSTANTLY and drastically takes you completely by surprise, the first reaction is confusion. If one minute you’re following a normal routine in an airplane, motors roaring, and a couple of minutes later the plane crashes and you’re on a raft, lost and adrift in a vast, loud silence, the disorientation is, at best, intense. Then a new world unfolds. You need time to understand and figure out what’s happening. Fate had thrown us into 65 million square miles of salt water and stillness. I couldn’t hear the wind; I couldn’t hear birds; I couldn’t hear waves. I felt like one minute I’d been watching television and the next I’d suddenly found myself on the moon.
With Phil patched up and Mac subdued, I finally had a moment to settle back and think, but I found no peace of mind. I thought of the eight other crewmen and the sharks that never slept, but that was too horrible to contemplate. Instead I tried to figure out how we three had survived. That was easy: we’d all been on the right side of the plane. Phil, because he’d switched seats with Cupernell. I’d been at the right waist window, and Mac had been behind me. The impact threw Mac free when the tail snapped off, but I could hardly imagine how Phil had made it. Anyone familiar with a B-24 cockpit knows how tough it is to get in or out on a good day. Phil should have been dead. The cockpit must have split apart when the nose hit the water. Because he was on the right side and up higher than Cupernell, who probably died instantly, the force pushed Phil through the opening, tearing his scalp on the way.
That left me. More than Phil or Mac, I should be dead. I began to focus on my miraculous escape from an impossible situation, and I had one simple question: “How did I get loose?” I relived every moment trying to find a logical answer. I went through it repeatedly. My ears had popped, I felt the unbearable pressure on my forehead, I lost consciousness…then my eyes opened and I was free. But how? Again: my ears popped, I felt the pressure…I was free. It made no sense. If the water pressure had knocked me out at a certain depth and at that point I was still sinking, why didn’t the increasing water pressure keep me out? Not to mention that the tripod was bolted to the deck and wrapped in metal wire.
I had no choice but to believe that something strange and wonderful had happened, and I was at a loss to understand it.
Memories surfaced of all the times since childhood I’d narrowly escaped death or horrible injury. Then I thought of a letter I’d sent just that morning to Payton Jordan, a friend in navy preflight school who’d been a USC sprinter and would later become an Olympic coach. I’d stuffed it in my pocket, intending to mail it, when we got the call to report for the rescue mission. I discovered it just before takeoff and tossed it out the window to one of the ground crew. “Mail this for