Devil at My Heels - Louis Zamperini [59]
As we neared Kwajalein, they brought generous portions of rice, soup, and daikon. My appetite had returned, but it backfired. I got sick as a dog and wanted to die. Two of the crew took me on deck to throw up and held me because there was no railing. Vomiting, I looked straight down about thirty or forty feet to the ocean, hoping they’d let me go.
ON KWAJALEIN I was blindfolded again and transported to shore like a sack of wheat. There four soldiers carried Phil and me to the beach, tossed us into the back of a truck, and drove to a building where they dumped us into separate cells. I skidded on my bottom until my back hit the wall. When I took off my blindfold my brain and my eyes fluttered with the unreality of it all. After nearly two months floating under vast open skies and infinite seas, I found myself locked in a cubicle the size of a dog kennel. The instant claustrophobia made me want to scream, but I was too weak. Instead, I lay down and looked at my body. Just six weeks before I’d been a vigorous athlete who could run a mile in just over four minutes. Now I was fleshless, skeletal. All my life I had kept my emotions tightly in check when it came to my own troubles, but I could no longer help myself.
I broke down and cried.
THE DETENTION BUILDING housed six wooden cells, three to a side. Each was six feet long, six feet high, and thirty inches wide. A ventilation slit on the rear wall was thickly coated with flies. Most tropical buildings stood a couple feet off the ground on stilts to avoid flooding during a monsoon, and the crawl space provided a slight breeze. But with no window, the heat was almost unbearable. Mosquitoes buzzed everywhere. A six-inch-diameter hole cut in the floor and a tin can underneath functioned as my toilet. I looked down and saw the can half full with maggots. Worse, they made me sleep with my head next to the hole and my feet near the door.
The guards shoved food through an eight-inch slot in the cell’s solid wood door. Appetizing it was not. I got whatever was leftover from the men’s mess—fish heads, boiled daikon—not otherwise fed to the pigs. Sometimes they’d reach into the slop bucket, squeeze together a gob of rice the size of a golf ball, and throw it at me. That usually meant an hour or two spent crawling around in the half-light, on the dirty floor, trying to find every grain while the guards howled with delight. Even then I’d have to spit out sand.
The rations were so horrible that I had constant diarrhea and dripped mucus from my rear end. Flies got into the mucus and laid their eggs. Some nights it was so bad that I had to curl up in the back of the cell with my naked butt hanging over the hole, leaking. I’d think I had it under control, then five minutes later it would start again, making sleep impossible.
Most people never understand how bad life can be for prisoners of war because no survivor talks frankly and in detail about these horrible experiences from the banquet dais.
I could tell from his groans that Phil suffered similarly two cells away, but the guards did not allow us to talk. Any attempt meant suffering a swift kick or a poke with a sharp stick. They also beat us regularly.
My new life was no new life at all. Better to starve me, or send me out to sea again on the raft. At least dying that way would allow me some dignity.
I FOUND A crude message carved into my cell wall. 9 MARINES MAROONED ON MAKIN ISLAND—AUGUST 18, 1942. Each name was listed. I knew the date and story well.
Two American submarines had approached Makin at midnight, carrying the Marine Carlson Raiders. Second in charge was James Roosevelt. They went secretly ashore in life rafts, crossing a dangerous reef, sank one ship in the harbor,