Unbroken_ A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption - Laura Hillenbrand [70]
Every conversation meandered back to food. Louie had often boasted to Phil about his mother’s cooking, and at some point, Phil asked Louie to describe how she made a meal. Louie began describing a dish, and all three men found it satisfying, so Louie kept going, telling them about each dish in the greatest possible detail. Soon, Louise’s kitchen floated there with them: Sauces simmered, spices were pinched and scattered, butter melted on tongues.
So began a thrice-daily ritual on the raft, with pumpkin pie and spaghetti being the favorite subjects. The men came to know Louise’s recipes so well that if Louie skipped a step or forgot an ingredient, Phil, and sometimes Mac, would quickly correct him and make him start over. When the imaginary meal was prepared, the men would devour every crumb, describing each mouthful. They conjured up the scene in such vivid detail that somehow their stomachs were fooled by it, if only briefly.
Once the food was eaten and the past exhausted, they moved to the future. Louie laid plans to buy the Torrance train depot and turn it into a restaurant. Phil fantasized about getting back to Indiana, maybe to teach school. He couldn’t wait to see the Indy 500 again. The race had been suspended because of the war, but Phil revived it in his mind, spreading a blanket on the infield grass, heaping it with food, and watching the cars blur past. And he thought about Cecy. It hadn’t occurred to him to tuck her picture in his wallet before he left the cottage, but in his mind, she never left him.
For Louie and Phil, the conversations were healing, pulling them out of their suffering and setting the future before them as a concrete thing. As they imagined themselves back in the world again, they willed a happy ending onto their ordeal and made it their expectation. With these talks, they created something to live for.
In all of these bull sessions, not once did they broach the subject of the crash. Louie wanted to talk about it, but something about Phil stopped him. There were times when Phil seemed lost in troubled thoughts, and Louie guessed that he was reliving the crash, and perhaps holding himself responsible for the deaths of his men. Louie wanted to reassure Phil that he’d done nothing wrong, but he decided that raising the issue would deepen Phil’s preoccupation. So he said nothing.
——
As Louie and Phil grilled each other, Mac usually sat in silence. Sometimes he’d ask Louie to describe a recipe, and occasionally he would interject, but getting him to fully participate was rough going. He shared few memories, and though the other two encouraged him, he couldn’t imagine a future. To him, it seemed, the world was too far gone.
Given the dismal record of raft-bound men, Mac’s despair was reasonable. What is remarkable is that the two men who shared Mac’s plight didn’t share his hopelessness. Though Phil was constantly wondering how long this would go on, it had not yet occurred to him that he might die. The same was true for Louie. Though they both knew that they were in an extremely serious situation, both had the ability to warn fear away from their thoughts, focusing instead on how to survive and reassuring themselves that things would work out.
It remains a mystery why these three young men, veterans of the same training and the same crash, differed so radically in their perceptions of their plight. Maybe the difference was biological; some men may be wired for optimism, others for doubt. As a toddler, Louie had leapt from a train and watched it bear his family away, yet had remained cheerfully unconcerned about his safety, suggesting that he may have been a born optimist. Perhaps the men’s histories had given them opposing convictions about their capacity to overcome adversity. Phil and Louie had survived Funafuti and performed uncommonly well over Nauru, and each trusted the other. “If there was one thing