• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

——

The freighter arrived on July 15. Louie and Phil were taken into the hold and housed separately. The captain had bountiful portions of food sent to them. The prisoners ate all they could.

One of the cruelties of starvation is that a body dying of hunger often rejects the first food it is given. The food on the atoll had apparently agreed with the castaways, but not the food on the freighter. Louie spent much of that day hunched over the ship railing, vomiting into the sea, while a guard held him. Phil’s meal left him almost as quickly, but by a different route; that evening, he had to be taken on at least six runs to the head.

As the freighter drew up to Kwajalein on July 16, the Japanese became harsh. On came the blindfolds, and Louie and Phil were taken onto what seemed to be a barge. When the barge stopped, they were picked up, heaved over men’s shoulders, and carried. Louie felt himself bobbing through the air, then slapped down on a hard surface. Phil was dropped beside him. Louie said something to Phil, and immediately felt a boot kick into him as a voice shouted, “No!”

An engine started, and they were moving. They were on the flatbed of a truck. In a few minutes, the truck stopped, and Louie was tugged out and flung over a shoulder again. There was walking, two steps up, a darkening, the sense that Phil was no longer near him, and the disorienting feeling of being thrown backward. Louie’s back struck a wall, and he fell to a floor. Someone yanked off his blindfold. A door slammed, a lock turned.

At first, Louie could barely see. His eyes darted about uncontrollably. His mind raced, flitting incoherently from thought to thought. After weeks of endless openness, he was disoriented by the compression of the space around him. Every nerve and muscle seemed in a panic.

Slowly, his thoughts quieted and his eyes settled. He was in a wooden cell, about the length of a man and not much wider than his shoulders. Over his head was a thatched roof, about seven feet up. The only window was a hole, about a foot square, in the door. The floor was strewn with gravel, dirt, and wiggling maggots, and the room hummed with flies and mosquitoes, already beginning to swarm onto him. There was a hole in the floor with a latrine bucket below it. The air hung hot and still, oppressive with the stench of human waste.

Louie looked up. In the dim light, he saw words carved into the wall: NINE MARINES MAROONED ON MAKIN ISLAND, AUGUST 18, 1942. Below that were names: Robert Allard, Dallas Cook, Richard Davis, Joseph Gifford, John Kerns, Alden Mattison, Richard Olbert, William Pallesen, and Donald Roberton.

In August 1942, after a botched American raid on a Japanese base at Makin in the Marshall Islands, nine marines had been mistakenly left behind. Captured by the Japanese, they had disappeared. Louie was almost certainly the first American to learn that they had been taken to Kwajalein. But other than Phil and Louie, there were no prisoners here now. Louie felt a wave of foreboding.

He called to Phil. Phil’s voice answered, distant and small, somewhere to the left. He was down the hall in a squalid hole like Louie’s. Each man asked the other if he was okay. Both knew that this was likely the last time they would talk, but if they wished to say good-bye, neither had the chance. There was shuffling in the corridor as a guard took up his station. Louie and Phil said nothing else.

Louie looked down at his body. Legs that had sprung through a 4:12 mile over bright sand on that last morning on Kualoa were now useless. The vibrant, generous body that he had trained with such vigilance had shrunken until only the bones remained, draped in yellow skin, crawling with parasites.

All I see, he thought, is a dead body breathing.

Louie dissolved into hard, racking weeping. He muffled his sobs so the guard wouldn’t hear him.

* Several days later, a catastrophic typhoon, almost certainly the same storm, plowed into the coast of China, collapsing homes, uprooting telephone poles, and causing extensive