moved to a nursing home. When the staff learned his war story, they scheduled an event to honor him. It was probably the first time that what he’d done during the war was publicly recognized not simply in reference to Louie, but for its own sake. For the only time in his life, Allen became an open book. As people gathered to listen to his story, spellbound, Karen saw a lovely light come to her father’s face. There was, she said, “a little grin underneath.”
——
The men who had befriended Louie in captivity found their way back into civilian life. Some flourished; some struggled for the rest of their lives. There was one terrible loss.
Bill Harris ended the war in grand style, plucked from Omori to stand on the
In September 1950, Harris was driving down a highway when the police pulled him over. He was being called to command a battalion in Korea and had to leave the next day. Before he left, he told his wife that if his luck went bad, he wouldn’t allow himself to be captured again.
Before dawn on December 7, 1950, Harris stood on a frozen Korean mountain with his weary battalion, which had seen such horrendous fighting that it had lost three-quarters of its men. That morning, it was serving as the rear guard for a convoy. As the convoy crossed an open area in the dark, a vast, entrenched Chinese force ambushed it from point-blank range. What Harris did next became Marine Corps legend. He gathered his men and, under murderous fire, led them straight at the Chinese. They took heavy casualties but held the Chinese off long enough for the convoy to escape.
Bill Harris with his daughter Katey in 1950. He disappeared a few months later.
When dawn came, no one could find Harris. The last time anyone had seen him, he’d been heading up a road, carrying two rifles. His men searched for hours but found no trace of him. They concluded that he’d again been captured.
For his actions that night, Harris won the Navy Cross, an award second only to the Congressional Medal of Honor. General Clifton Capes kept the medal in his desk in hopes that Harris would come home to receive it. He would not. Thirty-two-year-old William Harris was never seen again. When America’s Korean War POWs were released, none of them reported having seen him. He was simply gone.
Many years later, Harris’s family received a box of bones, apparently returned by North Korea. The remains inside were said to match those of Harris, but the reports were so incomplete that the family was never sure if it was really Bill whom they buried in a church cemetery in Kentucky. What actually happened on that morning in 1950 remains unknown.
——
After the war, Pete married a Kansas City beauty named Doris, had three kids, and devoted his life to the work he’d been born to do. He coached football at Torrance High, winning the league championship, then moved on to Banning High, in Wilmington, to coach track and football. In thirty years of Banning track, he had only one losing season. Coach Zamperini was so beloved that upon his retirement in 1977, he was feted by eight hundred people on the
“I’m retired; my wife is just tired,” Pete used to say, and he loved the motto so much that he had it printed on his business cards. But in truth, retirement never really took. At ninety, Pete had the littlest kids in his neighborhood in training, fashioning dumbbells out of old cans, just as his dad had done for Louie. He’d lead the kids onto his sidewalk and cheer them on through sprints, handing out a dime for each race run, a quarter for a personal best.
Pete was more troubled by Louie’s war experience than Louie was. In 1992, he served as escort for a group of students on an ocean fishing trip. Though the vessel was a spanking new, ninety-foot ship, the prospect of being at sea terrified Pete. He showed up with a ridiculously comprehensive assortment of safety items, including a heavy- duty plastic bag to use as a flotation device, a floatable flashlight, a six-foot lanyard, a whistle, and a pocketknife, which he imagined flailing at any sharks who tried to eat him. He spent the trip staring ambivalently at the water.
At the end of his life, Pete remained as dedicated to Louie as he’d been in boyhood. He assembled a scrapbook thick with clippings and photographs of Louie’s life, and would happily give up his afternoons to talk about his brother, once spending nearly three hours on the phone with a reporter while sitting in a bath towel. At ninety, he still remembered the final times of Louie’s races, to the fifth of a second, three-quarters of a century after Louie had run them. Like Payton Jordan, who went on to coach the 1968 U.S. Olympic track and field team, Pete never stopped believing that Louie could have run a four-minute mile long before Roger Bannister became the first man to do it, in 1954. Many decades after the war, Pete was still haunted by what Louie had endured. When describing Louie’s wartime ordeal to an audience gathered to honor his brother, Pete faltered and broke down. It was some time before he could go on.
On a May day in 2008, a car pulled to a stop before Pete’s house in San Clemente, and Louie stepped out. He had come to say good-bye to his brother; Pete had melanoma, and it had spread to his brain. Their younger sister Virginia had died a few weeks before; Sylvia and Payton Jordan would follow months later. Cynthia, as gorgeous and headstrong as ever, had succumbed to cancer in 2001, drifting off as Louie pressed his face to hers, whispering, “I love you.” Louie, declared dead more than sixty years earlier, would outlive them all.
Pete was on his bed, eyes closed. Louie sat beside him. Softly, he began to talk of his life with Pete, tracing the paths they had taken since pneumonia had brought them to California in 1919. The two ancient men lingered together as they had as boys, lying side by side on their bed, waiting for the
Louie spoke of what a feral boy he had once been, and all that Pete had done to rescue him. He told of the cascade of good things that had followed Pete’s acts of devotion, and the bountiful lives that he and Pete had found in guiding children. All of those kids, Louie said, “are part of you, Pete.”
Pete’s eyes opened and, with sudden clarity, rested on the face of his little brother for the last time. He couldn’t speak, but he was beaming.
——
In the fall of 1996, in an office in the First Presbyterian Church of Hollywood, a telephone rang. Louie, then a
