husband and son, she had sold the family house in Terre Haute and moved to Princeton to be closer to her daughter, Martha, and future daughter-in-law, Cecy, with whom she had become dear friends. That evening, when Kelsey was visiting Martha, someone brought her a telegram:
I REGRET TO INFORM YOU THAT THE COMMANDING GENERAL PACIFIC AREA REPORTS YOUR SON—FIRST LIEUTENANT RUSSELL A PHILLIPS—MISSING SINCE MAY TWENTY-SEVEN. IF FURTHER DETAILS OR OTHER INFORMATION OF HIS STATUS ARE RECEIVED YOU WILL BE PROMPTLY NOTIFIED
The telegram reached the Zamperinis that same evening. Louise called Sylvia, who had recently married a firefighter, Harvey Flammer, and now lived in a nearby suburb with her husband. Upon hearing that her brother was missing, Sylvia became hysterical, sobbing so loudly that her neighbor ran to her. When the neighbor asked her what was wrong, Sylvia was crying too hard to speak. Eventually she pulled herself together enough to call Harvey at the fire station. She was frantic and confused and didn’t know what to do. Harvey told her to go to her mother. Sylvia put the phone down and ran straight out the door.
Sylvia sobbed for the entire forty-five-minute drive. Weeks before, just after the Nauru raid, she had picked up her morning paper and seen, on the front page, a photograph of Louie, looking haunted, staring through a gaping hole in the side of
Her father was calm but quiet; her mother was consumed in anguish. Sylvia, who, like the rest of the family, assumed that Louie had gone down in the ocean, told her mother not to worry. “With all those islands,” Sylvia said, “he’s teaching someone hula.” Pete arrived from San Diego. “If he has a toothbrush and a pocket knife and he hits land,” he told his mother, “he’ll make it.”
Perhaps that day, or perhaps later, Louise found the tiny snapshot that had been taken on the afternoon Louie had left, when he had stood beside her on her front steps, his arm around her waist. On the back of the photograph, Louise wrote,
——
The news of Louie’s disappearance headlined California newspapers and led radio broadcasts on June 5. The
Pete called Jordan, and they talked about Louie. As Pete spoke of his hope that Louie would be found, Jordan could hear his voice wavering. Jordan thought about calling Louie’s parents, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it. He had no idea what to say. That evening, he drove home and told his wife, Marge, who had known Louie well at USC. They moved through their routines in a quiet fog, then went to bed and lay awake, in silence.
In Torrance, Anthony Zamperini remained stoic. Louise cried and prayed. From the stress, open sores broke out all over her hands. Sylvia thought her hands looked like raw hamburger.
Somewhere in those jagged days, a fierce conviction came over Louise. She was absolutely certain that her son was alive.
——
On Samoa, Stanley Pillsbury and Clarence Douglas were still in the hospital, trying to recover from the wounds incurred over Nauru. Douglas’s shoulder was far from healed, and to Pillsbury, he seemed emotionally gutted. Pillsbury was in considerable pain. The doctors had been unable to remove all of the shrapnel from his leg, and he could feel every shard, burning. He wasn’t close to being able to walk. In his dreams, planes dove at him, endlessly.
Pillsbury was in his bed when Douglas came in, his face radiating shock.
“The crew went down,” he said.
Pillsbury could barely speak. His first emotion was overwhelming guilt. “If I had only been there,” he said later, “I could have saved it.”
Douglas and Pillsbury said little more to each other. They parted, each man swimming in grief. Douglas would soon be granted transfer back to the States. Pillsbury would linger on his cot in Samoa, hoping that he would one day walk again.*
On Oahu, Louie’s friends gathered in a barracks. In the corner of one of the rooms, they hung a small flag in memory of Zamp. It would hang there as Louie, Phil, and Mac drifted west and the Allies, the 11th Bomb Group’s 42nd squadron among them, carried the war across the Pacific and into the throat of Japan.
*
There was one spot directly west, about halfway to the Marshall Islands, where the ocean floor was just five feet below the surface. It was almost an island, but not quite.
*
As soon as he could walk, Pillsbury was assigned to a new crew to replace a dead waist gunner. Superstitious about adding a new man, the crew received him coldly. On a mission, a Zero tried to ram the plane, and one of its rounds exploded inside the fuselage. The engineer found Pillsbury on the floor with a hunk of metal embedded just above his eye, the white of which was clouding with blood. The plane made a hasty landing, and Pillsbury was bandaged up and sent back to his gun. Somehow, Pillsbury survived the war, a fistful of medals and a permanent limp testifying to all he’d endured. “It was awful, awful, awful,” he said through tears sixty years later. “… If you dig into it, it comes back to you. That’s the way war is.”
Thirst
PHIL FELT AS IF HE WERE ON FIRE. THE EQUATORIAL SUN LAY upon the men, scalding their skin. Their upper lips burned and cracked, ballooning so dramatically that they obstructed their nostrils, while their lower lips bulged against their chins. Their bodies were slashed with open cracks that formed under the corrosive onslaught of sun, salt, wind, and fuel residue. Whitecaps slapped into the fissures, a sensation that Louie compared to having alcohol poured onto a wound. Sunlight glared off the ocean, sending barbs of white light into the men’s pupils and leaving their heads pounding. The men’s feet were cratered with quarter-sized salt sores. The rafts baked along with their occupants, emitting a bitter smell.
