felt as if he were in the sweetest of dreams.
On he went to Hawaii. Seeing the condition of the POWs, American authorities had decided to hospitalize virtually all of them. Louie was checked into a Honolulu hospital, where he found himself rooming with Fred Garrett. It was the first time that Louie had slept on a mattress, with sheets, since the first days after his capture. He was given a new uniform and captain’s bars, having been promoted during his imprisonment, as most army POWs were. Trying on his new clothes, he pulled off his beloved muslin shirt, set it aside, and forgot about it. He went downtown, then remembered the shirt and returned to retrieve it. It had been thrown away. He was heartbroken.
Louie and Fred hit the town. Seemingly everyone they met wanted to take them somewhere, feed them, buy them drinks. On a beach, they made a spectacle of themselves when Fred, feeling emasculated by the pity over his missing leg, flung away his crutches, hopped over to Louie, and tackled him. The wrestling match drew a crowd of offended onlookers, who thought that an able-bodied soldier was beating up a helpless amputee. Swinging around Hawaii, getting drunk, knocking heads with Fred, Louie never left himself a moment to think of the war. “I just thought I was empty and now I’m being filled,” he said later, “and I just wanted to keep being filled.”
——
That October, Tom Wade walked off a transport ship in Victoria, Canada. With a multitude of former POWs, he began a transcontinental rail journey that became a nonstop party, including eight impromptu weddings. “I must have kissed a thousand girls crossing the continent,” Wade wrote to Louie, “and when I walked through the train with lipstick all over my face after the first station, I was the most popular officer on the train.” In New York, he was taken aboard the
On October 16, Russell Allen Phillips, wearing his dress uniform and captain’s bars, stepped off a train in Indiana. He’d been gone for four years. His mother, his sister, and a throng of friends were there. A telegram had come from his father, who was soon to return from Europe: THANK THE LORD GREAT DAY HAS ARRIVED. WELCOME HOME MY SON. There, too, was the woman whose image had sustained him. Cecy was in his arms at last.
At Kelsey’s house in Princeton, they sat Allen down on the front steps, and he grinned while they snapped his picture. When they got the print back, someone wrote one word on it:
Four weeks later, in a wedding ceremony officiated by Reverend Phillips at Cecy’s parents’ house, the hero finally got the girl. Allen had no car, so he borrowed one from a friend. Then, as he had promised in a letter so long ago, he ran away with Cecy to a place where no one would find them.
Russell Allen Phillips arrives at his mother’s house. On the back of this photo, someone wrote, “Home!”
——
Pete was so anxious to see Louie that he could hardly bear it. The fighting had ended in mid-August, it was now October, and still Louie was hospital-hopping far from home. Then Pete learned that Louie was finally stateside, transferred from Hawaii to San Francisco’s Letterman General Hospital. As soon as he got the news, Pete went AWOL. He bummed a ride to San Francisco on a navy plane, hitched his way to Letterman, and walked in. At the front desk, he called Louie’s room. A minute later, Louie bounded into the lobby.
Each felt startled by the sight of the other. Pete had expected Louie to be emaciated and was surprised to find him looking almost portly. Louie was disturbed to see how the years of worry had depleted his brother. Pete was gaunt, and he’d gone largely bald. The brothers fell together, eyes shining.
Pete and Louie spent several days together in San Francisco while doctors finally cured Louie of his dysentery. After reading the Trumbull article, Pete had worried that Louie might be severely traumatized, but as the two laughed and kidded each other, his fears faded. Louie was as upbeat and garrulous as ever. Once, when a group of reporters shuffled in to interview Louie, they crowded around Pete, assuming that of the two men, this haggard one had to be the POW.
On a drizzling October day, the army sent a banged-up B-25 to San Francisco to bring Louie home. Pete, still AWOL, went aboard with his brother. The plane lifted off and rose over the clouds into a shining blue morning. Scared to death of flying, Pete tried to distract himself from the plane’s rattles and groans by staring out over a carpet of bright clouds, the upside of the rainstorm. He felt as if he could step from the plane and walk on them.
Over Long Beach, they sank back into the rain and landed. There, bursting from army cars, were their mother and father, and Sylvia and Virginia. The moment the plane stopped, Louie jumped down, ran to his sobbing mother, and folded himself around her.
“
Louie’s homecoming, Long Beach Airport. Foreground, left to right: Virginia, Sylvia, Louise, and Louie.
*
One POW’s worst nightmare came true. Upon liberation, he was told by a reporter that his wife, believing him dead, had just married his uncle. When she learned that her first husband was alive, the woman immediately had her new marriage annulled and got the Associated Press to deliver a message to her lost husband: “I love only you, Gene. Please forgive me.”
*
Louie was luckier than he knew. Another transport crashed on takeoff, in part because several Dutch POWs had overloaded the plane by packing aboard a large cache of GI shoes that they intended to sell back home. Everyone on the plane died. Another POW transport was lost over the ocean.
The Shimmering Girl
ON AN OCTOBER AFTERNOON, LOUIE STEPPED OUT OF AN army car and stood on the lawn at 2028 Gramercy Avenue, looking at his parents’ house for the first time in more than three years.
