the ground, Halloran was beaten by a mob of civilians, then captured by Japanese authorities, who tortured him, locked him in a pig cage, and held him in a burning horse stall during the firebombings. They stripped him naked and put him on display at Tokyo’s Ueno Zoo, tied upright in an empty tiger cage so civilians could gawk at his filthy, sore-encrusted body. He was starved so severely that he lost one hundred pounds.
After liberation and eight months in a hospital, Halloran went home to Cincinnati. “I was not the same 19- year-old Raymond whose mother kissed him goodbye that fall morning in 1942,” he wrote. He was intensely nervous and wary of anything approaching him from behind. He couldn’t sleep with his arms covered, fearing that he’d need to fight off attackers. He had horrific nightmares, and would wake running in his yard, shouting for help. He avoided hotels because his screaming upset other guests. More than sixty years after the war, he was still plagued by “poor inventory control,” keeping eight pillows and six clocks in his bedroom, buying far more clothes and supplies than he’d ever need, and stockpiling bulk packages of food. And yet Halloran was fortunate. Of the five survivors of his crew, two drank themselves to death.*
Some former POWs became almost feral with rage. For many men, seeing an Asian person or overhearing a snippet of Japanese left them shaking, weeping, enraged, or lost in flashbacks. One former POW, normally gentle and quiet, spat at every Asian person he saw. At Letterman General Hospital just after the war, four former POWs tried to attack a staffer who was of Japanese ancestry, not knowing that he was an American veteran.
Troubled former POWs found nowhere to turn. McMullen came out of Japan racked by nightmares and so nervous that he was barely able to speak cogently. When he told his story to his family, his father accused him of lying and forbade him to speak of the war. Shattered and deeply depressed, McMullen couldn’t eat, and his weight plunged back down to ninety pounds. He went to a veterans’ hospital, but the doctors simply gave him B12 shots. As he recounted his experiences to a military official, the official picked up a phone and began talking with someone else. After two years, McMullen got his feet under him again, but he would never really recover. Sixty years after VJ Day, his dreams still carried him back to the camps. Recounting his war experiences was so painful that it would leave him off-kilter for weeks.
The Pacific POWs who went home in 1945 were torn-down men. They had an intimate understanding of man’s vast capacity to experience suffering, as well as his equally vast capacity, and hungry willingness, to inflict it. They carried unspeakable memories of torture and humiliation, and an acute sense of vulnerability that attended the knowledge of how readily they could be disarmed and dehumanized. Many felt lonely and isolated, having endured abuses that ordinary people couldn’t understand. Their dignity had been obliterated, replaced with a pervasive sense of shame and worthlessness. And they had the caustic knowledge that no one had come between them and tragedy. Coming home was an experience of profound, perilous aloneness.
For these men, the central struggle of postwar life was to restore their dignity and find a way to see the world as something other than menacing blackness. There was no one right way to peace; every man had to find his own path, according to his own history. Some succeeded. For others, the war would never really end. Some retreated into brooding isolation or lost themselves in escapes. And for some men, years of swallowed rage, terror, and humiliation concentrated into what Holocaust survivor Jean Amery would call “a seething, purifying thirst for revenge.”
——
The honeymoon in the mountains had been Cynthia’s idea. Louie loved her for being so sporting, and for choosing something so dear to his heart. “You must look about you and remember what the trees + hills, streams + lakes look like,” he wrote to her before their wedding. “… I will see you among them for life.” Drifting off beside Cynthia each night, Louie still saw the Bird lurking in his dreams, but the sergeant hung back as if cowed, or perhaps just waiting. It was the closest thing to peace that Louie had known since
The drive back to Los Angeles carried them from the great wide open to the confines of Harry Read’s mother’s house. Cynthia was uncomfortable living there, and Louie wanted to give her the home she dreamed of. He needed to find a career, but was unprepared to do so. Having left USC a few credits short, he had no college degree, a critical asset in a job market glutted with veterans and former war production workers. Like many elite athletes, he had focused on his sport throughout his school years and had never seriously contemplated life after running. Now nearly thirty, he had no idea what to do for a living.
Cynthia Zamperini on her honeymoon.
He made no effort to find a real career or a nine-to-five, salaried job. His celebrity drew people into his orbit, many of them hawking ventures in which he could invest his life insurance payoff, which he’d been allowed to keep. He went to military-surplus sales, bought Quonset huts, and resold them to movie studios. He did the same with iceboxes, then invested in a telephone technology. He turned respectable profits, but each investment quickly ran its course. He did, however, earn a steady enough income to rent an apartment for himself and Cynthia. It was only a tiny place in a low-rent quarter of Hollywood, but Cynthia did her best to make it homey.
At the end of his first day in the new apartment, Louie slid into bed, closed his eyes, and fell into a dream. As always, the Bird was there, but he was no longer hesitant. The sergeant towered over Louie, the belt flicking from his hand, lashing Louie’s face. Every night, he returned, and Louie was helpless once again, unable to flee him or drive him away.
Louie threw himself into training. His long hikes became runs. His strength was coming back, and his dodgy leg gave him no pain. He took it slowly, thinking always of London in ’48. He was aiming for the 1,500 meters, and assured himself that if he couldn’t make it, he’d return to the 5,000, or even the steeplechase. But without extending himself, he began clocking miles in 4:18, just two seconds slower than the winning time of the Zamperini Invitational that he’d seen in March. He was coming all the way back.
But running wasn’t the same. Once he had felt liberated by it; now it felt forced. Running was joyless, but Louie had no other answer to his internal turmoil. He doubled his workouts, and his body answered.
One day, with Cynthia standing by, holding a stopwatch, Louie set off to see how fast he could turn two miles. Early on, he felt a pulse of pain dart across his left ankle, just where it had been injured at Naoetsu. He knew better than to keep pushing, but pushing was all he knew now. As he completed the first mile, barbs of pain were crackling through his ankle. On he went, running for London.
Late in his last lap, there was an abrupt slicing sensation in his ankle. He half-hopped to the line and collapsed. His time was the fastest two-mile run on the Pacific coast in 1946, but it didn’t matter. He was unable to walk for a week, and would limp for weeks more. A doctor confirmed that he had disastrously exacerbated his war injury. It was all over.
——
Louie was wrecked. The quest that had saved him as a kid was lost to him. The last barricade within him fell. By day, he couldn’t stop thinking about the Bird. By night, the sergeant lashed him, hungry and feral. As the belt whipped him, Louie would fight his way to his attacker’s throat and close his hands around it. No matter how hard
