Quotes About Survival

The crash of Green Hornet had left Louie and Phil in the most desperate physical extremity, without food, water, or shelter. But on Kwajalein, the guards sought to deprive them of something that had sustained them even as all else had been lost: dignity.

In September 1942, a B-17 crashed in the Pacific, stranding nine men on a raft. Within a few days, one had died and the rest had gone mad.

Four more times the Japanese strafed them, sending Louie into the water to kick and punch at the sharks until the bomber had passed.

The next morning, Louie was taken to an airfield to be flown to Okinawa, where many POWs were being collected before being sent home. Seeing a table stacked with K rations, he began cramming the boxes under his shirt, brushing off an attendant who tried to assure him that he didn't have to hoard them, as no one was going to starve him anymore. Looking extremely pregnant, Louie boarded the plane.

Both men survived, and as terrible as their experience had been, they were lucky. All over their captured territories, the Japanese were using at least ten thousand POWs and civilians, including infants, as test subjects for experiments in biological and chemical warfare. Thousands died.

What mystified Louie was his escape from the wreckage. If he had passed out from the pressure, and the plane had continued to sink and the pressure to build, why had he woken again? And how had he been loosed from the wires while unconscious?

Louie and Phil's hope displaced their fear and inspired them to work toward their survival, and each success renewed their physical and emotional vigor. Mac's resignation seemed to paralyze him, and the less he participated in their efforts to survive, the more he slipped. Though he did the least, as the days passed, it was he who faded the most. Louie and Phil's optimism, and Mac's hopelessness, were becoming self-fulfilling.

With arms shrunken to little more than bone and yellowed skin, the castaways waved and shouted

the record for inflated raft survival appears to have been set in 1942, when three navy plane crash victims survived for thirty-four days on the Pacific before reaching an island, where they were sheltered by natives.

Louie, declared dead more than sixty years earlier, would outlive them all.

the AAF surgeon general suggests that in the Fifteenth Air Force, between November 1, 1943, and May 25, 1945, 70 percent of men listed as killed in action died in operational aircraft accidents, not as a result of enemy action.

alive.3 Johnny found myriad avenues of

In the distance, the bomber swung around and began flying at the rafts again. Louie hoped that the crew had realized the mistake and was returning to help them. Flying about two hundred feet over the water, the bomber raced at them, following a path slightly parallel to the rafts, so that its side passed into view. All three men saw it at once. Behind the wing, painted over the waist, was a red circle. The bomber was Japanese.

Louie never saw a Chong diner finish his meal.

actress Esther Williams on the wall. The note that Louie had left on the locker was gone, as was the liquor. Among Louie's things, Krey found photographs that Louie had taken inside his plane. In some of them, Louie

They were alone on sixty-four million square miles of ocean. A month earlier

Zamperini looked toward his crewmates. They were too weak

On Kwajalein, Louie and Phil leared a dark truth known to the doomed in Hitler's death camps, the slaves of the American South, and a hundred other generations of betrayed people. Dignity is as essential to human life as water, food, and oxygen.

Louie grabbed the flare gun, loaded it, and fired. The flare shot straight at the bomber; for a moment, the men thought that it would hit the plane. But the flare missed, passing alongside the plane, making a fountain of red that looked huge from the raft. Louie reloaded and fired again. The plane turned sharply right. Louie fired two more flares, past the tail.

Though all three men faced the same hardship, their differing perceptions of it appeared to be shaping their fates. Louie and Phil's hope displaced their fear and inspired them to work toward their survival, and each success renewed their physical and emotional vigor. Mac's resignation seemed to paralyze him, and the less he participated in their efforts to survive, the more he slipped. Though he did the least, as the days passed, it was he who

The only break in the gloom came from a guard who would saunter down the barracks aisle, pause before each cell, raise one leg, and fart at each captive. He never quite succeeded in farting his way down the entire cell block.

Laura Hillenbrand

Dignity is as essential to human life as water, food, and oxygen. The stubborn retention of it, even in the face of extreme physical hardship, can hold a man's soul in his body long past the point at which the body should have surrendered it. The loss of it can carry a man off as surely as thirst, hunger, exposure, and asphyxiation, and with greater cruelty. In places like Kwajalein, degradation could be as lethal as a bullet.

The average army or army air forces Pacific POW had lost sixty-one pounds in captivity, a remarkable statistic given that roughly three-quarters of the men had weighed just 159 pounds or less upon enlistment.