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In the 1930s, America was infatuated with the pseudoscience of eugenics and its promise of strengthening the human race by culling the “unfit” from the genetic pool.
Even Hitler, who had been contorting himself in concert with the athletes, was watching him.
Hitler said something in German. An interpreter translated. “Ah, you’re the boy with the fast finish.”
He took a job as a welder at the Lockheed Air Corporation and mourned his lost Olympics.
In World War II, 35,933 AAF planes were lost in combat and accidents. The surprise of the attrition rate is that only a fraction of the ill-fated planes were lost in combat. In 1943 in the Pacific Ocean Areas theater in which Phil’s crew served, for every plane lost in combat, some six planes were lost in accidents. Over time, combat took a greater toll, but combat losses never overtook noncombat losses.
The surrounding waters were tumbling with sharks, which got trapped in the lagoon at low tide. Bored out of their wits, the local servicemen would tie garbage to long sticks and dangle them over the lagoon. When the sharks snapped at the bait, the men would lob hand grenades into their mouths and watch them blow up.
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 faded the most. Louie and Phil’s optimism, and Mac’s hopelessness, were becoming self-fulfilling.
The men ate every morsel of the bird, and every other bird that they caught, leaving only feathers and bones.
“The general opinion towards POWs at that time was very bad,” wrote Yukichi Kano, a private at another camp who was beloved by POWs he tried to assist. “There was always some risk of to be misunderstood by other Japanese by making humane interpretation of our duty.
The paradox of vengefulness is that it makes men dependent upon those who have harmed them, believing that their release from pain will come only when they make their tormentors suffer.
At first, Graham preached to a half-empty tent. But his blunt, emphatic sermons got people talking.
Louie felt indignant rage flaring in him, a struck match. I am a good man, he thought. I am a good man.
And then, standing under a circus tent on a clear night in downtown Los Angeles, Louie felt rain falling.
He carried the bottles to the kitchen sink, opened them, and poured their contents into the drain. Then he hurried through the apartment, gathering packs of cigarettes, a secret stash of girlie magazines, everything that was part of his ruined years. He heaved it all down the trash chute. In the morning, he woke feeling cleansed.
