Unbroken
by Laura Hillenbrand
Introduction:
All
he could see, in every direction, was water.
It was late June 1943. Somewhere
on the endless expanse of the Pacific Ocean, Army Air Forces bombardier and
Olympic runner Louie Zamperini lay across a small raft, drifting westward. Slumped alongside him was a sergeant, one of
his plane's gunners. On a separate raft,
tethered to the first, lay another crewman, a gash zigzagging across his
forehead. Their bodies, burned by the
sun and stained yellow from the raft dye, had withered down to skeletons. Sharks glided in lazy loops around them,
dragging their backs along the rafts, waiting.
The
men had been adrift for twenty-seven days.
Borne by an equatorial current, they had floated at least one thousand
miles, deep into Japanese-controlled waters.
The rafts were beginning to deteriorate into jelly, and gave off a sour,
burning odor. The men's bodies were
pocked with salt sores, and their lips were so swollen that they pressed into
their nostrils and chins. They spent
their days with their eyes fixed on the sky, singing "White
Christmas," muttering about food.
No one was even looking for them anymore. They were alone on sixty-four million square
miles of ocean.
A
month earlier, twenty-six-year-old Zamperini had been one of the greatest
runners in the world, expected by many to be the first to break the four-minute
mile, one of the most celebrated barriers in sport. Now his Olympian's body had wasted to less
than one hundred pounds and his famous legs could no longer lift him. Almost everyone outside of his family had
given him up for dead.
On
that morning of the twenty-seventh day, the men heard a distant, deep
strumming. Every airman knew that sound:
pistons. Their eyes caught a glint in
the sky - a plane, high overhead.
Zamperini fired two flares and shook powdered dye into the water,
enveloping the rafts in a circle of vivid orange. The plane kept going, slowly
disappearing. The men sagged. Then the sound returned, and the plane came
back into view. The crew had seen them.
With
arms shrunken to little more than bone and yellowed skin, the castaways waved
and shouted, their voices thin from thirst.
The plane dropped low and swept alongside the rafts. Zamperini saw the profiles of the crewmen,
dark against bright blueness.
There
was a terrific roaring sound. The water,
and the rafts themselves, seemed to boil.
It was machine gun fire. This was
not an American rescue plane. It was a
Japanese bomber.
The
men pitched themselves into the water and hung together under the rafts,
cringing as bullets punched through the rubber and sliced effervescent lines in
the water around their faces. The firing
blazed on, then sputtered out as the bomber overshot them. The men dragged themselves back onto the one
raft that was still mostly inflated. The
bomber banked sideways, circling over them again. As it leveled off, Zamperini could see the
muzzles of the machine guns, aimed directly at them.
Zamperini
looked toward his crewmates. They were
too weak to go back in the water. As
they lay down on the floor of the raft, hands over their heads, Zamperini
splashed overboard alone.
Somewhere
beneath him, the sharks were done waiting.
They bent their bodies in the water and swam toward the man under the
raft.
Conclusion:
On
the morning of January 22, 1998, snow sifted gently over the village once known
as Naoetsu. Louis Zamperini, four days
short of his eighty-first birthday, stood in a swirl of white beside a road
flanked in bright drifts. His body was
worn and weathered, his skin scratched with lines mapping the miles of his
life. His old riot of black hair was now
a translucent scrim of white, but his blue eyes still threw sparks. On the ring finger of his right hand, a scar
was still visible, the last mark that Green
Hornet had left in the world.
At
last, it was time. Louie extended his
hand, and in it was placed the Olympic torch.
His legs could no longer reach and push as they once had, but they were
still sure beneath him. He raised the
torch, bowed, and began running.
All
he could see, in every direction, were smiling Japanese faces. There were children peeking out of hooded
coats, men who had once worked beside the POW slaves in the steel mill,
civilians snapping photographs, clapping, waving, cheering Louie on, and 120
Japanese soldiers, formed into two columns, parting to let him pass. Louie ran through the place where cages had
once held him, where a black-eyed man had crawled inside him. But the cages were long gone, and so was the
Bird. There was no trace of them here
among the voices, the falling snow, and the old and joyful man, running.
What
did the author do that was so effective?
- For both introduction and conclusion,
she captured the attention of the audience.
What
tool or approach did she take?
- She conveys quite a bit of emotion
through imagery, engaging anecdotes, and enough background information. Her descriptions come close to full circle
and yet the emotion behind the descriptions has changed from the beginning to
the end.
Why
was she effective?
- She was effective because her purpose
was fulfilled through the emotion and character she uses. Her purpose is to make the reader feel or at
least ponder how this experience would have felt.
