book recommendation

I haven't done a lot of reading this year-- much to my chagrin-- but  just finished a book my dad recommended, Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand.  It's a biography of Louie Zamperini-- an Olympic runner who joined the Air Force in WWII, was sent to the Pacific to fight, ends up being "lost at sea" for 47 days before getting captured by the enemy, the Japanese. From then on, for the next two and half years, he is in prisoner of war camps and treated so inhumanly it seems completely made up; no one can possibly have been treated this badly. I'm very familiar with WWII in Europe and the plight of the Jews, but I was unprepared for the cruelty that was displayed by the other WWII enemy to its captured.

Through the years of wearing the same clothes (he literally wore the same shirt and pair of pants the entire time), suffering with dysentery, being beaten half-unconscious or all the way unconscious nearly everyday for months, resisting the urge to be used as a propaganda tool and having comforts, carrying tons, literally tons of coal daily for weeks, losing over half of his body weight, resorting to stealing to keep from dying, etc. Louie kept living. He never gave up and always had hope that one day the war would end and he could go home to his family.

I cried as I read about the war ending and the jubilation of the POWs as their captors left and they were finally free. I cried as he got off a plane and ran into his mother's arms. I cried as I read about the PTSD that beset Louie at home and the horrible lifestyle he picked up in reaction to his flashbacks and dreams. I cried as I read about his reawakening to God and remembering all the miracles that kept him alive through his war ordeal. I cried as I read about the sincere forgiveness the POWs offered to their Japanese guards years after the war. I cried as Louie got to carry the torch for the Nagano Olympics past the camp where he had suffered the most, through a column of Japanese guards and civilians who had worked at that camp.  (it probably doesn't help that I'm sort of an emotional, vulnerable wreck at this point in time!)

The subtitle of this book is "A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption". And this is what it is. War books are usually very disheartening to me but this one was fascinating with the details about the war that were meticulously researched and the conversations resulting from interview after interview with people who were there.

One of my favorite passages came when Louie was listening to a new preacher, Billy Graham, and Louie remembered floating in the ocean, lost, dying, and he reflected, "above, the sky had been a swirl of light; below, the stilled ocean had mirrored the sky, its clarity broken only by a leaping fish. Awed to silence, forgetting his thirst and his hunger, forgetting that he was dying, Louie had known only gratitude. That day, he believed that what lay around them was the work of infinitely broad, benevolent hands, a gift of compassion... when he turned these memories in his mind, the only explanation he could find was one in which the impossible was possible... what God asks of men, is faith... when he thought of his history, what resonated with him now was not all that he had suffered but the divine love that he believed had intercepted to save him. He was not the worthless, broken, forsaken man that the Bird had striven to make of him. In a single, silent moment, he rage, his fear, his humiliation and helplessness, had fallen away. That morning, he believed, he was a new creation." (p. 174-6)

Read it.