Our grand business is not to see what lies dimly at a distance, but to do what lies clearly at hand.”
Thomas Carlyle
Last week I wrote a mammoth post (over 4,000 words) on my new year’s resolution for 2019: to build more RESILIENT thinking patterns into my life.
In that post, I described twelve thinking patterns that, according Dr. Kathryn Connor and others, most resilient individuals share.
I personally have committed to studying and trying to implement one of these each month of 2019.
The resilience characteristic for January is to JUMP INTO ACTION. The basic idea here is learning not to take stressful situations lying down, but to form an action plan for dealing with them.
In this blog post, I want to unpack that a little more by sharing the story of one inspirationally resilient individual, along with four lessons I learned from his life.
As a boy, Louie Zamperini was a brash and reckless delinquent. To say he got into trouble often would be a gross understatement.
Laura Hillenbrand, Louie’s biographer, noted that stories from his childhood usually ended the same way: “…and then I ran like mad.”1 He frequently had to – quite literally – outrun the victims of his pranks and thievery, the police, his parents, and others hot on his tail.
His older brother Pete was his savior.
Pete channeled all of Louie’s prodigious athletic ability into running track in high school. He broke several records, eventually becoming the fastest American high school miler up to that time. He was the youngest distance runner ever to make the U.S. Olympics team2 and participated in the 1936 games in Berlin, Germany.
In 1941, Louie enlisted in the U.S. Army Air Corps, eventually making second lieutenant. He was assigned work as a bombardier, the crew member aboard a bomber aircraft responsible for the strategic targeting of bombs.
In April 1943, Louie and his crew mates were sent on a bombing mission to the Japanese-occupied island of Nauru in the Pacific Ocean. Their B-24 sustained such heavy damage in combat that it was no longer considered flight-worthy.
The crew was transferred to Hawaii to await re-assignment to another B-24. They were given The Green Hornet, an aircraft so clunky that it was not usually used for military missions.
On May 27th, The Green Hornet crew were ordered to search for and rescue the crew of another aircraft thought to have made a forced landing near the island of Palmyra. About eight hundred miles south of Oahu, two of the four motors on the Green Hornet sputtered, shuddered, and died. The aircraft dropped like a rock into the ocean, killing eight of the eleven men on board.
Louie was one of the three survivors.
That he survived at all was nothing short of miraculous. The impact of the crash had flung him into the waist gun mount. The tail end had snapped off; the wires of that part of the electrical system whipped and coiled around Louie’s body and bound him fast. In his confused and panicked mind, the morass of wires felt like “spaghetti.”
As the Hornet sank in the cold Pacific water, Louie struggled futilely to free himself. His ears popped; he vaguely realized this meant he was at least twenty feet down. And still dropping.
He was caught in wires’ death grip when he lost consciousness.
But then, for some inexplicable reason, he jolted back to consciousness – and found himself floating free of the wires.
Louie broke through a window and swam through the jagged glass into open water. His lungs screaming for air, he deployed the carbon dioxide cartridge in his life jacket. This was another stroke of luck – or something more. Back on base, the cartridges had often been pilfered to make soda water for the men’s Scotch. The gas propelled him seventy feet upward from the submerged craft.
He was one of three men to surface.
Resilience Lesson #1: Never Give Up.
The other two survivors were pilot Russell Allen Philips and tail gunner Francis McNamara.
Louis, Phil, and Mac had two life rafts and a limited supply of food and water. At first, they hoped that another rescue mission would be sent for them. But soon they realized that their small rafts would appear as no more than small specs on the vast, blue and white ocean, all but invisible from the sky.
Mac panicked and ate most of their food rations.
It is at this point in Louie’s extraordinary story that I start to catch glimpses of his resilient soul, glinting and gleaming under the harsh Pacific sun.
In his autobiography, Devil at My Heels, Louie wrote:
For a moment anxiety clutched me; the sea could swallow us all. But rather than give in, I made myself a promise: no matter what lay ahead, I’d never think about dying, only about living. Despite our situation, I felt so fortunate to be alive that I was actually happy. Maybe it seems odd now, but it didn’t then.”3
So he set about the business of surviving.
Resilience Lesson #2: Take Action on the Task at Hand.
For over thirty days, Louie, Phil, and Mac subsisted on captured rainwater, raw fish caught with homemade fishing gear, and the odd seabird that naively landed on their rafts.
Though rescue planes failed to see them, enemy planes did. Japanese bombers flew low over the ocean surface, strafing the rafts with machine gunfire (“strafing” comes from the German strafen, to punish).
Louie had learned in Boy Scouts that water causes bullets to lose their deadly force. So to escape the onslaught from above, the three men dove overboard and stayed a few feet underwater.
This worked — the bullets pierced the rafts (destroying one), but then sank lazily into the sea. Despite multiple attacks, none of the men were hit.
But this was not the only enemy to contend with. Sharks often circled below, looking for a man-sized meal. In the midst of slowly sinking bullets, the men had to kick and punch the bloodthirsty beasts to fend them off.
The sharks were not as easily deterred as the bombers. One tried to jump into the single remaining raft — Mac redeemed himself by smacking it squarely in the face with an oar.
Resilience Lesson #3: Believe in the Future.
To stave off incessant fears and hunger pangs, Louie learned to keep his mind active. He spent hours performing mental exercises of all kinds: shopping for and cooking imaginary meals for Phil and Mac, doing double column math problems.
But while he and his sun-parched, starving mates drifted aimlessly, Louie’s eyes turned resolutely toward the future.
He planned his life after the war. He told Phil and Mac that he dreamed of opening a restaurant in his home town of Torrance, California.
He pushed them to share their dreams, too. In this way, all of their minds were kept active. Louie made sure of that.
The question was not if they would survive; it was when. Louie pushed them to think about what actions they could take to live, and what they would do when that happened.
He did this because there was something else on that battered raft he was trying to keep alive: hope.
He was not entirely successful.
As the weeks passed, Mac slowly weakened. His body was ravaged by hunger and thirst; his mind by despondence. During the night of the 33rd day, he died. Louie and Phil wrapped his body and gave it to the sea.
By the 47th day, their raft had drifted to the Marshall Islands, where they were immediately captured by the Japanese navy.
Louie and Phil spent the rest of the war in Japanese POW camps. Louie attracted the sadistic notice of one prison guard in particular: Mutsuhiro “The Bird” Watanabe. The Bird’s methods were so heinous that he was later included in General MacArthur’s list of the forty most wanted war criminals in Japan.
But under this constant abuse, Louie’s resilience continued to shine. At one point the Bird, hoping to humiliate Louie, assigned him to care for a sickly goat in the camp. “If goat die, you die!” he barked.
When the goat did die, Louie feared the Bird would make good on his threat. Enraged, the Bird dragged him to one end of the prison compound and ordered him to hold a ponderously heavy, four by six timber over his head. The Bird watched, waiting for his weakened and emaciated prisoner to collapse to the ground.
Louie wrote:
The first three minutes I could hardly take the pain. Every muscle burned and begged to collapse. Then all one hundred pound of me went numb. I froze in that position and time stood still until, seething with anger and frustration, the Bird hopped off the roof and punched me in the stomach with all his might. The beam dropped on my head and knocked me flat on my face, and out. When I woke, Tom Wade told me he’d timed my punishment. I’d held the wood aloft for thirty-seven minutes.”4
Resilience Lesson #4: Leave the Past in the Past.
Louie survived the Bird, the camp, and the war. He had initially been listed by the military as missing at sea, then eventually “Killed in Action.” When he eventually returned home, he received a hero’s welcome.
But the post-war years were difficult for Louie. He failed to qualify for another set of Olympic games. He suffered with PTSD symptoms and recurrent nightmares of the raft and the Bird. In his words:
I should have read my Coming Home pamphlet, which described my symptoms exactly. Memories of war kept running around my head. I couldn’t concentrate. I tossed all night. And yet I had so much nervous energy I couldn’t slow down. The section on fear was especially relevant – in my case fear of what to do with my life, of personal failure, of not being able to run again, of the media sobering up long enough to realize that despite my running trophies, war medals, and headlines, I was just a guy who’d done nothing more heroic than live.”5
In 1949, Louie’s wife Cynthia encouraged him to attend an evangelistic crusade in Los Angeles. In response to Billy Graham’s preaching, Louie became a born-again Christian.
He forgave his captors.
He never had nightmares again.
Louie’s life after the war was quieter than the years before. Billy Graham helped him start a new career as a Christian evangelist.
In his eighties, with the help of David Rensin, Louie wrote Devil at My Heels. The book fairly shimmers with his zest for life, his resilience.
Reading his remarkable story, it is clear that Louie remained an action-taker all his life. He wrote,
Today I’m still in great condition. I fly planes, ski double-diamond runs, trail-bike, and climb, though I gave up skateboarding a few years ago, just to be on the safe side.
To this day, people ask me how, after all I’ve been through, I managed to do it. It’s a valid question. I say I eat right and exercise – both are necessary and true – but really, it’s all about attitude. The war, the raft, prison camp, drinking – they took ten years off my life. I simply made up my mind to get those ten years back.”6
The afterward of Devil at My Heels was written when Louie was 94 years old. Here I found still more glints of his resilience:
[As a professional speaker] I also like to talk about stress, its consequences, and how to control it. That’s so important in this day and age.
Sometimes I tell this story…As a POW, I was entitled to some healthy benefits from the government. I agreed to come in and apply, assuming that it only involved signing a few papers. Instead, I was subjected to a week’s worth of physical examinations, followed by an interview with a psychologist. When I arrived at the therapist’s office, she told me to sit down and began asking me how I relieved the stress and tension she assumed I must have.
‘I don’t have any,’ I said.
The therapist said, ‘That’s ridiculous. Everyone has stress and tension.’
‘Well, I don’t,’ I said. I could tell she didn’t believe me, so I explained. It came down to this: ‘I don’t let it in, so there’s nothing to let out.’
The therapist kept grilling me, which I think was her way to trying to provoke some sort of tension or anxiety to disprove my claim. She failed. The session ran forty-five minutes long, and when it finally ended the therapist smiled and said, ‘I’ve learned something today.’
….Call my life charmed, and I would agree. At almost ninety-four years old I am an example of the blessings of a beneficial lifestyle that is a combination of exercise, diet, cheerful attitude, and charity.”7
Shortly before his death at the age of 97, Laura Hillenbrand wrote Unbroken, another book that chronicled his amazing life. That book was later adapted into a film, produced by the Cohen Brothers, directed by Angelina Jolie, and starring Jack O’Connell.
Louie Zamperini died in 2014. I wish I had had the chance to meet him. But his resilience continues to shine out from the story of his life.
Sometimes I feel I am on the raft with him and Phil and poor Mac. Sometimes I too feel faint and weary, with enemies circling above and below.
But from the printed page, Louie still pushes me.
In the face of paralyzing fear, he emboldens me, telling me to focus on what I need to do to overcome it.
He encourages me never to give up, to find the same resolute strength.
He inspires me to leave the past in the past, to project myself into the hopes and dreams of future days.
Thank you, Louie. I will.
References
1Hillenbrand, L. (2014). Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption. Random House. p.6.
2 https://www.runnersworld.com/races-places/a20839124/the-great-louie-zamperinis-running-story/
3 Zamperini, L., & Rensin, D. (2003). Devil at My Heels. Harper. p.96.
4 Zamperini, L., & Rensin, D. (2003). Devil at My Heels. Harper. pp.180-181.
5 Zamperini, L., & Rensin, D. (2003). Devil at My Heels. Harper. p.213.
6 Zamperini, L., & Rensin, D. (2003). Devil at My Heels. Harper. p.274.
7 Zamperini, L., & Rensin, D. (2003). Devil at My Heels. Harper. pp.293-294.
Dr. Pamela Coburn-Litvak has published research articles on exercise and stress in Neuroscience and Neurobiology of Learning and Behavior. Her latest book, Leaving the Shadowland of Stress, Anxiety, and Depression, was published in 2020.
After receiving a Ph.D. in Neurobiology and Behavior from the State University of New York at Stony Brook, she served as both Assistant Professor of Physiology & Pharmacology and Special Assistant to the Vice President for Research Affairs at Loma Linda University in Loma Linda, California. She then joined the Biology department at Andrews University and developed courses in human physiology as well as the neurobiology of mental illness. She also founded Rock @ Science LLC, a company that specializes in health and science education and web development. She co-developed the brain and body physiology segment of the Stress: Beyond Coping seminar with its creator, Dr. William “Skip” MacCarty, DMin.
Dr. Coburn-Litvak currently lives in California with her husband. Their two daughters are mostly grown and attending school elsewhere.
When she’s not studying or teaching about stress, she enjoys stress-relieving activities like puttering around the garden, taking nature walks with her family, knitting, cooking, and reading.