“I was too busy staying alive to think about dying,” World War II
veteran Louis Zamperini told his son about his ordeal lost at sea and
then locked up in a prisoner of war camp.
The famous runner’s real tests of endurance came the decade after his
experience competing in the 5000 meters at the 1936 Summer Olympics in
Berlin, when he floated at sea for a month-and-a-half and subsequently
endured vicious beatings by a sadistic guard nicknamed “the Bird” during
two years in Japanese captivity. Luke Zamperini tells Breitbart Sports,
“These were my bedtime stories growing up.”
Luke Zamperini’s bedtime stories become everybody’s silver-screen
stories on Christmas Day through Angelina Jolie’s cinematic adaptation
of Laura Hillenbrand’s Unbroken. The Zamp, owner of a record
4:08 mile as a collegian, retained exquisite timing long after he had
hung up his track shoes. The Christian immortalized as a celluloid hero
on Christmas, like the patriot passing days before this past Fourth of
July, shows that death doesn’t kill a man’s timing.
It often replaces the substance of a man with a symbol. But the symbolism of a Christmas Day release of Unbroken
makes it hard to miss the substance of Louis Zamperini. He ran the 5000
meters in the Olympics for a few minutes in the mid-1930s and suffered
in a POW camp for a couple of years as Americans assumed him dead during
the mid-1940s. He spread Jesus Christ’s gospel for more than six
decades.
Like Christ, Zamperini lived past his obituary and figured
prominently in a bestselling book. The comparisons don’t go much further
for the life celebrated in the pews on Thursday and the one celebrated
in the movie-house aisles. The former juvenile delinquent drank with
zeal, hastily scheduled barroom boxing matches with unwitting,
conscripted opponents, and projected the bitterness in his soul upon the
world immediately following the Second World War.
“He was a vengeful man,” Luke Zamperini informs. “The Bird beat him
mercilessly for over two years. My dad suffered from what’s today
referred to as post-traumatic stress disorder. He was having nightmares
of the Bird beating him that inevitably ended with him strangling the
life out of the Bird.” Zamperini longed to return to Japan “to finish
him off,” concedes his son.
Instead of squeezing the life out of the Bird, Billy Graham infused
new life into Zamperini. “Hearing Reverend Graham speak reminded him of
the promises on the life raft and in the prison camp that he had made to
God,” Luke Zamperini tells Breitbart Sports of the violent and
boozed-out postwar version of his dad. “He felt he hadn’t lived up to
his side of the bargain.”
“His hatred for the Bird wasn’t hurting the Bird one bit,” son says
of father. “It was destroying Louis Zamperini.” The bitter veteran put
down the bottle and picked up the Bible. The sleep that followed the
Olympian’s close encounter of the Billy Graham kind, his son explains,
resulted in “the first night he did not have that nightmare and he did
not have that nightmare for the rest of his life.”
Whereas others might have wished not to revisit the painful events,
Zamperini used them for inspiration to start an outdoorsman camp for
boys and to speak to groups about the force that saved his life. “He
made a living talking about it,” Luke Zamperini notes. “He was a famous
American athlete who seemingly came back from the dead. He was given the
key to every city.” Holding in his war story didn’t work for Zamperini.
Letting it out did.
Zamperini’s saga includes the highs of running in the Olympics and
the lows of cleaning a pig sty with his bare hands. It’s an amazing tale
of survival, evading strafing Japanese planes and capturing food on the
raft with the primitive hunting tools available at the end of his arms.
It’s more importantly a story, like the story whose beginnings
Christians celebrate today, of redemption. In a life of service to his
savior, Zamperini embodied the central message of his faith.
Louis Zamperini enjoyed a Hollywood ending. It emanated from enjoying a Christian life. Readers and now viewers of Unbroken
marvel at the better-than-fiction quality to the miler’s tale of
superhuman endurance. The story’s greatness surely stems from the
protagonist’s awareness of the greatest story ever told.
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