At 96 Louis Zamperini is still telling his story:
In the nooks of Louis Zamperini’s mind, an incredible past still roils.
Those long-ago places, names and situations surface and flash. The reeking dungeons at “Execution Island.†The man they called “The Bird,†who beat, tortured and tormented him. The guinea-pig injections they shot into his veins and, literally, the crap they shoved in his face. The men who died right in front of him.
Contributed photo/Louis Zamperini Louis Zamperini inspects sizable damage to his plane in this 1943 photo. Later that year, he wouldn’t be so lucky. His plane would crash into the Pacific on a search-and-rescue mission, just the start of a 47-day, 2,000-mile odyssey on a raft, followed by more than two years spent in brutal Japanese POW camps. Zamperini will talk about his life and incredible story of survival at the Star Scholars program in Camarillo on Tuesday night.
Zamperini spent almost seven weeks in 1943 adrift on a raft, a speck of suffering in the dead of the vast, monochrome Pacific, with little food or water. The beating equatorial sun slowly burned madness into the brains of Zamperini and his two companions. They fought off the constant sharks that sometimes jumped aboard, eager to finish off what a horrific plane crash hadn’t.
He drifted west some 2,000 miles, right into the enemy’s hand. For the next two years, he was a prisoner of war.
His story has attracted attention over the years. Laura Hillenbrand’s best-selling 2010 biography, “Unbroken,†revived interest in Zamperini (who had written his own book, “Devil At My Heels,†more than a half-century earlier). Now, A-list Hollywood has come calling; a film version is in the works, with Angelina Jolie as director and the famed Coen brothers, Ethan and Joel, slated to write the final script.
Street kid. Olympic athlete. War hero. Brad Pitt is slated to play Mr. Zamperini in the movie. When asked if he’d’ve preferred someone younger to play him, Mr. Zamperini responded that he’d hoped for somebody better looking. It’s hard to tell if he was joshing. Zamperini was a pretty good-looking kid.
