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No one could reach Louie because he had never really come home. In prison camp, he’d been beaten into dehumanized obedience to a world order in which the Bird was absolute sovereign, and it was under this world order that he still lived.
After surviving against all odds while stranded at sea and in POW camp for nearly two years, Louie comes home and it seems that he has made it out of the war alive. Though his body is eventually nursed back into health, his mind remains trapped in the violent trauma heendured. Battling fits of frenzy, frequent nightmares, and slipping quickly into the life of an addict, Louie is paralyzed by the aftereffects of the atrocities of war. This quote highlights the depth of these atrocities for Louie and many other veterans.
A 1954 study found that in the first two postwar years, former Pacific POWs died at almost four times the expected rate for men of their age, and continued to die at unusually high rates for many years.
Throughout the story, statistics like these are used to frame the events of Louie’s life, amplifying the significance and pervasiveness of WWII’s impact. This quote comes during an outline of postwar life for Louie and many others. The atrocities that the men endure on all fronts of the war do not cease with the Axis powers’ surrender. Rather, the brutality follows them home, suggesting a level of unparalleled gravity that marks the horrors they endured.
Masses of POWs were beheaded, machine-gunned, bayoneted, and burned alive. The Japanese turned on civilians, engaging in killing contests, raping tens of thousands of people, mutilating and crucifying them, and provoking dogs to maul them. Japanese soldiers took pictures of themselves posing alongside hacked-up bodies, severed heads, and women strapped down for rape . . . Historians estimate that the Japanese military murdered between 200,000 and 430,000 Chinese, including the 90,000 POWs, in what became known as the Rape of Nanking.
This quotation referencing the Rape of Nanking comes early in the story, framing the way Louie and his crewmen think about crashes and the impending possibility of capture. The brutality described in this quote graphically asserts just how horrid the consequences of war can be, and places focus on the jarring willingness of Japanese soldiers to inflict these horrors. The theme of war and its atrocities is amplified by historical documentation like this, placing Louie’s story in the greater context of its time.
Dignity is as essential to human life as water, food, and oxygen. The stubborn retention of it, even in the face of extreme physical hardship, can hold a man’s soul in his body long past the point at which the body should have surrendered it. The loss of it can carry a man off as surely as thirst, hunger, exposure, and asphyxiation, and with greater cruelty. In places like Kwajalein, degradation could be as lethal as a bullet.
After his first week on Kwajalein, known to many soldiers as “Execution Island,” Louie comes to terms with the grim reality that the thing his captors will seek to take from him will not be his life so much as it will be his dignity. This realization, however, begins to stir a determination in Louie to remain human at all costs. The atrocities of war are highlighted in this thread throughout the book, wherein Louie’s enemies seek to torture and abuse him in ways that are specifically inhumane.
They had an intimate understanding of man’s vast capacity to experience suffering, as well as his equally vast capacity, and hungry willingness, to inflict it. They carried unspeakable memories of torture and humiliation, and an acute sense of vulnerability that attended the knowledge of how readily they could be disarmed and dehumanized . . . Their dignity had been obliterated, replaced with a pervasive sense of shame and worthlessness.
This exposition comes alongside stories of men returning home after the end of WWII. Veterans and POWs have been marked by the atrocities of war in a way that is so personal it is hard to detach from. This quote specifically highlights one of the most horrifying elements of the men’s trauma: the hunger and willingness of their enemies to bring pain upon them. The power of war to create these circumstances is made evident in this quotation and throughout the story as a whole.
