A story of survival and redemption

Laura Hillenbrand has written a marvelous book entitled Unbroken. The main character is Louis Zamperini, a 1936 Olympian from Torrence, California. World War II ruined his hopes for Gold in the 1940 Olympics, which were cancelled because of the world war. Louis becomes a bombadier, his plane gets shot down over the Pacific, he and another man survive for forty-some days in a six-foot raft, they get captured by the Japanese, he endures horrendous abuse in Japanese POW camps, comes home after the war, gets married, becomes an alcoholic, attends a Billy Graham crusade in L.A., remembers the vow he made to God when praying for survival aboard his raft, and lives the last years of his life serving Christ by operating a camp for wayward boys.

Laura pulls no punches. Her research is more than impressive. Here's a question for you: How many movies have you seen portraying Nazis? How many have you seen portraying sadistic Japanese soldiers of Emperor Hirohito? I know the answer: you have heard far more about the Nazis, right?

Our hearts all go out to the Japanese people for what they have recently experienced with earthquakes, tsunamis, and nuclear reactor melt downs. However, our fear of being racist may get in the way of recognizing truth. The truth is that POWs held by the Japanese fared far worse than those held by the Nazis; in fact, most were murdered. And more were about to be murdered at the time we bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

For a period after the war, Mr. Zamperini was overcome by his desire to seek vengeance for the brutality he endured in captivity. Here is one of my favorite passages from the book;

The paradox of vengefulness is that it makes people dependent on those who have harmed them, believing that their release from pain will come only when they make their tormentor suffer. Resentment is the emotion that nails us to the cross of our ruined past.