Unbroken (The Young Adult Adaptation): An Olympian's Journey from Airman to Castaway to Captive

When Phil, Cecy, and Fred Garrett come to visit Louie, they go out to dinner and enjoy their night. However, when Fred’s food arrives with a side of rice, Fred becomes furious and shouts at the waiter.

The narrative describes the former POWs who came home from war, suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). One study suggests that even forty years after the war, 90% still suffered from the disorder. They suffered from nightmares, fits of rage, hallucinations, depression, and more, often turning to alcohol to help cope.

For Louie, he attempts to run to find respite. He considers the Olympics coming in 1948 and can train and get his mile down to 4:18. However when running two miles one day, he reinjures his leg as “a doctor confirm[s] he’d worsened his war injury disastrously. It was all over” (254).

Suffering from PTSD, Louie turns further to alcohol. He begins having vivid flashbacks, believing that he is truly back at the prison camp, and is filled with rage at minor instances—twice beating an innocent man. As he struggles to cope, he decides that his only way to save himself is to find and kill the Bird.

The narrative shifts to Japan, where the entire police force of Japan is trying to find the Bird. He moves to Nagano, grows facial hair, and assumes the name Saburo Ohta to hide. He ends up on a farm as a laborer, posing as a refugee from Tokyo.

He fears capture but also contemplates turning himself in. He is remorseless, but often considers his guilt, as the journals that he kept while at the farm reveal. In one, he writes how unfair it is that the Allies, who “would not forgive,” oversaw the trials, adding to his fear of capture and unwillingness to turn himself in (258).

Eventually, he travels in secret to Tokyo to visit his family. As they celebrate seeing him again, detectives come in search of him and he is nearly caught.

When he returns to the farmer, the farmer attempts to set him up for marriage with a young woman who is interested in the Bird. Despite his interest in the woman and his loneliness and unhappiness, he decides that he cannot place his “burden” on her (260). He hikes to the countryside, into the Okuchichibu Mountain range, where his body is reportedly found with that of a woman in the fall of 1946, dead from suicide.

Louie knows nothing of the Bird’s fate. He slips further into alcoholism and despair. He fights regularly with Cynthia, sometimes getting physical. One night he tries to strangle her while dreaming he was fighting the Bird.

Meanwhile, he struggles financially, becoming obsessed with raising money to travel to Japan. Instead, he regularly loses his money to financial schemes and failed business ventures.

He has thoughts that God is “toying with him” (263), allowing him to struggle and fail repeatedly. He turns away from religion and forbids Cynthia from going to church.

In 1948, Cynthia gives birth to a daughter, Cissy. Although Louie loves her, she fails to “cleave him from alcoholism or his murderous obsession” (264). When Cynthia returns home one day to Louie gripping Cissy and shaking her as she cries, she leaves him.

The authorities examined the body found in the Okuchichibu Mountains more closely and concluded it was not the Bird. They questioned his mother and other relatives. For two years, they questioned and followed the mother. Finally, she met her son at a restaurant in Tokyo on October 1, 1948. He promised to return in two years if he was still alive.

In September 1949, in Los Angeles, Louie and Cynthia live together again, but only while she arranges a divorce. Billy Graham, an evangelist, brings a tent to LA and Cynthia goes to him but Louie adamantly refuses. She returns, ready to forgive Louie and forget the divorce. She tries to convince Louie see Graham.

Louie finally goes. Graham speaks of God’s miracles and the beauty of creation. Louie experiences flashbacks of staring at the seascape and admiring its beauty while all his suffering goes away, of the wires that trapped him while the Green Hornet sank miraculously disappearing so he could escape, and of promising to serve God forever if he was saved while on the boat.

Louie returns home and empties all his alcohol down the sink. That night, he does not dream of the Bird for the first time and never does so again. He awakens feeling “cleansed” as a “new creation,” and like his “dignity had returned” (269).

October 1, 1950, comes, and Shizuka goes to the restaurant to meet her son again. However, he does not show up, and Shizuka believes the Bird is finally dead.

Louie, after meeting Graham, turns his life around and begins preaching his story to fellow Christians. Although he and his wife still struggle with money, they are together and finally happy.

Louie returns to Japan, to Sugamo prison where the guards from his POW camp are imprisoned. He searches for the Bird but is told that he was never found. Louie contemplates what he would have done if he had seen the Bird, realizing that “thoughts of murder no longer had a home in him” (271). As he thinks of the Bird’s life after the war—one that was “now beyond redemption”—he realizes with amazement that he feels “compassion” for the Bird (273).

Louie realizes that he can finally feel forgiveness for what was done to him. As he is “seized by giddy exuberance,” he goes to the guards who had abused him during the war with “his hands extended, a radiant smile on his face” (273).

In June of 1954, Louie opens the Victory Boys Camp, for young struggling boys. He helps them deal with their troubles through outdoor activities like fishing and camping, as well as telling them about his experiences as a youth and the war.

When not at camp, he travels the world to speak to people about his experiences. He lives to be almost 100, still runs a mile in under six minutes into his sixties and learns to skateboard in his seventies. He “remained invariably cheerful” and accepted the “belief that everything happened for a reason” (276).

Phil, now going by Allen, moves with Cecy back to Indiana and raises two children. He speaks little of the war and has no issue being overlooked in Louie’s story. In 1998, shortly before his death, the staff at his retirement home learn of his experience in the war. They hold a ceremony, and he speaks of what happened to him for the first time.

Pete lived until 2008 and coached high school track throughout his life and remained “deeply devoted” to Louie. Virginia died a few weeks before Pete, while Sylvia would die a few months after. Cynthia died of cancer in 2001.

In 1996, after Louie agrees to run the torch by Naoetsu at the 1998 Olympics, a reporter calls and tells him that the Bird is still alive. In 1952, after seven years of living in the countryside, the Bird returned home after his arrest order was dropped in an effort at reconciliation between America and Japan. He married and had two children while living in Tokyo where he ran a successful insurance business. In interviews, he was rarely apologetic, using “absurd justifications” for his treatment of POWs with “self-serving lies, self-pity, and even apparent pride” (280).

In an interview in 1997, the Bird agrees to see Louie, as Louie prepares for the trip. He writes him a letter, telling him that the humiliation the Bird caused him made his life after the war a “nightmare.” However, he writes that he forgives him.

When asked again about meeting Louie, the Bird angrily declines. Louie gives his letter to someone in Japan during the Olympics, with the promise to deliver it to the Bird, but Louie never receives an answer. The Bird died in April 2003.

On January 22, 1998, Louie ran the torch for the Olympics in Japan. He sees smiling Japanese faces, Japanese soldiers who part for him to pass, and the places where he was once tortured. However, all of that has passed, as he is simply a “joyful man, running” (282).