Louis Zamperini: The Story of the Real-Life "Unbroken" Hero -- In His Own Words (He Was Born )

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That's ouramericanstories.com. They're some of our favorites. Our next story was made into a 2014 motion picture directed by Angelina Jolie based on the 2010 non-fiction book by Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken, a World War II story of survival, resilience, and redemption. While some of the most remarkable parts of Zamperini's story were left out of the film, you will be hearing them told now by the man himself. And we're telling this story because on this day in 1917, Louis Zamperini was born.

We'd like to thank the folks at Vision Video for giving us access to the footage you're about to hear. Let's take a listen. My name is Louis Zamperini. I was born January 26, 1917 in Olean, New York. I moved to California for my health. I had pneumonia.

And so ever since I was two years old, I lived in Torrance, California, just south of LA, about 20 miles. And I'm afraid I was in constant conflict with the Torrance police. I was a rascal. And I think it all started with the, I couldn't speak English. And the other kids were teasing me.

They wanted to hear me swear in Italian. You know, these were your bullies, they call them today. And so my dad got me some weights, a punching bag, and I started getting in shape. And so then after a few months, I started fighting back. And when I started fighting back, they stopped teasing me. But in the meantime, I continued with my errant ways.

And I had been dissipating. I started smoking when I was five. And during that time, it was prohibition. But everybody made beer, wine, and other things. And we knew who made it. And when they're at the movies on Saturday night, we would hijack the stuff. And even if they knew we took it, they couldn't turn us into the police.

So they'd go to jail. And so that was my life as a teenager, until my brother got me on the track, what they call an interclass track meet. And the pains of exhaustion, that's the worst. And that was it, no more running. So a week later, we're having our first dual meet with Narbonne, Narbonne High School, and everybody insisted I represent the school in this race. The same 660-yard run, and they finally talked me into it.

The first two runners from Narbonne had finished, and the third man was ahead of me about 50 yards ago. And I wasn't about to pass him, you know, until the students, 1,000 students from my high school started screaming, come on, Louie. Well, those were beautiful words to me, because I had no idea that anyone at all knew my name.

And here are 1,000 students are hollering, come on, Louie. And that tasted pretty good. And I just got up a little adrenaline, I suppose, and I finally nipped this guy at the table about six inches, and came in third. So after that, I thought about that recognition. That was important to me. And I think it's important to all athletes.

The thing that inspires you and creates the desire to go ahead and become a champion is recognition. And so that night, I had to make a decision. And that was no doubt the first wise decision of my life. I decided to go all out to become a runner.

I was the first time I decided to go all out to become a runner. Now, considering my life, you think that was an impossibility. And my family thought it was an impossibility. My brother thought. But I made up my mind, and I became a fanatic trainer.

No more dessert. I ran everywhere, no hitchhiking. Redondo them back four miles, center motion them back. I'd run like 12 miles on a Saturday. I'd hit the mountain, run around lakes, jump on, and I got to where I liked it.

I wasn't getting tired anymore and fatigued. And I enjoyed mainly not running around the track, but running in the wilderness. And jumping over streams, I can remember on a number of occasions chasing deer down a hill just for the fun of it. And so all that running, and in those days, there were no stopwatches around. So I had no idea how fast I was running.

Didn't even care. Started enjoying running. And finally, at the end of summer, the first running race was far west A.U., cross country at UCLA, two miles, about 101 runners. When the race was over, I won by a quarter of a mile, or over a quarter. And I couldn't believe it. I said, no, I'm sure I cut a corner.

I wouldn't take credit for winning. And the officials said, no, all the talents are in, you passed every checkpoint. And they said, by the way, you broke all three records, class A, class B, and class C, and you ran the two miles in 957, which was comparable to college running when I was a sophomore in high school.

So that did it. I knew that hard work was the answer. And from then on, I never lost a race for three and a half years.

The second best 5,000 meter runner in America was coming to California to run, to draw a big crowd and so forth. And my brother said, I want you to train. You've got two weeks. I want you to run against this guy.

Now we have no hopes of the Olympics. Just run against him to see how close you can get to a fellow who's going to make the Olympic team. And that would have been a victory in itself. And I caught him at the table about two inches. So I knew that I could beat him.

The second best runner in America. And this gave me the possibility of making the team. Now I didn't think about the team at that time until the next day when I got a call from the newspaper that the Olympic committee had called Torrance to tell him that I qualified for the Olympic tryouts at Ramblings Island in New York.

And again, it wasn't important to win. I made the team and it's a thrill. And I'm on this ship now with all these great athletes and they were all my heroes. And I'm going around meeting all the athletes and go off the ship in Hamburg and off to Berlin. And then they took us into the most beautiful Olympic village ever made.

And it was gorgeous. Fenced in, animals running loose lakes, stormtroopers walking through and we'd give them the highl hitter salute with a big laugh on our face. They knew we were kidding. They'd salute back.

If we said highlighter, they'd say highl hitter or vice versa. And so they were a lot of fun. And you're listening to the voice of the one and only Louis Zamperini, raised in Torrance, California, as he said, a self-proclaimed rascal in his youth. But hearing those words, come on, Louis, it chanted by students that recognition. Well, that was all the fuel he needed. It lit a fire in this young man.

And he said it was the first wise decision in my life to become a runner. When we come back more of this remarkable life story, Louis Zamperini story here on Our American Story. Here at Our American Stories, we bring you inspiring stories of history, sports, business, faith, and love. Stories from a great and beautiful country that need to be told.

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Or find a featured all-inclusive package to Iberostar hotels and resorts and do your deal at cheapcaribbean.com. And we're back with our American stories. Let's return to Louis Zamperini and where he left off with his arrival to Berlin, Germany, to compete as a 19-year-old distance runner in the 1936 Summer Olympics, also known as the Nazi Olympics. One minute isn't one minute of pain worth a lifetime of glory and I never forgot that. And so I opened up the last lap and I caught the leaders coming down the home stretch so I did come in with the leaders. In doing so, the coach said you just ran your last quarter in 56 seconds which was considered impossible for a distance runner and that evidently caught the attention of Adolf Hitler. He was there every day and I go back to my box after my shower and an officer comes over and says Hitler wants to meet you. First he asked for my name.

I said I didn't want anything. You know he was shaking hands with the gold medalist and he said well he wants to meet you. So I went over to him and he just reached down shook my hand and simply said the boy with ah he said ah yeah the boy with the fast finish and that was it. So admit the pure didn't mean anything but my opinion of him was the same opinion that Marty Glichman had and all the others. He looked like a comedian and the way he acted, stomping his feet, pounding his legs and face and mustache and all that.

Ah so that was my opinion of him. Ah well the games are over and ah we collected souvenirs. All the Olympians did to remind them of their their Olympic trip.

And ah now I'm back home entering USC as a freshman. And now 1940 Tokyo Olympics we're all aiming for that and suddenly we get the announcement headlines in the papers the Olympics are canceled. Well it was quite a blow you know ah adults really couldn't understand it but for a kid who's been aiming for four years for one race and you're going to hit your peak of your life at that particular year that was hard to take ah until Pearl Harbor was hit and of course we forgot all about being athletes and ah like all other Americans we were one mind of one accord one purpose get in the war quickly get it over with as soon as possible.

However I did run in Hawaii to keep in shape and even though General Arnold in charge of the Air Force through a friend he was a friend of mine indirectly. Ah but they wouldn't allow me to go back because our bomb group was a special bomb group and experimental. We were the first to use the heaviest bomb of the war for dive bombing. So we had a lot of missions up and down the Marshall and Gilberts bombing Macon and Tarawa and Woji and all those islands in and out. We had a few local search missions looking for submarines and then we came back and after a mission you get a couple of days off and we're heading for the main gate on the way to Honolulu and the operations officers come skidding up in the jeep and says ah we just got a report a B-25 has gone down 200 miles north of Palmyra. Now the cloud cover broken clouds are at a thousand feet that's our first mission height and ah swinging around here and there looking for debris in the water life rafts anything we could find and ah suddenly the RPMs dropped on one motor oil pressure to zero and ah the pilot immediately called the new engineer and he was so excited to do his job he came up and nervously feathered the wrong motor. Now this plane could not fly ah normally on four motors he couldn't get off the ground with a bomb load it was a the green hornet was a green hornet was a lemon and ah with one motor out the plane was having trouble and now when he feathered the wrong motor the plane just healed over and went down left wing first 45 degrees hit the water and exploded ah the pilot and tail gunner were fortunately blown free of the wreckage and then as the tail snapped off the control wires which are heavy wires that are ah springing so when the wires break they coil up and they so when they snap the the the wires coil around the tripod I'm in the middle I can't get loose now with the wires there's no hopeless situation and so I just thought well this is it this is it I'm dead and ah so I started sinking my ears popped and that usually happens around 25-30 feet and ah then as I sank deeper something I never had happened before I felt like someone being the scientist with a sledge hammer and ah then I lost consciousness and of course I'm sinking I'm still thinking so the pressure's got to be getting greater and ah when I then I lost consciousness and then for some unknown reason I'm conscious again I'm freed I'm loosened from that section of the ship I'm flailing around my arms trying to find something to grab onto and fortunately my usc ring which was on this finger was bearing the white star still there ah snagged onto the waste window and I knew that was the waste window by the field I grabbed it with my other hand watched my back out of the window inflated my life jacket and popped to the surface and there I saw my two buddies who were now hanging onto a gas tank they were both in a state of shock screaming help and the pilot's head was bleeding profusely with a cut artery and there's no way I can help them if I swim over to help them we're all dead but I saw a life raft that had ejected from the plane automatically and so there's a hundred foot cord dragging behind the life raft so I'm trying to swim to the life raft with shoes on and clothes and it's impossible even in a swimsuit I couldn't have caught that life raft the currents were that vicious but as I almost gave up swimming this cord was going by my face couldn't see it in the water and I grabbed the last two or three feet and I reeled in the raft and and I got to the pilot co-pilot pull him aboard put a three I took two t-shirts made a wet compress put on the cuts tied it with the other t-shirt very tightly so it wouldn't bleed anymore and I laid him back and then I started thinking about that escape that really bugged me and I kept thinking of any kind of a logical answer for my escape and I just couldn't find one so I gave up thinking about it instead I started praying and thanking God for sparing my life well my buddy saw this that they started to pray with me and then it wasn't long after that the tail gunner panicked and began to scream something dawned on him what happened we're all gonna die I said mac nobody's gonna die we're gonna die I said mac nobody's gonna die and then I told him to shut up I said if you don't shut up I'm going to make a report on you to the military when we get back and he still kept screaming so I tried to use child psychology on him and that didn't work so I thought I'd give him a double shock and this is the last resort of good shock treatment so I turned my back on and I came around with my the back of my hand and cracked him hard across the face he laid back in the raft content and he was okay for maybe five days or a week and then I had to do it again but it always seemed to work and he never gagged him I just laid back and seemed to enjoy it so our menu of course now is for the next 47 days there's what birds fish and water we could catch and of course the birds and the fish we simply ate raw three albatross well we actually caught four of them we caught the first one we caught we just ripped it open and the smell was enough we threw it overboard the second one we caught I said we got to eat some part of it you know and so we took the breast we tried to take a bite out of the breast a piece and try to chew it up and swallow it we just barely swallowed one mouthful again we we just threw it overboard and used parts of it for bait and we did catch a small fish we divided that in three ways and that wasn't bad raw fish and then a lot of time went by before we got another albatross another albatross we opened it up and now it was like a hot sponge sunny with nut on it we ate everything eyeballs and what a story you're hearing louis amperini tell hitler wants to meet you he was told after that last final burst of speed and by the way he did not tell the story here of him seizing the nazi flag and stealing it and taking it home that's a heck of a story we couldn't tell every bit and part of this story but he did it and he did it because well why not he was still well a rascal in the end he goes to usc he wants to compete in the 1940 olympics that doesn't happen they're canceled then comes pearl harbor his life has changed he takes on dangerous missions and soon finds himself stranded in the pacific with a few buddies 47 days hanging on for dear life to be rescued when we come back more of this remarkable life story the voice of louis amperini from the grave born on this day in 1917 here on our american stories draft kings the leader in fantasy sports just dropped a brand new fantasy app pick six pick six is the newest way for you to get in on the fantasy football action with draft kings just pick between two and six nfl players and choose if they're going to have more or less of a stat it's very easy for example will the player that you pick have more or less than 100 rushing yards or will the player have more than one touchdown track your lineup compete against others for a huge shot at cash prizes download the draft kings pick six app now and sign up with the code bobby sports that's the code bobby sports only on draft kings pick six the crown is yours gambling problem call 1800 gambler 18 plus in most eligible states but age varies by jurisdiction eligibility restriction supply valid only in states where draft kings pick six operates pick six not available in all states including but not limited to connecticut and new york for up-to-date list of states please visit dkng.co pick six states void where prohibited see terms at pick six dot draftkings.com with the best all-inclusive vacation deals to mexico and the caribbean booking your getaway with cheap caribbean vacations means you have more freedom to do your deal whether you want to enjoy snorkeling endless margaritas and more or simply soak up the sun and sand in a tropical paradise cheap caribbean vacations has your deal for that plan and book the exact getaway you want at exactly the right price for you by using our exclusive budget beach finder or find a featured all-inclusive package to ibirastar hotels and resorts and do your deal at cheapcaribbean.com little hands and minds can start learning anytime the good and the beautiful gives you everything you need to spark a love of lifelong learning give your preschoolers engaging hands-on material built on high academic standards and wholesome values find a variety of free resources an affordable curriculum to ignite your child's curiosity start your journey now at good and beautiful.com the good and the beautiful bring home a love of learning and we return to our american stories and to louis zamparini's story the year is 1941 while serving as a bombardier on a search and rescue mission in the b-24 liberator in the pacific zamparini's plane experienced mechanical difficulties and crashed into the ocean let's pick up where we last left off before we went uh seven days without water on the 27th day we heard motors and you can imagine our excitement we shot flares through water die in the ocean flickered our mirrors the plane came down and uh flew low as they came towards us we had our shirts off you know waving our shirts tears in our eyes boy we're going to be with the marines tonight on palmyra and then machine gunning water splashed off you know coming out and just missed us and then i saw the red circle i knew it was a sally bomber which was comparable to our b-25 and um so that went on these straits for about 30 minutes i was in the water with two sharks while the other two stayed in the raft and every time i came up i knew they were dead but they were alive and they weren't touched missed by an eighth of an inch quarter inch half inch and this was just unbelievable and i'm in the water with two sharks and of course i'm taught how to evade sharks the last resort is straight on me just stay there they'll come up uh slowly they'll stop size you up and then they'll come at you and you got plenty of time to get your hand up there and catch them on the end of the nose and they usually just take off and that worked and uh but after about 30 minutes we decided we were in a hopeless situation the raft was now wrinkled laying flat in the water there's no chance we got to pretend we're dead so we pretend we were dead and uh the plane evidently bypassed us that round but made a big circle and we thought they were going back to base but they decided on one more run and this time as they came directly on course this time instead of off course i looked out of the corner of my eye and i saw the bomb bay door open i thought oh no this is it they dropped the depth charge it was a canister now we dropped bombs on submarines they dropped a canister and um it lit about 50 feet away which would have killed us but the the canister was improperly armed and sank to the bottom harmlessly uh they did turn around then and leave us and boy what a relief and then we had to start pumping that raft with sharks around and we're right level with the water they're pumping like mad taking turns and barely got the raft up again and now the holes are about the size of a 22 hole that's a 7.7 millimeter i think and if you saw that inner tube pull a hole through the swimming pool it would not sink and that's the way that was our situation there's we settled back in the raft after eight days which it took us about eight days to get the raft decently patched up and then the only real big storm we had during the entire time and it was monsters the waves were like 25 to 40 feet and that was far more frightening than the japanese airplane and far more frightening than the sharks and uh we survived that uh well i should say the two of us survived that the tail gunner died on the 33rd day and we buried him at sea and uh so the next day of course there are big swells and we're on top of the swell and i see land for the first time and uh we knew we were going to drift into the islands but we also knew these were held by the japanese so we had to be real careful and try to find a georgian island and uh we were about to land on one item when the japanese patrol boat came around a point and spotted us and uh you know you got about 25 guys with rifles aimed at you one guy with a machine gun you know we were so blessed that we couldn't really laugh but inside we were laughing then they threw us a rope and pulled us aboard we couldn't even crawl we were that weak and uh sat us on the deck of the ship and hit us with a pistol in the face but they did give us a drink of water and a biscuit they were taking the woji in there weighed in at 30 kilo about i don't know 65 pounds so i lost about almost 100 and uh there we were treated uh decently they pulled the raft out of the from the boat and counted the holes 48 holes and i told them i told them the day the 27th day on the raft the date that the japanese pilot strafed us you should be able to find out who that pilot was oh no japanese pilot wouldn't do that but he did it so they wouldn't accept that even with the evidence two days later we're told we're going aboard a steamer heading for another island and after you leave this island we cannot guarantee your life so we're heading for quads and we knew through the uh scuttlebutt that it was considered execution island we were blindfolded the ocean 47 days out there all you saw was that endless sky and the pacific ocean is what 65 million square miles the endless ocean now i'm blindfolded and when i'm inside that cell which is two inches wide by six feet deep and six feet long they take my blindfold off my eyes just jump all over the place i couldn't believe where i was and this had a terrible effect on me i just uh in the corner of that cell i just sat there and looked at my skeletal frame and just started to cry and this is no here i am a two months ago i was a a vigorous athlete and here i am a skeleton and then our new guard came on duty and after about a week and he simply looked in and said you christian me christian that's all they can say well in japan at that time you didn't admit you were christian not in japan and of course i thought i wasn't nice oh me christian christian so we started a chat on paper we draw a picture for the name too and so forth and uh two days later he got his monthly candy ration shared it with me unbelievable uh every day of course we'd in the morning we would think about execution will this be the morning will this be the morning and then an officer came in one day and said you will go to the oklahoma kidneys of war on the japanese with the japanese street up to a sacred camp in the hills of ofuna and uh there i'm shoved into a room and told to stand we prefer the orders and uh so i stand there i see the back of a the man's head and then he turns around leans back in the chair looks at him laughs and he didn't have to say remember me i knew him well at usc for three and a half years james lasaki and while he says i came back to japan after usc and became admiral society i got civilian rank of admiral uh head of all interrogation all over japan 91 prison camps and uh we talked about usc uh the bacon and egg doctors on the campus he was talking about that kind of food so they weren't getting it and then he said well we'll see each other from time to time they call him jimmy jimmy fisaki had a high-frequency transmitter just off of torrance boulevard a short distance from the edison substation where he made broadcast daily to the japanese government then it said he left by boat two days before a raid by the fbi and cia and finally transferred to what they call headquarters camp omori between yokohama tokyo on a man-made island and there i meet the nightmare of my life the bird i come in there he lines us up come by and looks at me and i couldn't look in his eyes i looked away and he said why you don't look at my eyes bang so i'm knocked down i get up knocked down again so i'm punched out every day for the first 10 days and i knew who who the boss was that's for sure and uh so he was uh so brutal the other guys we gave them vile filthy names we didn't give him a filthy and we simply call him the bird because if he did find out through scuttlebutt that we named him a certain name then we're really in for trouble and you've been listening to louis amperini tell the story of his capture by the japanese 47 days in the ocean the sharks were tough the gunfire from enemy japanese planes was tough but what was tougher is surviving a wicked storm with 35 foot plus waves then he's transferred to execution island he catches a glimpse of himself and all he saw was a skeleton frame and he just started crying every morning he thought about one thing his execution and then he's transferred to another camp where he meets his tormentor the bird when we come back more of this remarkable life story the story of louis amperini born on this day in 1917 here on our american stories draft kings the leader in fantasy sports just dropped a brand new fantasy app pick six pick six is the newest way for you to get in on the fantasy football action with 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deranged that general douglas macarthur named him as one of the most wanted war criminals in japan let's continue with louis amperini now he was a son of a wealthy family he flunked out of officer schools they had him for officers and uh i can remember when we had a b-29 raid he called all the americans out and he separated the officers from the enlisted men and then he had all the lowest rank enlisted men just to shame us buck drivers faced us and each one had to punch us and knock them down and they wouldn't hit us hard they'd hit us easy and then they'd get hit with a club hey hit us hard knock us down get it over with so we had to take a full blow in the face down on the ground and so that's the way he was he took it out on officers always officers got the punishment but about another week went by and i believe there were six or seven of us lined up put on a train and now we're crossing tokyo but see in the meantime they had the big fire rate on tokyo which we saw from our vantage point we saw the sky aglow all night and half the next day and uh to put on the train and we go right to that charred waste and all we could see for miles 19 square miles of charred you know bamboo huts or whatever wooden shacks but the only thing we were able to identify were the hundreds of layers that the japanese did they did like the germans their factory was bombed but it didn't slow them down because the big factory the industrial complex at the point of tokyo they only had part of their machinery there the rest of it was in the civilian homes and i remember going to the slaughterhouse to pick up our meat which was horse guts in a wheelbarrow and they used to see these transformers and i thought my golly for this little house i looked back and i'd see a lathe great big 25,000 a lathe and the guys working making parts and all down the street so it was really strange to see the only thing not burn were all those machines and that was the reason truman had the firebombing of tokyo was because that was the industrial complex so while we're going north 12 hours to right to nagano and down to the ocean to naletu and we get to the prison compound we have to stand there to test them and wait for further order and we waited and watched the front door of the guard shack and whoever was in there was making us wait purposely and we waited and waited and waited and the door opened and out steps the bird well my knees buckled i just i just couldn't believe it i just thought you know i'm a guy that never gives up but i got to the point i just thought it's hopeless hopeless i can't escape this guy and so i got back to attention and then i had to put up him all over again so then about eight days before the war's over we kept one of the guards came to me and and said a sad thing happened in japan a city called hiroshima cholera broke out no one's allowed to go in it's quarantine and yeah we we thought that was sad so the whole nation of japan knew that hiroshima was acidic quarantine was color and uh then about eight days later we're told to pay pw on the roof and we heard rumors about the war being over for two years so it didn't mean much but we wouldn't believe it till we saw a tbf fly over the river and they saw all the prisoners in the river and they flashed on their their red light dah dah dah and the uh radio man picked it up the war's over so then we rushed up to the compound and began to wave at the plane he circled and circled then he dropped the red ribbon on the end of it was a candy bar with a bite out of it and and a pack of cigarettes with two cigarettes gone and yet 350 men got a puff of cigarette and we all got a sliver of candy pretty good that evening he came back and we looked like a body falling it was a pair of navy pants tied at the bottom and top and cartons of cigarettes and candy and and commander Fitzgerald of the of the grenadier submarine uh the ranking officer he opens the pants and right on the top was a magazine and he just stood there silently looking at that picture of the atomic bomb because we'd never heard of it and he kept looking at it and the other officers walked up we all looked over his shoulder and looked at that picture and then i realized the date of the color as hiroshima uh that the same dates well actually what happened with the bomb and the japanese uh pulled the eyes over the general public by telling him it was cholera which was the best thing they could have done so finally uh the bird uh two days before we knew actually knew the war was over the bird disappeared and uh because we had a 70 pound rock on the second floor right over the river and a rope we had it hidden away in the bulk of the building and we were going to grab him tie the rock on him and throw him over into the river and that was that was our intention but he flew the coupe so we didn't see him again near the guards all start bound the scraping and and uh and we talked to our farm and and we knew that families at home they weren't eating too well and typical american we started giving the guards food to take home to their children and stuff like that candy in fact when the war was over sleeping in tenth on the way home i still had nightmares about the bird i i'm italian i have to have revenge and when he's torturing me and punishing me and doing revenge in my heart and my hands are clenched i got him by the throat and that was in my dreams every night every night every night i got home it was the same thing at home i got married i still had the nightmares in the meantime i started drinking because of that but before i started drinking heavily i started training for the 48 olympics and i did get in good shape and then when i had my knee give out and my ankle and muscle spasm or like an explosion in my calf i couldn't train anymore and i gave that up and that really hurt me and so i started drinking more and more and my wife decided it's time for a divorce and somebody in our apartment house was telling me about a fella named billy graham we never heard of him they talked my wife into going down to hear billy graham he made a decision for the lord came home that night tried to talk me into it and i said keep away from i don't want to hear any more about religion and uh but she said something that really struck me in the heart and that was and because of my decision i'm not going to get a divorce so that was good news and but the next issue was all over man i refused to go finally they more or less tricked me into going out to hear billy and there he's preaching you know for all of sin well i knew i was a sinner well i didn't like the idea of him reminding me just gave him give me an excuse to leave i got mad grabbed my wife pulled her home and and the next day she's all over me again and so i finally consented on a return trip and i said well when he finishes his sermon and says every how it bowed i'm getting out okay so back we went and um i kept quoting scripture from the bible and uh and i knew what i should do but i didn't want to do it and uh then as i started to leave the camp i started thinking back on the on the raft when our lives were spared we did pray morning noon and night and we prayed constantly on the ramp uh my prayer was always god save my life and i'll seek you and serve you and here i am home alive my prayers were answered and they completely turned my back on those promises that hit me pretty hard before i got to the aisle where i decided to turn out no i stopped momentarily made my decision went back to the prayer room and made my confessional faith in christ and there a miracle took place my life completely changed i had a turnabout i knew that i was through getting drunk i knew it obviously to myself i knew i'd forgiven all my guards i knew i'd forgiven the bird and i think proof of that was that that night i didn't have a nightmare for the first time and it's been two and a half years and i haven't and since the war and i had a nightmare every night and now from 1949 till this day i still never had a nightmare or even the spy just anchoring of a nightmare and uh so when i met with the studio to make the movie with universal the producer was hearing all the things the bird did to me and i'm sitting at this meeting like this listening to these fellas talk and finally he's getting really uptight and he jumped up and said louie louie how could you forgive that so-and-so and he said well i'm going to forgive that so-and-so and i stood up and i said well i can only give you one verse in the bible why i could forgive him therefore if any man be in christ he is a new person all things are passed away behold all things are become new and he looked at me i didn't know what he's going to do and he rushed over and grabbed me around the waist picked me up and said we're going to make this into a major film so i thought that was pretty pretty neat him being jewish and not mentioned in christ so that was the climax that was just beautiful so that's my story and what a voice you just heard that is louis zamparini from the grave in heaven sharing his story for all to hear about how jesus saved his life made those nightmares disappear and renewed his life and his marriage and a special thanks to greg hangler as always for the editing on that piece and thanks to vision video god saved my life and i will seek and serve you he prayed on that boat i turned my back on god but then i came to christ my life completely changed i forgave the bird my nightmares ended louis zamparini born on this day in 1917 here on our american stories judy was boring hello then judy discovered jumbacassino.com it's my little escape now judy's the life of the party oh baby mama's bringing home the bacon whoa take it easy judy the chumba life is for everybody so go to chumbacassino.com and play over 100 casino style games join today and play for free for your chance to redeem some serious prizes chumbacassino.com no purchase necessary 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