by Doug Stanton
Some of the boys now asked him if they could evaporate the salt from the seawater by cupping it in their hands and holding it up to the sun. He gently shook his head, told them, “No, son,” and begged the boys to be patient. He began keeping a close eye on those he knew weren’t married or who were without close ties on shore. Those with families, he discovered, were fighting the temptation to drink from the sea.
Those who succumbed fell into violent fits and, finally, comas. At first, they whooped and hollered and spun circles in the water, arms flailing, until finally a kind of explosion took place and they went limp. More than one boy came to rest in a ring of circling sharks. The dead and near-dead floated motionless, facing the sky, bodies jerking, eyes blinking in terror. Some of the poor boys clawed the air in thirst or panic. Their throats were too dry to scream. It often took no more than two hours for them to die.
It was dark now, and Haynes could feel the anxiety swirling around him. The life vests, the boys’ last line to hope, were growing waterlogged. Some were riding as much as six inches lower in the sea, making it even more difficult not to swallow salt water. The vests possessed an estimated buoyancy limit of forty-eight hours, and they were approaching that limit. After this, the boys would be floating on borrowed time. And they knew it.
As Haynes grew feverish and started to shake, he felt his power of reasoning slipping away. The night was rent by screams rising up all across the water, the awful music of the savaging as the sharks attacked around the edges of the group. Haynes had yet to see a shark attack close up, but this was almost worse. It was torture; too much was left to his imagination.
He instructed the boys to tie their vests together and form a protective mass. They obeyed, huddling in moaning clusters as the temperature plummeted. Soon all were shivering uncontrollably. One boy chewed completely through a rope he’d placed between his chattering teeth. It was so cold they began announcing when they had to pee so others could gather around them.
It was as if everything that had come before had completely slipped away.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Genocide
At first you get in a situation where you abhor it.
You can’t stand it. It’s terrible. But you can’t get away from it.
So you stick with it. And then you get so that you tolerate it.
You tolerate it long enough, you embrace it.
It becomes your way of life.
—LEWIS HAYNES, LCDR, Medical Corps, USS Indianapolis
DAY THREE
WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 1, 1945
Where does a man go when there are no more corners to turn, when he’s running out of hope, out of luck, out of time?
In the very early hours of Wednesday morning, the boys started killing one another. Haynes had spent the night listening to the sounds of shivering and chattering teeth. Then, from somewhere not far off he heard a shout: “There’s a Jap here! He’s trying to kill me. Get the Jap!”
This was followed by piercing screams, but Haynes had no idea what was causing them. He could see, but barely, boys fumbling with the knots holding their vests together. Then, suddenly, the circle of boys blew apart, as if parted by an invisible wind. They scattered in all directions.
Haynes, swimming into the pandemonium, saw boys with knives blindly stabbing at buddies who were still tied to them. Those unable to punch or stab rose up and tried to drown the closest breathing thing they could find. One sailor gouged out another’s eyes with his fingers.
Haynes watched as one sailor tried stabbing another, who, in turn, was rescued by two nearby boys. They jumped atop the sailor with the knife and held him under. As they drowned him, they screamed long, defiant cries of anguish. Then the rescuers turned on each other. Hypothermia, dehydration, hypernatremia, photophobia, the onset of starvation—Haynes knew what was turning the minds of these boys inside out. In a matter of ten minutes, an estimated fifty boys were killed. The melee had the intensity of a flash fire.
Haynes tried paddling away from the bursts of violence around him, but wherever he went, another fight was raging. Then he was jumped by two gibbering figures carrying knives. As they shoved him deep underwater and held him down, he knew he was drowning. Kicking and punching at his attackers’ arms, the doctor managed to break free, shooting to the surface with a wrench. Swimming away as fast as possible, he kept his eyes trained on his attackers until he reached the fringe of the chaos. He was heartsick; the boys had become a pack of fighting dogs.
Sharks, he realized, were still circling, and he was certain they were pursuing him. But if he returned to the group, he was sure he would be drowned. So he floated, trying to catch his breath, and attempted to remain perfectly still. His mouth was just inches from the surface of the water, which he knew was poison to him. His vest was so waterlogged he wondered how much longer it would hold him up. Even the slightest movement of his hands was a monumental effort—he was that tired. Convinced that he would soon slip beneath the waves, he cried out for help.
Suddenly he heard a voice in his ear: “Easy, Doc,” it said, “I’ve got you.”
It was the pharmacist’s mate, John Schmueck, with whom he had stood aboard the Indy watching their helpless patients slide into the sea. Schmueck shoved his arms through Haynes’s life vest and hoisted the gasping doctor onto his hip. “Nothing’s gonna happen to you now, Doc,” the voice said. But Haynes was out cold.
Private McCoy had cut himself and his four raftmates free of the other rafts in their group sometime before sunset the previous day. They were now adrift, bucking and gliding through the dawn. Well? he wondered. What now, dumb shit?
The trouble with the boys on the other rafts in his group had begun late the previous day. An argument had broken out, and somebody on one of the rafts finally pulled a pistol. The fight had centered on whether or not breaking up the group would increase their chances of survival. Somebody had suggested they should strike out separately in the hopes that one of the rafts might sail into a shipping lane.
Mike Kuryla, on the raft next to McCoy, had thought the idea was plain dumb. After the gun appeared, though, he shut up.
McCoy had been in favor of the idea; he was sick of waiting. The water around him had become a floating morgue. Bodies and pieces of bodies—arms, legs, half-eaten torsos—were floating by, and McCoy had been willing to do almost anything to get away. His raft had been nearly destroyed by the constant pounding of the other rafts as the waves pitched them together. Of the ten feet of raft, only about seven were still usable—the thing couldn’t even be called a raft anymore. He had known that striking out for a shipping lane was a cockeyed idea, but it was better than watching the other boys kill each other.
His raftmates Payne and Willis didn’t have much of an opinion. They were asleep. Felton Outland was also fading, into unconsciousness, his face and arms blistered with welts, which McCoy guessed were caused by the stinging tentacles of a jellyfish. Somehow, McCoy and the rest had missed getting stung as their raft drifted over the nearly invisible predator.
As for Bob Brundige, he had rallied but he was still speaking very little. It annoyed McCoy, who enjoyed shooting the breeze to pass the time. He was about to say something about this when Ed Payne woke and started acting crazy. Payne was shouting in a high-pitched wail: “I don’t wanna die. I don’t wanna die.” It was bad enough for McCoy when the boys were asleep. Now the raft was turning into a floating mental ward.
“Shut up,” McCoy told him sharply. “We ain’t gonna die.”
A plane flew over at what looked to McCoy to be about 5,000 feet. He pulled out his pistol and this time the gun fired. He knew it wouldn’t work, but he had to try. Nothing. The plane just kept on flying.
One of the boys, maybe Payne, said, “Give me some of your water.”
McCoy was shocked. “I don’t have no water,” he said. “Hell, you know that.”
“You do have water. You’re keeping it from us!” Now the boy pulled a knife.
“Shit,”
said McCoy, “is that what it’s coming to? You wanna start killing each other, huh? Fine, but let’s use our bare hands.” He was in no mood for this looney-tunes horseshit. “See?” he said, grabbing the knife away from the boy and tossing it over the raft’s side. Then he pitched his pistol as far as he could and said, “All right now, come on. Let’s do it.”
Nobody moved. What passed for normalcy returned to the raft.
Across the water, in other groups, boys were making deals with God, promising to read the Bible, to write their parents more, to never steal or cheat, so help them, if only they could survive this day.
In the raft group commanded by Ensign Twible, chief engineer Redmayne was losing it. He had started sipping salt water sometime late Tuesday night, and he now informed Twible that he was going to swim belowdecks and start the Indy’s engines. Twible was beside himself. Of the original group of 325 boys, about 200 were still alive, and this disorganized mass was operating under the strictest rules of survival of the fittest. Boys who couldn’t muscle onto a raft were doomed to spend every minute floating in their life vests, more fully exposed to the sharks.
And now there was Redmayne to contend with. Twible feared that in his delirium, the wounded officer would drown. For several hours, Twible had been struggling to keep him afloat. He finally jabbed him with a morphine Syrette. Redmayne barked, “Whadya do that for!” and then he slumped over.
The young ensign tied the straps of Redmayne’s vest to his own. He would tow the 200-pound officer behind him, like a fish on a stringer.
In the early morning light, Dr. Haynes came to in the arms of his friend and slowly craned his head around. Everywhere there were more mutilated bodies, limbs swaying silently on the morning tide.
Haynes looked out as far as he could see. But he saw only ocean and more ocean, rolling in ominous green humps over the horizon. No planes, no ships, not one goddamned thing that promised life or offered even a shred of hope. He saw boys buck naked or wearing tattered shreds of underwear. Some had tied hats or socks around their necks, fashioning makeshift protective scarves. They stared at the morning sky with sunken eyes.
Who’s there? the eyes seemed to beg as they studied the clouds.
No one, pal, came the answer in their shipmates’ hollow faces. No one but you.
As the merciless sun rocketed into the sky Wednesday morning, it revealed a new day without faith. And yet many of the survivors found themselves reaching even deeper inside and summoning a grim refusal to die. No one believed that help was coming, but they tried to convince one another to hang on, as if for the hell of it. They had been afloat fifty-five hours. At this point slightly more than half of the 900 or so who had left the ship were still alive. Boys had been dying at an average rate of one every ten minutes for the past three days. And it looked like the cycle would only accelerate.
The seawater was eating Dr. Haynes’s boys alive. Their sunburned, waterlogged arms and legs were stamped with painful red sores, called saltwater ulcers, some as small as cigarette burns, others as big as basketballs. The salt water was even dissolving hair from some of their bodies. After another cold night in the water, the men’s body temperatures hovered around 88 degrees, precariously within the coma zone. Their kidneys were shutting down, their hearts were racing, and they were gasping for air.
And then they began hallucinating en masse. The visions came whirling over the horizon through the bright morning sun—whole islands, grocery stores, old girlfriends, wives, automobiles, and mountains of ice cream materialized on the water around the boys, who looked on overjoyed and amazed.
It was the beginning of the final act.
The rafts of marine private McCoy and Captain McVay drifted ahead of what remained of the other groups. McCoy and McVay were about eight miles apart, and each was about seven miles from Haynes.
Amazingly, Captain McVay’s crew was nearly untouched by madness. The other good news was the relative smoothness of the sea, which had replaced Tuesday’s swells. Assessing his collection of rafts, McVay knew the boys were teetering on the brink of exhaustion. In a low voice that, given his parched mouth and throat, was a huge effort, McVay pleaded with the boys to stay still and expend as little energy as possible. Quietly, he begged them to keep looking out for planes.
The tension was nearly unbearable. At one point, as many as nine sharks were circling the rafts. The crew had spent hours fishing and they’d had little luck, although John Spinelli had been able to catch one fish. He’d cut it into strips and arranged them on the raft’s edge to dry in the sun. But Mc Vay had been afraid to let the boy eat the small, black triangular fish, fearing it might be poisonous. Spinelli obeyed and tossed it overboard. The sight of this was torture for the others, who’d been sucking sullenly on milk tablets or nibbling at their meager rations of salty Spam and crackers.
McVay’s four rafts were spread out over seventy-five feet of ocean. He was trying to create as large a visual target as possible for passing aircraft. At 5 A.M., after spotting a plane’s red and green running lights, Mc Vay had shot two star shells—illuminating rounds—from a pistol he’d scavenged from his raft’s emergency box. Later, he spotted what he thought was a B-24 or B-29 bomber flying in a westerly direction. It had to have taken off from Tinian and was almost certainly on its way to Leyte.
But as had been the case time and again, with so many planes that had offered a moment or two of hope, the diligent boys’ signal mirrors had failed to attract notice. Mc Vay knew that his sense of self-discipline was the only thread holding his boys to sanity.
John Spinelli didn’t like the terrible quiet on the raft, but he was more troubled by what he saw in his captain’s eyes. Spinelli knew what Mc Vay must be feeling, but could do nothing. Turning his glance toward another of his raftmates, Spinelli noticed the increasingly odd look in the boy’s eyes and told himself to watch this one carefully. All morning, the guy had been gazing at the enormous shark trailing their rafts. The fish had bumped the rafts, nuzzled them, even lifted the rafts’ corners as if testing its power. The guy never took his eyes off the fish. It was like he was hypnotized.
Suddenly, as the shark passed again, the boy slashed out with a tiny, two-inch penknife. Spinelli couldn’t believe it—the crazy bastard had actually managed to stab the shark between the eyes! Cannonballs of water landed around the group of rafts as the shark thrashed, thumping the tiny craft with long, leathery strokes of its tail. It seemed all the rafts would tip and break apart.
Spinelli was pissed off, confused, and a little amazed. He thought of his baby daughter, now three weeks old. He had laid eyes on her for a total of two days before being ordered back to the Indy. He figured that was all he was going to get in this life—two lousy days.
McVay raised his voice: “We are going to be all right! We are going to be all right!”
Like a lid clapped on a box, his firm voice silenced the boys. They looked at one another, grumbling, and settled back into their corners. Spinelli and some others grabbed their mate and pinned him to the side of the raft. Someone yanked the knife from his hand and threw it overboard.
McVay knew he had to do something quick if he was to get anyone back to shore. If they didn’t kill themselves, they’d starve. He reminded them that rescue had to be on the way. Then he doled out each man’s daily ration of one sliver of Spam and a malted milk tablet before announcing that, thenceforth, he would be cutting the rations in half. This would double their survival time, he figured, to twenty days.
As he and his boys chewed and stared into a blinding horizon, peace—or something approximating it—gradually returned to the rafts. To while away the long afternoon, McVay started questioning the boys about their personal lives. He wanted to know about their wives and girlfriends. He himself fell into a reverie about his comfortable life in D.C. with his wife, Louise.
Spinelli, who had served under the Indy’s previous captain, the hard-nosed Johnny “General Quarters” Johnson, knew that few captains would ever get
this personal with their crew, not even when everything was “FUBAR”—“Fucked-up Beyond All Recognition,” like things were now. He admired McVay’s soft-spoken calm. The old man, in his opinion, had been getting the job done—hey, at least they hadn’t died yet. Spinelli realized he was learning something essential, something he couldn’t yet put into words. He and the boys listened raptly as the stoic, gray-haired captain confessed, “I’m going to have some explaining to do.” McVay didn’t know what he might tell the families of the dead—if he survived. He knew there was little he could say that would help.
On board the Indy, McVay had sometimes talked of becoming an admiral. But now he said, “I should have gone down with the ship.” The boys on the raft disagreed.
It was as if, in his candor, McVay was discovering what it meant to be a captain and a leader. He had commanded ships, but until now, relying on the barest of resources—some crackers, pieces of fishing line—he’d never felt the pull of the lives he held in his hands, or the full measure of what it meant to be placed in harm’s way. He assured the boys they would be rescued by the next day. And they believed him.
In McCoy’s raft, Ed Payne had taken to drinking his urine. He was kneeling—or trying to—on the edge of the raft, his hand cupped at his zipper while he peed into a ration tin. And then he brought his hand to his mouth. McCoy was amazed Payne even had anything left. The boy was becoming a real problem, but McCoy didn’t blame him. As the afternoon sun pressed down, McCoy was so thirsty he was thinking of taking a pee himself. But he couldn’t bring himself to do it, figuring it might make him even crazier. He reached over the raft and cradled a cool palmful of water. He burned for a sip.
