by Tod Olson
Sergeant Alex looked the worst of the lot. A white paste had formed at the corners of his mouth. He sat in the doughnut and moaned for water or mumbled the name of his girlfriend over and over. Her nickname was Snooks, and it took a while for the men to figure out what he was talking about.
Finally, Rickenbacker got tired of listening to the moaning. In his mind, despair was a contagious disease, and Alex was showing symptoms. If they were going to survive out here, everyone had to believe it was not just possible but certain. Any sign of doubt had to be stamped out quickly and ruthlessly. No one could be allowed to quit.
He roped the doughnut in close and lashed out at Alex.
“Why the hell can’t you take it?!” he demanded.
After all, Alex wasn’t the only one suffering. And there were thousands more boys out there fighting for their lives in unbearable conditions—American soldiers stuck in waterlogged foxholes eating meager rations of rice and beans.
Alex explained meekly that he’d been recovering from jaundice and appendicitis. He’d only been out of the hospital for a couple of weeks, and he’d gotten some kind of lip or gum infection. He also admitted he’d been leaning over the side of the doughnut and drinking the salt water.
“I tried not to, but I had to,” he moaned. “I just had to have water.”
Rickenbacker turned away and let the doughnut drift back to the end of its twenty-foot tether. They’d better find food and water soon, he thought, or Alex wasn’t going to make it.
Hunger filled the empty hours of the day and night. Their minds groped for solutions, real or imagined.
At one point, Cherry was baiting a hook with yet another useless piece of orange peel when he wondered out loud if fingernails would work as bait.
Bartek said no, it would take a real piece of flesh to make a fish bite.
“What part would you use?” asked Whittaker.
Bartek claimed he’d use an earlobe because they don’t serve any purpose.
“You’d never miss it,” he said.
Whittaker suggested the tip of a finger.
Reynolds wanted to use a piece of toe because no one would ever notice it was missing.
It had started as idle chatter, but everyone knew it was a real option. They needed bait, and if they had to use their own flesh, shouldn’t they do it?
Adamson warned that the blood from a fingertip or an earlobe might aggravate the sharks. That didn’t seem like much of a threat after a week at sea with their constant companions. But no one was quite ready to slice off an earlobe for the chance of catching a fish. The conversation passed with all body parts intact.
The talk of using human flesh as bait, however, brought them uncomfortably close to a last-ditch measure that no one was willing to mention aloud. At sea, when men grew desperate enough, they had been known to eat one another to survive.
In 1820, the whale ship Essex was rammed by a giant sperm whale about 2,500 miles east of where the three rafts were now drifting. In three months lost at sea, the eight survivors of the Essex consumed seven of their companions. In one case, they didn’t even wait for a boat mate to die. They drew lots, and the unlucky sailor who picked the short stick was sacrificed for a meal. They drew again to decide who would shoot him. The practice was common enough that it was part of an unwritten code known as the Custom of the Sea. As long as the lots were drawn fairly, no court of law considered it murder.
The survivors of the yacht Mignonette shocked the world in 1884 when the news came out that they had killed and eaten their cabin boy.
Most sailors had to be on the verge of death before they resorted to cannibalism. But everyone had a different threshold. It took the castaways from the Essex two months before they started saving dead bodies for food. In 1884, the crew of the English yacht Mignonette lasted twenty days before they killed and ate their seventeen-year-old cabin boy.
Rickenbacker, Whittaker, Bartek, and the rest of the crew had now been adrift for a week.
CHAPTER 8
OUT OF THE SKY
The names of the B-17 crew were released on October 25, five days after the plane vanished. The army and the navy were using every available plane to search for the men. But by now, the papers were declaring them—and their famous passenger—lost for good.
“Only A Wisp Of Hope,” reported the Lewiston Tribune in Idaho.
“A Star Has Vanished,” decreed the Gadsden Times in Alabama.
The Wichita Beacon in Kansas left no doubt at all: “Rickenbacker Death a Serious Blow,” read its headline on October 27, six days after the men disappeared.
Rickenbacker’s close friends and relatives weren’t ready to write him off just yet. They spoke to reporters or wrote letters to the editor insisting that Eddie would survive this close call, just like he had survived the others.
But most reporters retold the story of Rickenbacker’s life as though they were speaking at his funeral. And nearly everyone agreed that the world had lost a great American. According to the papers, Eddie was a role model. He was a hero at a time when Americans needed heroes. He stood for values that seemed especially important to a nation at war.
Eddie was a man of action. “No swivel chair for him, but the pilot’s seat and the roar of the motor,” wrote one reporter.
“Lead Foot Ed”: Rickenbacker at the wheel of a race car, not long before he went overseas in World War I.
Eddie believed in progress. He raced automobiles in the days when just one in fifty Americans owned one. He flew military missions at a time when planes had been around for barely more than a decade. He started a commercial airline when most people were too scared to set foot on a plane.
Eddie wasn’t afraid to take risks. In his racing days, a newspaper called him “Lead Foot Ed” because he knew only one way to race: Floor it until you either win or crash. According to an Illinois paper, he was the “bravest of the brave.”
Now it appeared he was gone forever. Eddie had been a meteor, blazing his way “across the horizon of human achievement,” gushed the reporter from the Gadsden Times. “His star arose and dazzled during the First World War and the shining arc of it swept into the war of the present, finally to be smothered in the spume of the restless Pacific.”
Back on the rafts, Rickenbacker’s star was merely dozing when a small seabird—a swallow or a tern—circled the group, came unusually low in the sky, and landed on his hat.
Eddie woke. The bird looked around at the gaunt creatures in front of him. They stared back. No one spoke. No one moved.
Rickenbacker saw the greed in the eyes of his raft mates and knew exactly what had happened. He raised his right hand as slowly as he could bear. He touched his chin. He raised his hand higher.
When it reached the brim of his hat he made a blind grab for the bird, clamped his fingers around its legs, trapped its body with his other hand, and hung on as though eight lives depended on it.
The bird could not have weighed more than three ounces. But it was food—and more importantly, bait.
Rickenbacker wrung the bird’s neck and plucked its feathers. He carved out the intestines and set them aside. Then he carefully cut the rest into eight equal pieces of dark, sinewy meat. The men devoured the tiny bites raw, bones and all. Aside from the four bites of orange they had so carefully rationed, it was the first food to cross their lips in nearly two hundred hours.
The morsels of bird meat were just enough to make their mouths water for more. Rickenbacker handed a slimy piece of seabird intestines into the other large raft. Two baited hooks went overboard, and eight pairs of eyes stared after them. It didn’t take long for the dead bird to serve its purpose. Cherry’s boat hauled in a fish about 8 to 12 inches long. Rickenbacker caught another about the same size.
The men carved the first fish into portions an inch square and a half-inch thick. They agreed to store the second fish for the next day’s meal.
Rickenbacker thought he could feel the mood in the rafts lighten. The tiny chunk of raw fish
tasted cool and moist—one of the most delicious things he had ever eaten. Even Alex and Adamson, in all their misery, seemed to revive when the food hit their tongues.
Best of all, the crew had proven they could use their own resourcefulness to survive. They had reached into the vast ocean and plucked food from it. With patience and a little ingenuity they had turned their prison into a pantry. There was an unlimited supply of fish in the sea, and it was theirs for the taking.
The food had a noticeably different effect on Whittaker’s mood. He enjoyed his two-course meal of tern and fish. But as soon as he finished, another craving took over. His mouth was pasty and dry. His head throbbed. It felt like the sun was baking every last drop of moisture out of him.
The late-afternoon air cooled and brought some relief. But when the sun finally dropped to the horizon, the colors in the sky tormented Whittaker. All he could think of was the expression “He drank in the sunset.” The red would be strawberry, the yellow lemon, the purple grape. And he wanted it all with plenty of ice.
The fact was that people had been known to survive two, even three months without food. Rarely did anyone last for two weeks without water.
CHAPTER 9
NOT A DROP TO DRINK
Every night, after Bill Cherry optimistically pointed the Very pistol at the sky and fired, the flare left behind a metal cartridge, about six inches long and an inch in diameter. The men put them to good use. Since they had trouble standing up in the raft, they peed in the cartridges and dumped the contents over the sides.
By the end of the first week, Rickenbacker and Adamson made a decision that comes eventually to people who are dying of dehydration. They would drink their own urine. Had they known a little more about the body’s chemistry, they probably would not have made the effort. Urine contains salt and other minerals the body needs to get rid of. Put those minerals back in and the body loses more liquid trying to flush them back out.
But Rickenbacker and Adamson were desperately thirsty. They let their half-full cartridges sit in the sun, hoping that the heat would somehow purify the contents. Then they tried to drink.
They gave up after a couple of sips.
By the second week, the intense hunger that gnawed at Rickenbacker, Adamson, and the crew had begun to fade. It’s not as though the tiny morsels of food had satisfied them. Their bodies were still wasting away, consuming muscle for fuel. But their cells and organs adapted to the new regimen, learning to make do with less. The men moved slowly to conserve energy. Reactions came seconds later than they should. Thoughts passed through the brain in slow motion. As the body adjusted, the cravings for food came and went. Mostly there was weakness and a dull, familiar ache that became easier and easier to ignore.
In its place rose a desperate, relentless, piercing desire for water.
“The violence of raving thirst has no parallel in the catalogue of human calamities,” wrote the first mate of the Essex, who survived the wreck of the whale boat in 1820. He described the affliction as a “raging fever of the throat.”
Rickenbacker and the others had begun to understand exactly what he meant. Their saliva turned to a foul-tasting paste in their mouths. Their tongues felt swollen and thick. They wanted to complain bitterly about the lack of water, but if anyone talked for more than a minute his voice shrank to a raw, hoarse whisper.
Water surrounded them. There were trillions of gallons beneath the rafts and a never-ending supply of mist in the air. And yet the salt seemed to leach moisture out of everything it touched. Cherry rubbed oil from behind his ears into the moving parts of his revolver to keep it lubricated. But after a few days the gun was a useless hunk of rusted metal, and he threw it into the sea.
Whittaker felt the lack of water in every pore. His skin seemed to grow tight as it dried. It felt like a fabric stretched snugly over the bones of his face. He had mostly stopped sweating by now; his body didn’t have the liquid to spare. But every minute he spent in the sun seemed to drain another precious drop of moisture from his flesh.
Finally, he couldn’t take it any longer. They were floating in the biggest swimming pool on Earth. There were still sharks prowling around down there, but they hadn’t attacked so far. “What the hell,” he said, and slipped over the side into the cool water. He thought he could feel his skin soaking up liquid like a dry sponge.
A minute later, he was still in one piece.
The others joined him, one by one. Even Alex managed to flop over the side and spend a couple of minutes floating in the sea.
In the next few days, DeAngelis would turn into the most dedicated swimmer of them all. When he went over the side, he would drop a few feet under, where the water felt cool against his skin. He made sure no one—especially not Rickenbacker—could see him. He let the salt water flood his mouth. He swallowed, and then he did it again. He knew it wasn’t good for him, but he couldn’t help himself. He’d been watching Alex drink from the ocean all along. And everyone was getting desperate. They had been more than a week at sea without a drop of freshwater. People had been known to die of dehydration in less time than that.
As the sun went down on the eighth night, Rickenbacker felt the temperature drop more than usual. The sky clouded over. The wind picked up, ruffling the surface of the sea. For days the ocean had been calm. Now swells began to lift the rafts and drop them. The familiar roller-coaster ride had begun again—and it meant that rain just might be in the air.
Rickenbacker tried to stay awake. They had a plan for collecting water, and he rehearsed the steps in his mind. But he was so weak that he could feel himself dropping off, his head sinking into Adamson’s knees.
At some point in the night, he was jolted awake. The raft had slammed into the bottom of a trough, and all around them the seas were raging. Wind gusted from every direction. The sky had turned a murky gray-black. Every now and then one of the other rafts appeared at the crest of a wave, silhouetted dimly against the sky. The rest of the time, his companions were hidden in the gloom. He could only hope they were still attached.
By midnight, they were all awake and alert, scanning the sky for the telltale vertical streaks of the violent mid-ocean storms known as squalls. At 3 a.m., Rickenbacker heard someone cry out, “Rain!” He lifted his face to the sky, opened his mouth, and felt the drops, cool, clear, and sweet. Then they were gone.
They could see the source of the rain—a fearsome-looking squall hanging in the distance. The men groped for the oars and started paddling. If they could find the strength, and if the wind cooperated, and if they prayed hard enough, they might be able to put themselves in the path of the storm.
It was the clearest sign yet of how desperate they had become. They were eight men jammed into three leaky rafts. Even on the fringes of the squall the sea was lethal. The swells churned and foamed at the crests. Lightning streaked the sky. Claps of thunder rolled across the empty sea. In front of them, all the deadly turmoil of the sky and sea rushed across the horizon in a concentrated column. And they were paddling straight into it, shouting as loud as their dry throats would allow.
The rain came in a curtain, sweeping across the ocean. When it hit them they were ready—underwear, T-shirts, handkerchiefs, socks, and bandages all laid out like washing day on their heads and arms and the sides of the rafts. Water poured from the sky and soaked the garments in seconds. The men wrung the water out furiously and wrung again until the taste of salt was gone. Adamson and Bartek passed clean garments to Rickenbacker, and he started to squeeze the cool freshwater into a bailing bucket.
Just then, he felt a tug at the raft’s bowline. He turned in time to see a giant swell turn Whittaker’s raft on its side and toss the three men into the ocean. Reynolds! he thought. The radioman couldn’t possibly be strong enough to stay afloat in these seas. But the next flash of lightning revealed three men clinging to the handline that ran around the sidewalls of the raft. With Bartek’s help, Rickenbacker reeled the raft in and held it tight to their leeward side, shelteri
ng the three men from the waves while they dragged themselves back in.
Cherry, Whittaker, and Reynolds were safe. But what was missing? The Very pistol was gone, along with the rest of the flares and a few cartridges. So was Cherry’s bailing bucket and the freshwater he had collected. But the most valuable thing lost was time. They had encountered just one storm in eight days, and it was passing fast.
Rickenbacker went back to work wringing garments into the bucket and watching anxiously for the back edge of the storm. Cherry and Whittaker sucked the water out of their T-shirts and shorts and spit it into the valve of a life vest. Each vest had two inflatable compartments in the chest and another in the neck—enough space to store about a gallon of water. In the doughnut, DeAngelis and Alex had no way to store water, so they collected what they could and wrung it greedily into their mouths.
Then the rain stopped, like someone shutting off a faucet in the sky. What had it been—ten minutes? Twenty? As long as an hour? No one could say.
The important thing was that they now had about a quart and a half of clear, cool, sweet water.
A quart and a half for eight men.
Six ounces of water per person.
Half a glass to keep each man alive until they were lucky enough to drift into another storm.
CHAPTER 10
DESPAIR
They started with an ounce of water on the morning of the ninth day. Rickenbacker poured each ration carefully into one of the remaining Very cartridges and passed it down the line. The handoff from raft to raft was made with great caution. All eyes watched as the man whose turn it was drained the tiny vessel. Even so, as the cartridge made its way back, everyone who handled it brought it to his mouth and lifted his face to the sky, hoping to catch one remaining drop.