American WWII Veteran to speak - SF Bay area - Menlo Park, CA on 21st and 22nd.
This weekend, Louis will be guest speaking at Menlo Park Presbyterian Church on 1/21 and 1/22. If you’re interested, more info here: http://mppc.org/unbroken
Subject: Louis Zamperini is coming to San Francisco this weekend!
Who is Louis Zamperini?
He is the former Olympian and WW2 veteran featured in Laura Hillebrand’s (if that name sounds familiar, she also authored Seabiscuit) #1 NYT Best Seller “Unbroken.”
Louis grew up in California in the 1920s, and emerged as one of the greatest runners America had ever seen, competing at the 1936 Berlin Olympics (where he met Adolf Hitler, broke a world record, and roomed with Jesse Owens). On a May afternoon in 1943, Louis joined the Army Air Corps as a bombardier on a B-24 flying out of Hawaii, and was 1 of only 3 members of an 11-man crew to survive a crash in the Pacific. After drifting for 47 days and 2,000 miles—enduring starvation and desperate thirst, sharks that leapt aboard the raft trying to drag them off, a machine-gun attack from a Japanese bomber, and a typhoon with waves some forty feet high—they were captured by the Japanese and spent 25 months in POW camps Ofuna, Omori, and Naoetsu. While only 1 in 100 American captured in Europe died, nearly 1 in 3 perished in Japanese captivity. Louis survives this brutal experience, returns home in October 1945, and is awarded the Air Medal, the Purple Heart, and Philippine Liberation Medal, the Asiatic-Pacific Campaign medal, and the American Campaign Medal with battle stars.
Like most returning soldiers, Zamperini had a difficult re-entry, and struggled with PTSD, alcoholism, flashbacks, and nightmares. In the fall of 1949 at a Billy Graham crusade, Louis becomes a Christian and turns his life around, even returning in 1950 to Japan as a missionary. He meets several of his former prison guards, embracing many of them and even pleaded for clemency on their behalf. In 1998, on his 81st birthday, Zamperini ran a 1-kilometer leg of the Olympic torch run in Japan for the Nagano Winter Olympics.
This weekend, Louis will be guest speaking at Menlo Park Presbyterian Church on 1/21 and 1/22. If you’re interested, more info here: http://mppc.org/unbroken
Wow...wish I could be there for this Oiao
In 1998, on his 81st birthday, Zamperini ran a 1-kilometer leg of the Olympic torch run in Japan for the Nagano Winter Olympics.
Holy Carp!
Thanks so much for this Oiao!