Chapter 34: The Shimmering Girl

Louie finally reached home in October. They had a huge party waiting for him. Louie, even after coming home, still had nightmares about the Bird. Back home, Louie met Cynthia Applewhite. They went out on some dates, and after two weeks, Louie asked her to marry him. They were married on May 25.

Chapter 33: Mother's Day

A train took the POWs to an American base. People thought that Louie had died, only believing he was alive when they actually saw him. POWs continued to eat as much as they could. The doctor told Louie that he would never be able to run again. Louie ended up on Okinawa, waiting to be transported home. Louie was finally transferred to Hawaii and then to San Francisco, where he was cured of his dysentery.

Chapter 32: Cascades of Pink Peaches

Soon, word got to Phil's camp about the ending of the war, and they threw a party. Care packages were sent by American planes flying above POW camps carrying food and cigarettes. Louie was overjoyed about all of the events. The Japanese still executed the kill-all order on some of it's islands that it controlled. The POWs were not freed from the camps until mid-September. The POWs marched out of camp, with some of the nicer guards saluting them.

Chapter 31: The Naked Stampede

The guards and civilians around the camp had gone into a daze. The Bird apparently left camp to go to the designated spot on the mountains for the new camp where they would kill all of the POWs. The date they had set for the killings was the following week. Louie was suffering from bad bowel problems. One of the POWs found out that the war had ended. Some guards at Phil's camp made them go on strange marches through the forest in the freezing cold. An American plane flew over POWs one day when they were allowed to bathe in a river, and it said that the war was over. Louie was sick and tired, but at the same time, he was overjoyed.

Chapter 30: The Boiling City

The Bird still beat Louie ferociously on a daily basis. One night in July, the Bird beat Zamp unconscious. Louie couldn't take it anymore. He and some other officers hatched a plan to kill the Bird. On August 6th, the American army dropped the atom bomb on Hiroshima.

Chapter 29: Two Hundred and Twenty Punches

At the beginning of May, 400 more POWs entered their camp, which meant less food for everyone. By June, Louie's leg felt better, so the Bird sent him back out to shovel coal. Someone had stolen fish from one of the boats. This resulted in a line where anyone involved in the theft would go down a row of all of the POWs at the camp, and get punched by all of them. Each man in the camp ended up being hit in the face 220 times. The Japanese were considering moving all of the POWs to the mountains where they were going to kill them. Louie worried that all of this would happened before they were rescued.

Chapter 28: Enslaved

For the next two months, Louie was in the worst camp in all of Japan. The prisoners had very little food. Everyday, the POWs were put on ships to shovel coal into the engines of the boats. They breathed in a lot of coal dust. There were no showers, only baths in which the Japanese reused the same water used the day before. Towards the end of a torturous two months, Louie collapsed and felt a stinging sensation in his foot and knee. He was moved to work at the pigsty because he could not work very well.