Serendipity, it's a word you rarely hear used these days. It's often replaced by lucky or coincidental, but rarely,
serendipity, and I think that's a shame. I think that's a shame because
serendipity is such a useful word. If you hear that a story is serendipitous, you can virtually
guarantee that it is going to have
importance greater than itself. It's going to be something that speaks to a larger meaning.
And one such serendipitous story takes place here in the Ogasawara Islands chain, on this island, Chichijima.
It happens in September,
1944, just at the close of World War II, as the Americans have been pushing back island after island after island,
until they are just off the coast here.
And if you're in the Japanese military,
you virtually know that you're going to die, now that they've arrived. Almost every single island chain has seen near
100% death rate for the Japanese military.
And you have to understand how that must have felt. The terror, the anger, the fear.
So when those Americans are just off the coast, on that morning in September,
Japanese sitting here, manning their guns, waiting for them to come in, a
squadron of American fighters comes flying up over the island. And the Japanese take to their guns and
they shoot down as many as they can. A handful
come flying into the island, doing their best to make it here, before their plane crashes, make it to land, become
prisoners of war.
And it's the wrong decision.
It's the wrong decision because the man in charge of the military here, Yoshio Tachibana,
he's not taking prisoners. He's a sadist.
What's worse? He's a cannibal.
He eats the pilots who crash here. He tortures and murders the rest.
But that's not the story I'm trying to tell.
The story I'm trying to tell is the story of one pilot, who decided that instead of coming into land,
he was going to risk the ocean.
So instead of flying his plane in, he ejects immediately,
crashing into the water, ripping open his head on the tail of his plane as he tries to eject,
*finger snap*
landing in a life raft that has no supplies,
knowing the Japanese are coming, seeing him crash into the water, already in their fighters and boats going out to reach him.
But the Americans know he's there too,
and his hope, his last hope, is that the Americans
somehow, make it to him through this minefield of ocean. They send a boat to come and get him. And
somehow,
somehow, they succeed. And that soldier is pulled back aboard.
And that's the story I want to tell, because that's the story of
serendipity.
That soldier's decision, that pilot's decision to go that way, rather than this way, that tiny
decision, to brave the ocean rather than the land,
it fundamentally alters world history,
for better or worse.
Your life is changed.
My life is changed. All of our lives are changed by that tiny decision
of that way.
Because if that 20 year old pilot had not decided to try to get back to his ship,
we would not have the same 41st president of the United States.
Because that pilot's name is George Herbert Walker Bush.
That's serendipity.
And this? This is Rare Earth.