Wendell Lett had tried to catch up on his sleep but only ended up in another nightmare episode. He had been crying and gasping and he might’ve shouted something, his throat raw, his eyeballs stinging. Hopefully no one heard him.

He sat up on his bed. The breeze from the ceiling fan, its wicker blades driven by a belt, led him to see the bouquet on the dresser, yellow hibiscus. He breathed in its sweet, fresh scent.

For a troubled war veteran, a room all to one’s self could be the harshest prison. Lett’s combat fatigue hounded him from the war, unrelenting, damning him. But he figured there was hope for him yet. They had offered him a cure, so of course he’d taken the deal. The alternative, an Army stockade, would only accelerate his deadly affliction.

They had sent him to the US Territory of Hawaii. He was on the Big Island, rugged and volcanic and remote—on the map he’d seen that the other Hawaiian isles could easily fit inside the Big Island, including Oahu. As his eyes adjusted to the dim afternoon light, he saw that the leis and coconuts on the curtains matched the bedspread. The wall calendar promoting Dole Pineapple Juice was open to February 1948. If only he had some of that nectar to wash away the rum on his tongue, stale and slathered on like rubber cement. The bottle on the nightstand read, Tanduay Rhum, Manila, Philippines. It came from the Far East. Or was that now the West from here?

He’d been here two days. They’d sent him two continents away from rural Belgium, where he was living with his wife, Heloise, and their toddler, Holger Thomas. His sickness was destroying him, his family, and her love for him. He had to do something, anything—so he had.