A couple weeks into his treatment and just days after his first assignment, Lett had gotten the call—his next assignment. His cure could continue. They traveled straight from the Big Island in a Catalina flying boat, taking off from the water down in a cove along the South Kona shore. Deploying by airplane sounded first-rate, but it ended up like being inside a submarine, a tight-as-hell mess of erratically placed seats and bunks with thin padding. They had to watch their heads and elbows and toes because of all the bolts and brackets left where wartime equipment used to be—machine guns, old navigation equipment. Jock loved finally getting a ride in a floating plane, but his excitement cooled once they took off and the giant metal tube of a fuselage rattled and shook and dipped and shifted and kept at it after they rose to altitude. It had blister windows that bulged out, but looking over the vast sea below and seeing only nothingness until the horizon didn’t help a man cope. They were a six-man team again, a few from the group that did the job in Hilo, a couple new ones. The fragility of the ride didn’t help any of them want to get to know one another any better. It wasn’t like a game of craps or cards would last anyway on account of the droning racket alone.

They landed on Guam first, for refueling, and they were only allowed to get off long enough to stretch their legs and walk around the plane. At some point—hours, maybe a day after their first liftoff—Jock was rocking Lett awake for landing. They touched down on water and floated into another cove, but this inlet was far across the Pacific from the one they had left.

They were now in the Philippines.

A pontoon boat was waiting, and it took them ashore. A few men joined them there, “in-country” as they called it—two more Americans looking as GI-issue as they come, and a couple Filipinos for translating, guiding, and what have you. After coffee and Spam-and-egg sandwiches and a half hour of shut-eye on solid land, they all piled into the two waiting troop trucks. Then they rode south on a narrow highway that bordered swamplands and curved along waterways of brown water lined with lush greenery wanting to overgrow to the opposite bank. Longboats rode the water; the men in them stooped. It was even more humid than in the Territory of Hawaii.