Voyage to Somewhere by Sloan Wilson

a third of the letters and started to read them. The men, after all, were faced with the same old problems, and the letters were all strangely alike. The same phrases were expressed in letter after letter until, no matter what their individual content, they became monotonous and lost meaning.
    â€œMy Darling Wife, I miss you so much. Don’t worry about me, though, everything is going fine.”
    â€œGood night, Darling. Probably it won’t be so very long before I see you again.”
    Most of the letters said these things in an infinite number of ways, and the whole stack of letters gave the impression of variations on a melody. A few of the letters stood out, however, as individuals. The tall gunner’s mate wrote many pages in a close, fine handwriting.
    â€œDear Doris,” he wrote, “I wish I could be there for the spring planting. I think you were wise to wait before setting out the tomato plants. I saw by the paper that you had a late frost, and when I saw that, I was proud that you had waited.”
    The letters that the men wrote to their mothers and wives were much different from those others wrote to their girls. Most of the letters to girls were writen in a humorous vein.
    Wortly, the coxswain, wrote: “Hello, there, do you mind if I come in? Well, how’s old Sally today? I bet she looks just as pretty as ever. Sure would like to be there to see her! Bet there are plenty of other men around, though. Ha, ha. Well, Sally, your old sailor boy is out on the deep blue sea.”
    There were very few passages in the letters that had to be censored. Most of the men were not interested in writing about military subjects. Sometimes a clumsy attempt at telling our destination had to be extracted. “We’re going to an unnamed place where there are plenty of hula girls. You’ve probably heard lots of songs written about this place; lots of bands specialize in them,” one boy wrote, and just to be sure he added, “In this place where we’re going I hear they play the guitar different than they do out West.” Another seaman tried the familiar joke, “I can’t tell you where we’re going. Aloha. Jack.”
    A few of the letters had to be censored because of the clause that “nothing prejudical to the morale or reputation of the armed services” could be mailed. One seaman had unwisely written: “Boy, do I hate this God damn outfit! What a ship! You could stand on the bow and spit over the stern. Ninety percent of the crew have never seen water before and I wish I had never seen it, either.”
    White wrote his wife a long letter about the escaping of the drum of steel cable. “Betsy darling,” he wrote. “We had a terrible thing happen the other night, but I wasn’t as scared as I thought I’d be.”
    The letters differed a good deal in the neatness of writing, the spelling, and punctuation, and it was difficult not to make note of the amount of education the various men displayed. One seaman second class by the name of Wenton wrote in a beautiful, neat hand that looked almost like engraving. There were no mistakes in his letters, and as we needed a yeoman striker, I resolved to keep him in mind. Another seaman by the name of Whysowitz wrote letters that were almost completely illegible. Security forbade our passing letters we couldn’t read, but it was obvious that if we rejected Whysowitz’s letter he probably could not write a much better one, and would be condemned to silence for the rest of the war. Mr. Crane and I puzzled over the maze of scrawled misspelling for the better part of half an hour, and finally passed it.
    â€œHell,” Mr. Crane finally said, “if that boy is trying to tell anything to the enemy they’ll be just as confused as we are.”
    Two of the letters had in their context material that somewhat disturbed me. One was a long, badly written letter from a seaman named Wrigly. It