Voyage to Somewhere by Sloan Wilson Page A

was written to a woman and it was so filled with obscenity and downright lewdness that it was painful to read. Censorship forbade this sort of thing, and it was easy to just drop it in the box of rejects, but it was a temptation to me to call Wrigly in and give him a good talking to. After reflecting upon the subject a moment, however, I decided that that would be a misuse of authority, and I contented myself with enclosing a slip in the letter that read: “Not passed because of obscenity. Further infraction of censorship regulations will result in disciplinary action.”
    The other letter that I found disturbing was from a radioman by the name of Whitfield. His letter was simply a collection of ingenuous lies.
    â€œDear Mother,” he wrote. “We have been at sea only about a week, but we have already been attacked twice. The first time it was a submarine, and she sure was a big one. We dropped depth charges on it and seemed to blow up the whole ocean. Blood and oil came to the surface, so I guess we got her. The second attack was from a dive bomber. It strafed our decks and killed a couple of our men, but I opened up on a machine gun and shot it down. Well, that’s all for now, Mother. I’ve got to go and stand by the guns again.”
    I picked up a slip of paper and wrote, “Rejected because of …” There I paused, because it was difficult to give an official reason for rejecting such a letter. Certainly it was disclosing no military information. Finally I wrote, “It is suggested that letters be written to cause a minimum of worry to the families of military personnel.”

CHAPTER NINE
    T WO DAYS before we arrived at Honolulu the crew perked up. It was as though when they left San Pedro that they had thought they were merely heading out into the vast unknown, and now it came to them as somewhat of a surprise that they were actually going to arrive somewhere. The last two days of the voyage were calm, and I think the men were further surprised that life at sea could be quite pleasant.
    The ocean spread out around us as harmless and as blue as a mountain lake. Instead of being bounded by mountains, however, it so blended with and mirrored the pastel blue of the sky that it seemed to have no boundary, and gave an impression of almost astral space. As we sailed southward the sun took the cold sting from the air and beat pleasantly upon our shoulders. Many of the men took their dress whites from their seabags and hung them up to air on deck.
    More and more I was asked if the ship would get mail in Honolulu. The men showed no interest in the Hawaiian Islands as other than a place where they could get mail. The government-issued travel leaflets describing the islands and the customs of the natives went unopened. The men had far more of a sense of going away from something than going toward anything. The mail was the only thing that interested them, and in their anticipation of that they were really more looking over their shoulders than ahead. A dozen times a watch I heard the question, “Sir, do you think we’ll get mail in Honolulu?” In desperation I finally put a sign on the bulletin board that read: “It is expected that mail will await this unit at her next port of call.”
    The day before we arrived in Honolulu another question was continually asked: “Sir, when will we get in?” As navigator I felt my reputation depended on giving them a reasonably accurate time of arrival. According to my calculations we would raise Oahu Island at about noon of June 4, but the night of June 3 I began to get a little jittery about it. For the first time in my life I had no one aboard to check my calculations. Mr. Warren and Mr. Crane were just beginning to use a sextant, and their results were so often contradictory that I had to go entirely according to my own observations. My uneasiness increased when I awoke on the dawn of the fourth to find the sky too overcast for