Still in port, Dart announces that he may be done with his lowly mess hall duty in the next couple of days.

He tells Dot that today he wrote a long letter to Fred, trying to square him up after that disheartening letter he received from Fred last Sunday. “He’s lost what a person needs most out here: faith and the ability to find the best in things. Of course I gripe. Everyone gripes. We call it something else out here, but it’ griping and complaining allee samee. But Fred seems unable to see the better points of his life.”

Dart ennumerates “the better points” of Fred’s life: He’s safe. There are no more air raids on his island. He has a fairly good job. Staff Sgt. in the Marines is no small feat. While he has a good family, an agile mind and great friends, he can’t seem to see those things. He thrives on less pleasant things. “I wish there were something I could do to bring him around again to the old, cheerful Fred who could sling a line of satire instead of a screaming, continual gripe.”

He writes at length in a vague manner of shattering many myths out on this sea cruise. He talks about seeing so many of the locations he’s only heard about in the news, hence they were myths to him. Now they are actual places, ports of call, with their own distinct features. “But if I should tell others, it would be as mythology to them, for the mind cannot see things as they are, without the eyes having seen them first.”

He continues by describing the mythical ships which sail around him. The battleships “loom above the horizon like a fairy tale’s enchanted castle. They slog through the same seas that throw a (destroyer) halfway over on her side.”

Warships nice, graceful, beautiful? Sure, says Dart. They can be. One only has to focus on the positive rather than the dark side. He’s been trying for two months to live by this creed and he has evidence it works. “I’m happy. The finest girl in the world has said what I’d expected her to say, ever since we met in 1943. My Darling Dot, I love you and miss you so very much.”