Dart warns in the first sentence that this will be a disconsolate letter. It bears the bitter news that he has been confined to the US Naval Hospital with the measles! To aggravate things further, he left his barracks without Dot’s picture, his stationery or his fountain pen.

From botched surgery to “cat” fever, to measles. This sailor can’t catch a break. As I see it from the perspective of the intervening years, knowing he eventually made it through and regained his health, I can be grateful that these persistent  medical setbacks kept him out of combat for months. Perhaps they even saved his life. But all this 20-year old can do is despair over his confinement, especially since it delays once again, the long-awaited reunion with Dot.

In what is perhaps his attempt to end the letter on a more positive note, Dart tells Dot about his lively correspondence with his buddy, Fred Dixon. Actually, his youthful smugness comes though a little in this part, but I suppose he can be forgiven because he is so young. I’m a little sad when I read the part about undying friendship between these two young men. While their war-time correspondence was a mutual source of comfort and intellectual stimulation, the friendship did not survive much past the war. The way I understand it, after a few post-war visits in their beloved Cleveland, Dart and Fred found they had grown too different in their outlooks to remain friends.