With Jack’s thirty-day leave about to expire, he now asked to delay reporting for duty until March 1, in order to undergo medical tests at New England Baptist Hospital. At issue were his continuing stomach troubles and back pain. X-rays were taken and the surgeons made a determination: if Jack wanted to walk properly again, he should undergo the surgery that had been recommended a year earlier while he was stationed in South Carolina.

While weighing whether to go under the knife, he sat for a long interview with Hersey. They talked in Jack’s small and nondescript hospital room, with him propped up on the bed. From press accounts and the interviews in Rhode Island, Hersey had pieced together the basic chronology of the harrowing episode in the Blackett Strait, which he now took Jack through, step by step. Gradually, a fuller picture emerged. At one point Jack drew a map of the area in Ferguson Passage where he got off the reef and was in the water throughout the night, carried off by the current. Mesmerized by the image of that night and its dreamlike quality, Hersey asked for details; Jack did his best to provide them. For hours they talked as the afternoon disappeared and twilight bathed the room. Hersey came away impressed. “He had a kind of diffidence about himself that seemed to be genuine,” he later said. “So in a joking way he wondered how he looked to [the crew]. They were wildly devoted to him, all of them. Absolutely clear devotion to him by the crew. No reservation about it. They really did like him.”21

Jack opted to hold off on the surgery and managed instead to be reassigned to the Submarine Chaser Training Center, in Miami, near the family home. The relocation allowed him to spend some time with little brother Teddy, now twelve. One night, he took the young boy to another nearby naval base and, under the cover of darkness, smuggled him onto a PT boat. He also introduced Teddy to some of his favorite writings, including Stephen Vincent Benét’s epic poem “John Brown’s Body,” which the two took turns reading aloud. Teddy, reveling in his brother’s presence, listened with rapt attention as Jack talked about the key developments in the Civil War. “Never be without a book in your hand,” Jack told him.22