Operation Digout

A distinguished stranger with an English accent walks into Whit's End while John Whittaker is away. He declines to give Connie Kendall his name. Instead he asks her to tell Whit to meet him at Trickle Lake at two o'clock tomorrow afternoon, and leaves a message of just two words: Operation Digout. When Whit returns, the message stops him in his tracks - no one has mentioned Operation Digout in a long, long time. At Connie's eager urging, he tells her the story behind it.

During World War II, Whit was a signalman aboard the USS Irongate, part of the fleet fighting the Japanese for Guadalcanal in August 1942. During a lull in the fighting he was called to the commander's cabin and introduced to Lieutenant Reginald Duffield, an Englishman on loan from the British Navy, whom Whit had earlier helped rescue from Manitogo Point. As a coast watcher there, Duffield had noted the Japanese regrouping on Rabaku, a small island off Guadalcanal's northeast coast, and the plan was to take the island before the enemy could rebuild its strength. The mission was called Operation Digout, and Whit was chosen as the signalman on the lead landing barge.

Duffield - a mapmaker by trade, and by his own account neither sailor nor soldier - visited Whit's cabin and found him reading his Bible. He asked whether Whit had always been a Christian or was merely a wartime convert; Whit answered that he had believed since boyhood, through the influence of his parents' faith. Duffield admitted he had gone to church as a lad and simply stopped, and proposed that after the battle the two of them sit on a beach, swat mosquitoes, and talk about this faith of Whit's. Whit, in turn, invited him to visit America someday for a proper cup of tea.

Before the battle, Whit read Isaiah 40:28-31 aloud to the men - those who wait on the Lord shall renew their strength. Duffield asked whether he honestly believed those verses, and when Whit said he did, replied that he was glad they were on the same barge. Off Rabaku, a signal flashed from the beach that the landing was all clear, but Whit saw that the sending style was not Kennedy's, the signalman with the advance party. It was a trap: the Japanese had caught the men on the beach. As the barge ran for shore under fire, an explosion rocked it; Donovan was down, and the lever that opened the door would not work. With the men trapped inside and shells falling, Whit went over the side to crank the door open from the front, and Duffield came with him. They got the men out, and just before another shell struck, Whit threw Duffield into the water - taking the shrapnel himself.

Whit woke in a hospital bed with a leg wound and the top of his right ear gone. The commander told him he had been put in for a Purple Heart: the men had escaped the transport before it was blown to pieces, and Rabaku had been captured. It was Duffield who had pulled Whit from the water, but the lieutenant had shipped out the day before, leaving only a message about swatting mosquitoes or drinking tea in America. Whit understood exactly what it meant. He only wished he could have thanked him.

The next day, Whit arrives at Trickle Lake to find a full tea set waiting on the beach - and Reginald Duffield pouring. Old now, widowed, his children grown, Reggie has made finding Whit his quest, tracing him from the Navy Records Department in Washington to the Universal Encyclopedia offices in Chicago to Odyssey. He has come to say thank you. Operation Digout, he explains, taught him two truths: that living on this planet is a temporary condition, and that the strength of the God Whit talked about was real - he saw it in the Bible reading, the verses before the battle, and Whit's bravery at the door. It made him want to know God, and he does now: he has spent the last 25 years pastoring a church in a little village called Sunning Hill. Each man thanks the other for a rescued life, and Reggie draws the lesson: "Only God knows what becomes of the seeds we plant." One thing is still missing, though - Whit once promised to tell him about his parents' faith. So, over tea, Whit begins the story of his stepmother, Fionna Donneral, the strong and shining woman his father married when Whit was five.