We megaphone the subchaser , his response returned to us; out of the darkness the voice was youthful. I could picture a youngster of a skipper out there with his blown hair and his life jacket and binoculars. Rolling to the sea in the Mediterranean dusk. Some young man who shortly before had perhaps been unaware of any sea at all. And then there he was a strange new man in command of a ship, suddenly a person with acute responsibilities, carrying out with great intentness his special small part of the enormous aggregate that is are war on all the lands and seas of the globe. In his unnatural presents there in the heaving darkness of the Mediterranean, I realized vividly how everybody in America had changed, how every life had suddenly stopped and as suddenly begun again on a different course. Everything in this world has stopped except war and we were all men of a new profession out in a strange night caring for each other.
Hearing the voices of the subchaser captain caused the writer to think about
(1) his own youth back in the United States
(2) his respondsibilities to the men on his ship
(3) the invasion that was about to begin
(4) how very dangerous their situation was
(5) how the war had changed everyone's life
I think # 5