“Ike, the wind is picking up; we really should turn back,” a voice beside me suggested meekly, the words nearly stifled by the crashing of the waves beneath us and the buffeting of the wind.

“We can’t go yet! For all we know, they could be just over the next wave or just over the horizon!” I countered angrily. “Their lives are in our hands, Dave! We can’t just let them die!”

Around us, I remember the grey of the powerful tempest and the bellowing sea being interrupted solely by static in the radio, and an occasional burst of lightning. The cockpit of our PBY Catalina was dimly lit, illuminated mostly by the various dials and displays, whose meanings had been drilled into our memories in training. Dave and I did rescues in our old Catalina those days; few trips seemed to end in a successful recovery, and bombers went down daily. The war effort was faring poorly, and the Japanese zeros outclassed our planes regularly.

“Ike, they were just as much my friends as they were yours. Chances are the storm out there has sent their plane to the bottom of the Pacific by now, and if we stay out any longer, we’ll be next!” Dave tried to convince me. At that point, I was beyond reason. That time, the names weren’t just names on a paper or faces never seen before; they were some of my best friends, and my mind was set on one goal. In hindsight, I wish I had listened.

“Chances are? I don’t care what the chances are! They could be out there, Dave! John and Nick, would you be okay with letting them die like that? We have to do whatever we can to save them!” I shouted, fury clouding my mind, obscuring logic. Dave quieted down after that, I remember. I hope he could forgive me.

The ride was quiet following our argument, the turbulence and the pelting of rain on the plane filling the relative silence of the night. My rage obscuring logic, I failed to acknowledge the ice building up on the wings, hindering the mechanics of the flaps and ailerons. I held fast to the yoke, stared off in the distance, and prayed to see some kind of raft appear over the horizon. Hours passed, and yet nothing presented itself to us.

I had fallen into a daze, staring blankly into the distance, when I spied a faint light in the distance. Neither Dave nor I could believe it, but we saw what appeared to be a flashlight, like one of those provided in emergency kits in the life rafts. Too shocked to speak, I silently dipped the plane down towards the light.

Suddenly, lightning flashed, revealing the empty sea surrounding the flashlight; it had been torn out of a pack of a raft long sunk. I struggled to regain altitude, but the ice had held fast on the flaps, locking our descent into the freezing Pacific. I turned to my petrified friend, and mouthed one word as the medium- sized plane crashed into the sea.

“I'm sorry.”