Our first “cruise,” nominally to Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, strewed aircraft all along the Atlantic Coast after forced landings, with dense concentrations at Palm Beach. All failures in this outfit were classified as “mechanical”; the term “cockpit failure” had not yet been created. On analysis, I had discovered that practically all forced landings and delayed starts were chargeable to a few pilots. But when I posted the figures on the wardroom bulletin board, this act had been considered hardly cricket. Fed up with the vagaries of this school of aviation thought, I had looked around for a change of duty, and found it during the summer of 1922. That year, the National Rifle Association of America had decided to enter a team in the international free rifle matches at Milan, Italy, and extended me an invitation to compete for the squad. Here was an opportunity to escape the razzle-dazzle of naval aviation into something I knew about. Better still, it afforded an opportunity for my wife and me to make a joint European tour. At Milan, our team won the championship of the world. By that time, my wife had obtained tickets to the last performance of the Passion Play at Oberammergau, an event destined to shape my outlook. We had been billeted in the home of Antone Lang, the Christus of the play, and had been stirred by the devout spirit shining in the faces of the villagers. The play, too, had moved us deeply as a revelation of the fundamental tenets of our Christian faith. Though spoken wholly in German it had remained for us a vital religious experience. During the evening following the performance we had talked with Antone Lang in his parlor and obtained his autograph on a photograph of himself in his role. And when we had come to settle with Frau Lang for our lodgings, we had been astonished to find them so absurdly cheap. Upon our offer to contribute to a local charity—this at a time when inflation had put the exchange rate up to several thousand marks to the dollar—Frau Lang had set a limit of twenty-five marks. At my exclamation of surprise she had hurried to explain, “We need honest work, not charity. Today there is nothing that money can buy!” I had left with a deep impression of the disaster of inflation and the folly of war. Upon our return from Europe, I had avoided the Bureau of Aeronautics and obtained an assignment as Executive Officer of the destroyer tender _Bridgeport_, a converted former German merchantman. Under command of Capt. R. Drace White, I had enjoyed a year and a half of pleasant duty, trying to make a yacht out of a floating machine shop, and had just begun to feel at ease, when Adm. William Adger Moffett reached down into the Caribbean to pluck me off my happy home and install me in his bureau.