Panama Canal

The Panama Canal is a transitional setting in the Caine’s return from the Pacific: a working passage that carried the ship toward decommissioning and became, in Willie Keith’s recollection, one of the improbable milestones of his life as a wartime commander.

Route to Decommissioning

After the high-speed sweeps were finished, the Caine and the Moulton received orders to proceed to the Naval Supply Depot in Bayonne, New Jersey, by way of Pearl Harbor and the Panama Canal. The two crews rejoiced at the prospect of decommissioning. The canal thus lay on the route out of the Pacific and toward the end of the ships’ wartime service; the evidence does not specify the date or details of their passage through it.

Willie Keith’s Passage

Weeks after leaving Pearl Harbor, Willie Keith looked back on navigating the canal as an experience almost too strange to feel real. He remembered taking the Caine through its great locks and steamy green channels, then sailing past Florida and recognizing from the water the pink stucco house where he had spent seven childhood winters. His recollection places the canal within a larger homeward voyage, linking the Pacific war to familiar landmarks on the American coast.

A Threshold Between Identities

The canal passage forms part of the return that unsettles Willie’s sense of who he is. At Okinawa, his identity as a naval officer had still held firm; nearer home, the familiar coast seemed to loosen that military self, leaving neither the officer he had been nor simply the earlier Willie Keith. The Panama Canal is therefore more than a navigational link in his account: it belongs to the passage between the extraordinary life of command and the difficult, dreamlike approach to civilian identity.