As the air­plane rum­bled down the taxi­way to its Boston depar­ture run­way, I set­tled into my seat and pulled out my copy of Mao: The Unknown Story. To under­stand China, I had read in a travel guide, one must first under­stand Mao Tse-tung. My knowl­edge of Chi­nese his­tory was shaky at best. This 700-page tome promised one-stop shop­ping for a detailed his­tory of mod­ern China. Fur­ther­more, I rel­ished the idea of bring­ing it with me into the coun­try, where the title is cur­rently banned by the government.

I was halfway through the first page when the man seated next to me inquired about the book. We chat­ted about Mao briefly. He seemed to know a lot about geog­ra­phy and world his­tory. I told him briefly what I do for work.

“So what do you do?” I asked.

“I’m with the Mer­chant Marines.”

“Really? What kind of ships do you deal with?”

“Well, I work for the US Mil­i­tary Sealift Command.”

The air­plane took off and banked broadly, reveal­ing a view of Boston Harbor.

“See that ship down there? The white hos­pi­tal ship. I’ve been the cap­tain of that ves­sel sev­eral times.”

“You were cap­tain of the USNS Com­fort?”

“Yep. And her sis­ter ship, the USNS Mercy.”

“You’ve got to be kid­ding me. I was just down there pho­tograph­ing the Com­fort a few weeks ago.”

We nerded out about ships for a while. I told him I’d like to see some pic­tures, so he opened up his lap­top com­puter and started pulling up shots from his dig­i­tal camera.

“I cap­tained the Mercy in 2005 when we sailed her to South­east Asia as part of the tsunami relief effort. We were sta­tioned there for months with some of the best doc­tors in the United States. We had some of the best peo­ple from M.G.H. on board. We had one of the Red Sox team doc­tors. There’s one thing politi­cians will always agree on: our mil­i­tary needs the best health care they can get. And we pro­vide it. The scale of the dis­as­ter was tremen­dous, and I don’t think most peo­ple can grasp it.”

He showed me a pic­ture of hun­dreds of decay­ing bod­ies stacked up under a bus stop awning. And another pic­ture of a beach lit­tered with bodies.

He showed me pic­tures of some of the peo­ple his ship’s crew saved in the after­math of the dis­as­ter. Many of them were chil­dren, posed atop the ship with the doc­tors and nurses who treated them. They each had a story.

“This girl here had a benign tumor the size of a soft­ball. She would have died if we hadn’t removed it.”

“This woman here con­tracted hem­or­rhagic dengue fever. She didn’t use bug spray.”

“We had an eye doc­tor on board, and one day a woman came up from town and asked if we could treat eye prob­lems. Our guy said he’d set up a field clinic in town to see what he could do. He was a quiet guy, and he hadn’t told any­body up until this point, but it was then that he finally told us that he had been a field medic in Viet­nam. So he brought all his equip­ment into a school­house in town and set up a field oper­at­ing room. So word got around that an Amer­i­can eye doc­tor had set up shop, and within hours you couldn’t believe the size of the line. He started doing triage—’How many fin­gers am I hold­ing up?’—and before you knew it, he had to start ask­ing, ‘Can you see my hand at all?’ One thing you have to under­stand about for­eign­ers is that they hon­estly, truly believe that Amer­i­cans can do any­thing. But you know what? He pretty much did. He restored sight to dozens and dozens of peo­ple who would still be blind today.”

“All while oper­at­ing out of a school­house?” I asked, rhetorically.

“It’s amaz­ing what a skilled doc­tor can do in a non-litigious environment.”

“Last year I met up with the health min­is­ter of Indone­sia at a con­fer­ence in Wash­ing­ton DC. We were there for a pre­sen­ta­tion about the tsunami relief effort. She rec­og­nized me instantly, and came up to me and said, ‘Why couldn’t you get there sooner?’ And I had to say, ‘Ma’am, we could only get there so fast.’ And she under­stood. And we both just started crying.”

Once in Newark, we had to pass through secu­rity again. The T.S.A. man who was swiftly hand-inspecting my copi­ous amount of film thanked me for my patience.

“Are you a pro?”

“Naw, I just shoot for fun.”

“Because some­times these pros come through here with bags and bags of film, and want me to hand-inspect all of it, and they get all pissy about how long it takes.”

“That sucks. I fig­ure there’s no point in being mean about it.”

“That’s right. Because you know what I do when peo­ple are ass­holes to me? I take all day to search their stuff. I’m in no hurry to go nowhere! Here you go, brother.”

Some­where after lunch in Newark, I lost my ticket to Hong Kong. As I was fly­ing with paper tick­ets, I would not be per­mit­ted to board the air­plane with a re-printed board­ing pass. Only the orig­i­nal ticket would do. After a furious—and fruitless—last-minute search of Ter­mi­nal C, I pleaded with the agents at the pas­sen­ger ser­vices counter to help me replace my lost ticket. After some tedious tele­phone con­sul­ta­tions with their supe­ri­ors, they were able to pro­duce some­thing I had never before seen in my life: a hand­writ­ten air­line ticket. This arcane pro­ce­dure required break­ing the seal on a leather banker’s bag, remov­ing a 3-part car­bon­less ticket form, insert­ing a spe­cial embossed metal tag into a credit card-style imprint­ing machine, and tediously recre­at­ing the details of my orig­i­nal ticket in pen. All while the PA announce­ments instructed me to report to my gate for imme­di­ate depar­ture. I made the flight with sec­onds to spare.