1944. Hapless Second Lieutenant Merle Wye of the US army's intelligence service is dismayed that he has not seen any action - he imagining himself as a suave undercover agent, worming secrets out of exotic female spies - instead being confined to a desk job in Honolulu. For non-military reasons, Merle is assigned a new posting - his first field job - that on the South Pacific island of Rodahan. He eventually learns that both his job on Rodahan and the posting in general are rather innocuous, as the Americans liberated Rodahan from the Japanese eight months ago, there has been no action there ever since, and as such it is a rather quiet, idyllic locale. All the Japanese soldiers on the island surrendered at the time, that is all except one, a man named Kobayashi, who is unarmed and seen as being harmless because of it. Merle's job is to locate and bring in Kobayashi, solely because he has been pilfering luxury goods from the US army commissary and officers' quarters the last little while. Merle's task, however, does take on some urgency as his new superior officer, Colonel Charles Korotny, who sees Merle as being useless, threatens to ship him off to what is the remotest of the remote army outposts if he makes the Colonel look bad by not being able to achieve this one simple task. Merle's job is not made any easier by the presence of Navy Commander Jeremiah Hammerslag, also newly posted to the island and a man who is overly officious also to be rather useless, and the help of Merle's underling, Sergeant Roy Tada, who is more interested in the twelve women he is currently courting back home than he is with anything to do with the army, especially if those army tasks get himself killed. Through it all, Merle tries to bolster the nature of this job and its dangers to woo the woman of his dreams, army nurse Lieutenant Molly Blue, who he knew and basically dismissed while in college back in Kansas, but who has blossomed since, and as such can have her pick of any man she wants, most who outrank Merle.