Haas enlisted in the U.S. Navy on 26 August 1942, as a Seaman First Class.  This was his second attempt to join the Navy.  Haas had tried to enlist just after Pearl Harbor, but had been denied because he wore dental plates.  [Update: He then went to work at the Kaiser shipyards in Richmond, California.]  A bit later. the US Army sent him notice he was to be drafted.  And so Haas returned to the naval recruiter; this time, he was assigned to the Naval Armed Guard, given four weeks of boot camp and four weeks of gun training.  (Although Don Herron notes that when Haas was assigned to operate a 20mm. gun on a ship, he had never yet fired one, so--he reports half-seriously--learned to use "his weapon with one hand while holding the operations manual in the other.")

Hass did three tours, the first a six-month stint on the Aleutians, the second 18-months in the South Pacific, and finally, a four-and-a-half month trip around the world.

He saw some action, but also had a chance to fulfill his long-time Romantic urge to explore the South Seas.  Whether he had been in years past, or developed it while in the military is unknown, but Haas was a collector, and he spent much of his time gathering material that would later be ensconced in the Vaults.  Among the things he gathered were tapa clothes, a tapa club, pressed leaves from the tree under which Captain Cook first landed in Tonga, elephant statues, butterflies, sandalwood.

He also carried sandalwood seeds.  Haas was infatuated with sandal wood.  Perhaps it was the tree-man in him.  Probably, Haas already then knew of the romantic associations of sandalwood.  Certainly, he knew it was precious and difficult to come by--he only found some to buy in New Caledonia and Tonga (where he also purchased some seeds).  Later, he met Meti, from New Aitutaki, who told him that his homeland had no sandalwood.  Haas made a gift of the seeds to Meti.

Later, the famed fantasy author Clark Ashton Smith would say, "That carrying of sandalwood seeds from Tonga to an island in the Cook group is about as romantic and poetic as anything I have heard of in ages."

And it was--Romantic and poetic.  Especially through the mists of memory.  No doubt that Haas experienced days and nights of terror, struggled with the heat and humidity and bad food, got sick, headaches, bumps and bruises.  But as he looked back on his life and recounted it to Smith and Herron, those things fell away, and what he remembered was the Romance.  Haas was creating an image of himself--and of the world--in which the fantastic was mundane, but no less wonderful for its ubiquity.