Dan Pinck with a sword taken from a Japanese soldier during World War II. (Globe Staff Photo / Mark Fritz)

By Mark Fritz / Globe Staff / April 15, 2001

The colonel gave Dan Pinck a suitcase full of cash, a pistol with a silencer, a box of condoms, and the complex details of a dangerous mission: ''You'll be near Hong Kong, up the coast. That's all I can tell you,'' he told him.

The colonel also gave him 50 things that looked like GI-green fountain pens, complete with pocket clip. Each contained an explosive charge that delivered a single .22-caliber round. He was supposed to eat a bullet if he was captured.

''I was wondering why he gave me so many of them,'' Pinck recalls. ''I only planned to kill myself once.'' Pinck got something else when he joined the Special Intelligence section of the Office of Strategic Services: a cover, as an American major. ''I was 19 and I probably looked like I was 13 or 14,'' says Pinck, who lives in South Boston with his wife, Joan. ''I got carded until I was 27.''

Dan Pinck is among the last of a breed - men and women who by dint of a special talent, cunning, ability or, in some cases, simply being a handy warm body, became members of the OSS, the intelligence agency that was formed during World War II and broken up after the war was won.

Pinck was listening to a football game on the radio when an announcer broke in on Dec. 7, 1941, and said that Pearl Harbor had been bombed. The United States entered a global conflict that would kill an estimated 45 million people.

But it wasn't until he faced a daunting college calculus test that he figured it was time to volunteer in the fall of 1942. He was assigned to China and spent a few months as the reconnaissance man in a three-man team wedged in a P-51 built for two.

He applied to the OSS. He was sent behind enemy lines, working with Chinese guerrillas in the vicinity of Hong Kong. Out in the countryside, surrounded by gentle hills, rice paddies, and grazing water buffalo. Pretty country.

He remembers one day in particular. ''In a valley, rice paddy, hills on either side. We got information the Japanese were coming down there, maybe a couple hundred of them.'' Pinck, some other OSS men, and Chinese guerrillas hunkered down to wait.

''We waited until they got on the rice paddy path and let them have it,'' he said. ''Some Japanese got killed. They ran like hell to get away. We lost one person.''

China was a tough place, splintered by the Allies and the Axis and Chinese factions from the left and right. As his tour wound down, Pinck faced one of the moral quandaries that sometimes confront even people who have grown accustomed to the savagery of war.

He was supposed to call in bombing information to the 14th Air Force, but one day they found out that the Japanese had set up a base in a small town called Swabue. Their gasoline was stored in a school. Pinck was going to call in an air raid, but his interpreter, Chum Hay, asked him to think about it. Lots of women and children would be killed, he said.

Pinck didn't send the message. He says he stopped sending intelligence that endangered civilians altogether.

Headquarters complained about the drop in targets. Pinck stalled, and the war ended a few weeks later. He didn't talk about this for years, wondering if he did, in fact, fail to do his duty or if he did the right thing. Finally, he decided that the innocent have no business getting killed by combatants.

It took one other war to convince him.

''Vietnam,'' he said.