Hack joins VMF-213 at Pearl Harbor on January 5, 1943, alongside his closest friend in the squadron, Dallas Jenkins. The real VMF-213 stood up in mid-1942, took delivery of some of the first Corsairs in the Pacific at Espiritu Santo that March, and spent 1943 fighting its way up the Solomons — Guadalcanal, Banika, the June 30 landings at Rendova and Wickham Anchorage, and on toward Munda and Vella Lavella — under a run of commanding officers so short-lived the squadron burned through five COs in less than a year, including Maj. Wade Britt, killed in a takeoff accident at Henderson Field. Real aces James Cupp, Edward Shaw, and Wilbur “Gus” Thomas flew in its ranks. It's the squadron Hack calls home through the end of 1943, flying combat over Bougainville and the central Solomons alongside Dallas.

Reassigned in January 1944, Hack reports to VMF-114 — commissioned at MCAS El Toro and led for the whole of his tour by Maj. Robert Franklin “Cowboy” Stout, a Wyoming ranch hand turned Guadalcanal ace. The real squadron spent early 1944 flying long, lightly-opposed “milk run” strikes from Espiritu Santo and Green Island against Japanese garrisons bypassed and left to wither in the Bismarcks, then ferried its Corsairs the length of the Pacific — the Admiralties, New Guinea, the Palaus — to land on Peleliu's shattered airstrip on September 26, 1944, days after the Marine landing there. It's on Peleliu that Hack is pulled from flying status to serve two weeks as a forward air controller on Bloody Nose Ridge — the closest the war brings him to the ground fighting he directs from above everywhere else. His uncle Franklin is on the island too, a Seabee with the construction battalion rebuilding the airfield Hack flies from.

Hack's own squadronmates ask for him back by name, and in November 1944 he rejoins VMF-213 — no longer a land-based Solomons outfit but, together with VMF-124, one of the first two Marine fighter squadrons ever assigned to a fleet carrier. Flying F4U-1D Corsairs off USS Essex as part of Air Group 4, the real squadron opened its carrier war with a strike on Formosa on January 3, 1945, took part in the Navy's first carrier strike on Tokyo that February 16, and flew close air support over Iwo Jima into March. Hack gets no practice landings before he's aboard — only field drills back at Ewa — and takes his first real carrier traps the same way the rest of the squadron did: live, under combat deployment, with no room for a second attempt.

Hack's third and final combat posting puts him with VMF-323, launched off the escort carrier USS White Plains into Kadena airfield on April 9, 1945, under 24-year-old Maj. George Axtell Jr. Flying through the worst of the kamikaze campaign off Okinawa, the real Death Rattlers shot down 124 Japanese aircraft without losing a single pilot in the air — the highest total of any squadron in the battle — and produced twelve aces. On May 11, 1945, during one of the war's most ferocious kamikaze actions, the squadron defends the radar picket destroyer USS Hugh W. Hadley; it's this action, flying alongside fictional squadronmates rather than the real Death Rattlers named in the record, that makes Hack an ace.