I stood at attention and barked off a lot of “yessirs” and “no sirs” and hoped that Captain McQueen would get a sore throat from screaming and just go away. I prayed he would not open my footlocker, which sat tantalizingly before him with my Master padlock hanging open on the footlocker’s hinge and clasp. McQueen was in an energetic mood and kept on screaming as he upended my footlocker and spilled its contents onto the concrete floor of the barracks. But instead of spotting my lid of grass which spilled into plain view, McQueen reached for my Gillette double-edged safety razor and ordered me to dry-shave. I do believe such an act of torture is against the Geneva Convention Rules, especially when your Super Blues have gone three steps beyond “dull”—I mean, it brought tears to my eyes to have to shave in such a fashion but I complied anyhow, artfully kicking a pair of dirty skivvies over the lid of grass as I finished the job. Then I commenced to explain to Captain McQueen that I was a boxer in special services and that the reason I hadn’t shaved was the fact that I had a fight coming up in three days. “A close shave will lead to a cut on my nineteen-year-old baby-pink face! Sir!” I said that the reasons I was reading Batman were both literary and psychological—I was about to go into battle, one-on-one with a Navy boxer name of Goliath. I said that Sergeant Wright, my D.I. back at Parris Island, had won the Navy Cross in Korea and never tolerated slackers. I was quite relieved to have the lid of grass concealed and confident that the boxing coach, Sergeant Myers, would take care of this Mickey Mouse hassle since Myers was tight with the colonel who himself happened to be a boxing buff. I was penciled in as the light heavyweight even though I had lost two of my last five fights. I smoked, drank, and had quite a gut going in addition to my grass habit. The team’s only possible winners figured to be the Menares brothers, Sammy and Flash—twins from the Philippines, a featherweight and lightweight respectively, and our best bet, the middleweight, Hector Greene, who was fifteen pounds lighter than me and my chief sparring partner. Hector could punch harder than me and he was all but impossible to hit. I hated working with him. I figured my own chances against the Navy fighter as pretty much nil, but as a member of the squad I was free to train and sleep as I pleased and to be relieved of all duties extraneous to boxing. I tried to explain this to McQueen.