I had been thinking about my friend Lance Corporal Hokofugu Hama a lot. He was the victim of an addiction and I knew he would suffer tremendously if he didn’t learn to control his yearnings. But I had learned over the years that pressure from outside rarely worked. The cure always lay within. Hokofugu was a slave to alcohol and I could see he was losing the battle with his master. His favorite line was “If I ever lost control I would give it up there and then.” So I decided to put that to the test.

One evening he was staggering along a dirt track (staggering was not considered losing control) when up ahead he saw a beautiful woman.

“I am lost,” she said, “and I have nowhere to stay. May I come to your tent?”

He looked her up and down. She wasn’t dressed like a lady of the night. She wore a sensible frock and had a long feather boa around her neck. As she was lost and had nowhere to sleep he agreed, on the condition that she would help him to walk because, he said, he was a little dizzy, perhaps from the humidity. When he awoke the next morning, he had a feather in his mouth and beside him on the pillow was a duck, staring at him lovingly. He couldn’t understand what had happened. Of course he didn’t tell anybody. He convinced himself it was common mistaken identity.

But a few days later, he was staggering along the same dirt track in search of booze when he saw a beautiful woman in elbow-length fur gloves. Remembering the duck incident, he tried to ignore her.

“Excuse me, sir,” she said. “I am very sad because my fiancé has found another woman and I cannot sleep. Would you mind if I spent the night with you in your tent?”

Of course he felt sorry for her and she was far too beautiful to refuse so he asked her to help him walk home as he had reacted badly to some cough medicine and was a little dizzy. When he woke up in the morning he had a hangover that thumped like an orchestra of bongos and there was one hairy arm draped over him. He opened his eyes wide and saw that the arm was connected to a smelly orangutan. He couldn’t believe he’d mistaken this beast for a beautiful woman. An hour in the shower was not enough to erase her stink from his skin. But still he told nobody.