It came out then that he had been on Guadalcanal from the first landing, went through the worst of it under the earliest and worst conditions, had been wounded last December, flown out by ambulance plane when he was well enough to be moved, and then returned by ship to San Diego, where he had spent a long recuperation. The nature of the injuries, how he had got them and where, under what conditions, he didn’t say—his modesty amounted almost to a phobia—but he was now almost entirely fit again, he said; and certainly he looked it. He returned home to Bridgeport only a week ago and yesterday married Billie Cowles, whom he had known slightly in high school, gone with later, and looked forward to coming back to throughout all of Guadalcanal. He had been an enlisted marine since the month he was graduated in 1941 from Syracuse University—where, Grandin suspected, he had most certainly been a football hero. Since that time he had risen in two years to the rank of captain at the age of twenty-­four. To Grandin, who was so often struck by the maturity of the young, this seemed an early age indeed. It spoke of Hauman’s qualities as a soldier and a leader—as a young man fitted for today. In the presence of this marine captain almost half his age, John Grandin began to feel, strangely, the younger of the two.

It was ironical now to recall the young paratrooper who had sat all day in the smoker entertaining the men with stories of his training at a Georgia camp, while Hauman, who could have held them enthralled, had not opened his mouth; but Grandin found his mind turning to other things. He wondered ruefully what he had written—or not written—in his last letter to Maine. . . .

Plied by Ethel with polite questions, Hauman began to reveal a good deal about his background. As he himself seemed to emphasize, he was definitely up-­from-­the-­ranks. It wasn’t entirely Grandin’s fault that he had got the impression Hauman didn’t belong on a luxury train. By his manner, he insisted he was from a working-­class family; that he and his wife should have had reservations on the Pullman was because of their honeymoon. Further, the suspicion about the football hero was correct; he had won a scholarship at Syracuse on the strength of his athletic talents and physique. During his four years, however, he had declined the easy life that went with such a scholarship, preferring instead to earn his room and board by waiting on table, wrapping bundles before dawn for one of the city’s newspapers, tending furnaces. In high school he had worked as a soda jerker and at the same time kept house for his widowed father. “My daddy’s a carpenter. He’s a wonderful man,” he said. “I’m first-­generation American, because my daddy’s a Hollander.”