An odd part to play, you might think, for one who fancies himself a libertarian, an anarchist, a dedicated scofflaw. Perhaps not. I’ve never known a serious policeman who had much respect for the law; in any well-organized society the police constitute the most lawless element. Policemen are not legalists; they are moralists, stern believers in good and bad, right and wrong. I too am a moralist, not a legalist, and thus fulfill the basic qualification for cophood.

My career as a PIG (Pride, Integrity, Guts) began not with the Park Service, however, but during my stint with another overgrown governmental bureaucracy affiliated with the Department of Commerce—I refer of course to the U.S. Army. One morning I was coming down off a boat onto the bomb-wrecked docks of Naples, Italy, when this man I’d never seen before tapped me on the shoulder and asked how tall I was. I told him I was six foot two on a warm day but contracted a bit in cold weather. “You’re a cop now, wiseass,” said the man. He was a second lieutenant in the military police; the boat I’d just left (traveling tourist class) was a troop ship; I was an eighteen-year-old acne-haunted draftee rifleman in the infantry; and on that particular day every replacement six feet tall or taller was being shunted, willing or not, into the military police.

Typical of the army; keep the big men in the rear; let the little guys do the fighting. Actually the war was over; the Japanese had surrendered the day I finished basic training; but our wise, spunky Harry Truman was doing his best to get a fresh war started with Russia, Yugoslavia, Korea, Arkansas, anyone available.

My feelings were hurt at being assigned to the MPs, since my true military ambition was to become a clerk-typist like James Jones and Norman Mailer. But it did no good to object. Some sergeant put a black and white Nazi-like armband on my sleeve, a white helmet liner on my head, a nifty red scarf around my neck and a club and a .45 automatic in my hands. At once I began to feel mean, brutal, arbitrary, righteous. “Let’s stop coddling criminals,” I wrote home to mother, that first night in Napoli; “let’s put father in jail where he belongs.” (My father was the village Socialist back in Home, Pennsylvania.)

After that first day I never saw an MP officer. The officers were down in Sorrento, shacking up with contessas, living off their black market profits. Our boss was Sergeant Smitty, a lifer and a drunk, who’d received his police science training, like most other MP noncoms, in the army’s Disciplinary Training Center at Pisa. There he had served first as an ordinary inmate (rape, larceny, assault, murder), then as a trusty, then as a guard, emerging fully qualified to enforce the law. Smitty was proud of the two years he’d put in at Pisa; not only had he avoided front-line combat, but he had also learned, as a routine part of the required training there, how to polish his mess kit with a needle. With a needle? Why yes, with a needle. That’s the way it was done at old ivy-covered DTC.