Smitty became my hero. “Did you ever kill a man, Smitty?” I asked him once, stars in my eyes. He grinned his evil, wolfish, yellow grin. “Naw,” he said modestly, “not really. Couple of niggers, that’s all. A few Germans. I’m kind of a tender-hearted fella.” And he gave me the fearsome grin again and put me down for the vice squad.

“Dear Mother,” I wrote home after my third day in Napoli, “last night I raided my first whorehouse.” Not entirely true, I wrote no such thing. But I did raid the whorehouse, and it was certainly my first. In fact I was still a virgin. In many ways. I had never before seen, for example, one man beat another with a club. Sergeant Smitty showed us—me and another rookie—how it is done. We arrested several whores and one AWOL soldier, the black man Smitty had clubbed into unconsciousness. That soldier, I later learned, was sent to Pisa, where he too would learn to polish his mess kit with a needle.

I requested a transfer to the motorcycle squad. “What’s the matter, kid, you cherry?” Smitty asked. “Yellow?”

“Well, sir,” I said, “that night work…I don’t know.”

“Can you handle a Harley?” he said.

“No problem,” I said. I wasn’t sure what a Harley was, but figured that anyone, like me, who knew how to harness a team of horses or crank up a Farmall could probably put a bridle on a Harley.

“Well, stick around,” Smitty said, “we’re having the tryouts in a few days.”

There were three positions open on the bike squad. Six of us showed up for the tryouts, which were held on a racetrack outside the city. Sergeant Smitty—wreathed in whisky fumes—wrote our names down on his clipboard sheet. “Okay, Abbey,” he said, “you’re first.” (I was at the head of every list in the army.)

I approached this olive drab machine parked on the cinders, a huge Harley-Davidson loaded with red lights, a siren, chrome-plated crash bars and a tailpipe fashioned from a German 88-mm cannon shell, the brass polished to a golden gleam. I straddled the seat and turned the switch. I’d been doing some homework and sneaking around and was pretty certain I knew how to start this type of machine. Spark in the left grip, throttle in the right, kick starter, gear shift lever and clutch pedal just like a car. Easy. Nothing to it. Nervous all the same, my sweaty thumb slipped onto a button on the handlebar. The siren began to growl. “Shut that thing off!” Smitty bellowed. Okay, okay. I fumbled around, got the shift lever into neutral, my foot on the starter, and kicked. The motor roared like a dinosaur. Frightened but determined, revving the engine, I slipped the lever forward into first (clunk!) and slowly, cautiously engaged the clutch (clang!). The bike leaped forward like a spooked horse, bearing straight ahead.

Paralyzed with terror, I clung to the handlebars, trying to think what I was supposed to do next. Shift into second? Of course. But we were already approaching the first turn in the track. How do you steer this thing? To me the handlebars seemed rigid, welded to the frame. It never occurred to me that I must lean into the turn. Locked together, the Harley and I crashed through the wooden fence on the outside of the track, plowed into a dirt bank, stalled out, keeled over. Still gripping the handlebars, I heard, above the scream of the siren, the outraged bellowing of Sergeant Smitty staggering down the track toward me. “Back to the vice squad, Abbey! Back to the whorehouse for you!”