During the war, he was commissioned a captain in the Medical Corps and sent (by a General Muller, a Regular Army doctor who thought Hitler a great man and psychiatry bunk) to Alaska, to study the effects upon mental stamina of cold, isolation, and monotony. For the first time in his life, and after twenty months of Alaska, Dave pulled strings in his own behalf. He was assisting the OSS--a major, then--in figuring out methods of hastening the deterioration of Nazi morale--when they came through the Bulge. Dave stayed at a forward subheadquarters to manage the tourniquet on his colonel's bomb-shattered leg. Hurrying German troops took the colonel prisoner and shot Dave four times, on sight. Some of Patton's men found him, still alive, in a cellar, three days later. Two of his toes had to be amputated because they'd frozen. He limps when he's weary--but he's still a handball champ. The Nazis didn't take care of his colonel's tourniquet and the colonel died. Dave has a Purple Heart, plain--but nothing else to bespeak what, in a Gentile, might possibly have been regarded as courage beyond the line of duty. He had, you will recall, reluctantly decided that there would always be a Dr. Wiswell over him, in the field of psychology. He had also come to the reluctant conclusion that a Jew without money in America was like an unarmed man in a city of quick-draw experts. So he had studied law. Problems to which he put the lever of his mind usually yielded. The problem of money was one such. He is a completely honest man; he no longer saw any objection to applying his honesty, and talents, in places where money was abundant. He is worth, I should imagine, a quarter of a million, and he has only started. Dave is the ugliest man I know--or, at least, know well. A huge but thin hooked nose divides his face vertically. Hitler's trained anti-Semites needed only a look at that to shoot. His large, round ears are set almost at right angles to his head. He has a conspicuous Adam's apple which--in talk, or merely from emotion--rides up and down with the acceleration and quick braking of a humming bird before a hollyhock. His forehead bulges; his mouse-brown eyebrows look as if they had been sprayed on as a random afterthought. He is almost bald. His mouth takes a generous cut into his pale, gaunt cheeks and his chin retreats. Only his eyes contrast with a face they cannot redeem: they are an immortal blue--living proof of compassion, of reflection, and of mirth. He is a bachelor. He was in love, once, with a stately girl from Boston--a quiet, brainy brown-eyed girl who wore sensible shoes and braids but sometimes had the look of wanting to lie in the grass with a man, or even of being ready to pull a man down. I had hoped that Dave would be granted this one exception by the unwilling gods. He wasn't. She married an opera singer--and divorced him two years later--and went to live in Milan. My Campfire Girl, Dave called her, after that.