Only now do I see how greatly to his credit it was that he himself would be the first to joke about these gaffes. I was in the army before I realized there was no such thing as “battle fa-ti-gyoo”! he’d say with a tight little grin, and if I happened to be there when he was telling this joke on himself I would wait, with a complicated pleasure, for the person he was telling it to to realize that the word in question was “fatigue.”
