Back to the Great Depression! To make a long story short: Germany invaded Austria and then Czechoslovakia and then Poland and then France, and I was a pipsqueak casualty in faraway New York City. Coulomb Frères et Cie was out of business, so I lost my job at the agency—not that long after my father’s Moslem obsequies. So I joined what was still a peacetime United States Army, and scored high on their classification test.
