His deep-seated need for comradery had, among other youthful calamities, driven him into the criminal arms of bootleggers, seen him hired on by a traveling circus as a strongman, and had signed him on for a six-month stint at sea on the occasion of his twentieth birthday. War’s mother liked to say he would gladly befriend a hungry cannibal if it saved him from that most dire of all fates: solitude.
