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He served in World War II in the famed 10th Mountain Division, the Army’s ski troops, as leader of a special weapons platoon.

Early in January, when we had all just returned from the Christmas holidays, a recruiter from the United States ski troops showed a film to the senior class in the Renaissance Room.

“You know, I think these are pictures of Finnish ski troops,” Phineas whispered on the other side, “and I want to know when they start shooting our allies the Bolsheviks. Unless that war between them was a fake too, which I’m pretty sure it was.”

“I’m going to enlist in these ski troops,” he went on mildly, so unemphatically that my mind went back to halflistening.

This established our liaison with World War II. The Tunisian campaign became “Leper’s liberation”; the bombing of the Ruhr was greeted by Brinker with hurt surprise: “He didn’t tell us he’d left the ski troops”; the torpedoing of the Scharnhorst: “At it again.”