Lecture: Essence of Auditing, Know to Mystery Scale (1954)

One time I was at a court martial. I was a summary court’s counsel for an enlisted man while I was in the hospital. And this summary court’s– was meeting and convening upon– in fact, I think he’d been found without an ID card or something of the sort. But he had really messed himself up. He’d started to fight the Shore Patrol. And he’d– oh, mopery and dopery on the high seas, strictly. They had him. They had practically thrown the book at him and I was his counsel.

In looking this situation over– because I was tremendously interested in human reaction and how this all worked out and so on. I was– this was very early observation of this, very early, in 1945 this observation was made. This fellow had been brought out of a war zone and had been placed in the hospital. He had argued with the doctors about being placed in the hospital but they had merely assumed that he must be nuts not to want to be in a nice hospital. And so they had given him a bad time, but he had lain there for days and days and days before all this occurred, realizing that there was nothing for him to do, nothing for him to think about, there was nothing on the future track, there was absolutely nothing for him to worry about and he had entered into the state known as 2.5, boredom. And he was very solidly bored.

He was actually achingly desperate because nothing was going to occur. And then without letting his right hand know what his left one was doing, he left his ID card– for being a very punctual sailor and so forth– left his ID card in his locker, very carefully, went into an out-of-bounds area, managed to make enough noise and confusion so the Shore Patrol would come up and then beat up the Shore Patrol and then had quite a few problems right away.

I got him off on the basis that he’d been returned from a combat zone and probably was not quite right in the head.¹

Notes