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with a fifth of scotch as the prize. Huggins, who possesses the scotch, loses the contest but doesn’t forfeit the bottle, and the episode is never mentioned again. The turning point of the story occurs when Huggins, prompted by Maydee, sets his wife up at a nearby hotel. Maydee is never invited to meet his friend’s wife. Instead, Huggins stops going to the Ground School and now sees little of his friend. The card games end, and Maydee is again alone and miserable. One night, while Maydee is reading at the Ground School, Huggins appears, distraught and incoherent. Something has happened with his wife. She is having an affair with a pilot and has asked Huggins for a divorce in order to marry her lover. Maydee somehow finds a way to repair his friend’s marriage and return his confidence. But he must meet alone with Huggins’s wife for a week and a half in order to do it. As the story ends, Maydee enters the barracks very drunk and announces to the narrator that he has applied for transfer overseas. When asked why, Maydee despondently replies that he cannot stand the sight of Huggins.19 Of course, Huggins has been duped by his friend. Retrospect reveals the story littered with clues—those slight, only marginally disturbing details left unanswered or unexplained. No pilot had ever fallen in love with Huggins’s wife; the culprit had been Maydee all along. Desperate to preserve their friendship, he sought to have Huggins split with his wife or, perhaps worse and posing as a pilot, engaged Huggins’s wife in an affair.

At first glance, Salinger appears to punish these two men severely for their shortcomings, Huggins for his selfishness and Maydee for his treachery. Yet, as the story closes, the two men are no worse off than they were at its beginning. Huggins is still a fool, cuckolded by a woman who remains untrustworthy. Maydee is still a scoundrel and has learned nothing of the lessons that true friendship can offer. Both are as lonely in the end as they were at the start. And that’s the result of their sins. Both men were granted the opportunity to advance their compassion through the bond they had formed. It was the small steps they refused to take that led to their eventual downfall: the fulfillment of a promise, a sincere invitation, a visit to a friend. In short, Maydee and Huggins simply refused to do the right thing. In “Two Lonely Men,” Salinger points to these small omissions as breeding the treachery that would be their ruin. Maydee and Huggins were not “ordinary heroes”—not because it was not in their nature but because they chose not to be. When the occasion to grasp heroism arose, they succumbed to ego and let it slip away.

• • •

On the morning of April 28, a catastrophe occurred at Slapton Sands, where a full-dress rehearsal of the D-Day landing was scheduled to take place in a maneuver dubbed Operation Tiger (similar exercises were held all over the British Isles). Salinger found himself crowded aboard a naval convoy in Lyme Bay, waiting his turn to practice storming the beach. Seeking to condition the troops to the fury of artillery fire, the operation’s commanders had decided to explode live ammunition from the vessels, and the soldiers themselves were equipped with live rounds.

The maneuver attracted the attention of German torpedo boats, which scrambled to attack the flotilla. Laden with fuel and jammed with thousands of troops, the vessels were particularly vulnerable and, once struck, exploded into fireballs. The result was carnage, and 749 soldiers lost their lives; their bodies either pulled from the English Channel or washed out to sea.*

The army quickly raced to cover up the incident and swore everyone who had been there to secrecy. Salinger never spoke of the experience.

Beyond being sworn to secrecy himself, Salinger was charged with ensuring the silence of other soldiers. With the disaster at Slapton Sands, the role of the CIC agents reverted to its original purpose of keeping watch over fellow American troops. On the morning of April 28, CIC agents were dispatched to each hospital receiving the