Moreover, we forget - and are reminded by an essay in the book by a World War II Marine named Scotty Bowers - about the physical closeness that these fighting men lived with.
There’s no privacy in a foxhole showers were rare and often communal, and toilets were open-hole latrines. If you served on the field of combat, you saw other men naked a lot more than you might today, even if you go to the gym after work. As Bowers points out, practical jokes that many of us would now consider invasive - slipping a hand down someone’s pants to tweak his penis, say - were within the realm of just-boys-being-boys high jinks. “Just grab-ass,” they’d say.Įven outside the service, men of that era probably saw each other naked more than we realize. A soldier from a Kansas farm had spent his youth skinny-dipping in the local pond with his friends plenty of outhouses, and even some school bathroom stalls, had more than one seat city high-school kids showered in an open room with nozzles along the wall, sans curtains or dividers, daily after gym class.
Tenement kids slept three and four to a bed. Most kids - especially poor kids, but everyone - had far less of a sense of physical privacy than we do.
