now it can be told

I trust that there's a statute of limitations on this confession, and that the military police, if and when they read this, are not going to come knocking on my door, dragging me off to be court-martialed. If that happens, I'll claim that I've made all of this up.

Being the sort of person who'll pick up anything and read it, while on guard duty during various stints of reserve army service when I'd find old newspapers in the guarding booths I positioned ... I read them. Of course this was a sort of "one sentence at a time" reading, always lifting my eyes to scan my area of responsibility, never becoming engaged enough in my reading to endanger national security. But even if I found a week-old edition of a newspaper which in civilian life I would never read, here I'd pick it up and plow through it, less starved for the news that it might contain than simply unable not read what was there.