TOTAL IMMERSION
In his twilight years, a second world war hero who once walked nine miles to safety with severe bullet wounds to his intestines and lungs — a man who took part in a string of Reapergoading missions as a weapons trainer and saboteur, parachuted twice into occupied France, bombed German naval vessels, and helped stockpile weapons in preparation for D-Day — would tell people that he was a former accountant who’d retired at 66.
Bob Maloubier’s aloofness about heroics that saw him cited three times for the War Cross between 1939 and 1945, and receive a Distinguished Service Order in 1945, had nothing to do with fending off dark, Proustian infiltrations into his consciousness: he would later
