Plot

The story is told from the point of view of a narrator

Narrator

A narrator is, within any story , the fictional or non-fictional, personal or impersonal entity who tells the story to the audience. When the narrator is also a character within the story, he or she is sometimes known as the viewpoint character. The narrator is one of three entities responsible for...

 who is a professional short story writer now working as a Morse Code

Morse code

Morse code is a method of transmitting textual information as a series of on-off tones, lights, or clicks that can be directly understood by a skilled listener or observer without special equipment...

 Instructor. The setting is an Army

Army

An army An army An army (from Latin arma "arms, weapons" via Old French armée, "armed" (feminine), in the broadest sense, is the land-based military of a nation or state. It may also include other branches of the military such as the air force via means of aviation corps...

 base in Georgia, where the narrator details the developing friendship of two officers. One, a Captain, has a wife who visits and subsequently describes an affair she had while he was stationed. At the close of the story, the Captain approaches the narrator and tells him he has requested a transfer, because he now does not like the other officer.

History

The story was written in 1944, while Salinger was still in the service. A 27 page, dated manuscript

Manuscript

A manuscript or handwrite is written information that has been manually created by someone or some people, such as a hand-written letter, as opposed to being printed or reproduced some other way...

 is available at Princeton University's Firestone Library, part of the library's Story Magazine archives. Copies of the story are not permitted.