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.
