From Let Me Tell You What I Mean, a collection of essays that will be published next month by Knopf. The essay originally appeared in The Saturday Evening Post in 1968.

“I hope you don’t think I’m a hippie,” said the man to whom I was talking in the Crown Room of the Stardust Hotel on the Las Vegas Strip. “I’m just kind of, you know, growing this beard.” His name tag said Skip Skivington. He was probably in his early forties and he had been at Bastogne with the 101st Airborne Division in 1944 and his voice was…