U.S. NAVAL HOSPITAL

LCDR Lawrence Boswell had to shave off his beard when he came into the Navy and he nursed a huge resentment over this. At the Officer’s Club and with a few drinks in him he would go on about the beard adding to his Freudian aura. “I don’t look like a psychiatrist without it.” He raised his beer glass in toast position. “FTN.”

No one echoed his blasphemous acronym. FTN meant “Fuck the Navy.” The CO was always threatening to send him to Vietnam if there was a reportable incident from his locked nut ward. And now we had Darryl Wolfson, a military werewolf without the superfluous hair.

We were both writing up our admission summaries on Wolfson. “Hey Bos what’s the admitting diagnosis? I never saw anything like this guy before.”

He smiled and looked up from his notes. “There was a full moon tonight. What we have here is a temporary psychotic break probably triggered by some scary movie Wolfson saw when he was a child. I bet there have been other episodes in his life. We even a name and a medical code for it–Lycanthropy.”

“This is crazy, Bos. I can’t write this shit down.” I stared at his smiling face.

“It is nuts. Wolfson’s nuts. You wait, he’ll be totally normal in the morning and howling tomorrow night until the moon starts to shrink. Just make a reference to the psychiatric consultation–mine–that Wolfson had a temporary schizoaffective disorder on your write-up.”

“Have you ever seen this before?” I still had scary flashbacks with recalling the incident so fresh in my mind. “You should have seen his hair standing up. He was salivating like crazy and he growled like a dog.”

“I did see it. LT Finder showed me Trask’s Polaroid photos. We could write this up for the psych section in Military Medicine.” Boswell was really caught up in the possibility.

“We have a potential problem Bos. The CO doesn’t like profile cases like this on his record. He’ll think it’ll diminish his chance to make Admiral.”

“Don’t worry Peter. I’ll keep him locked up until we get him out on a medical board to the VA hospital system.”