Six months or so later, around Christmas of 1962, Elliot came home on leave. He'd just finished basic training and some other hush-hush CIA school at Ft. Bragg, and was going to be on his way to Vietnam the morning of New Year's Day. His head was shaved. His ears stuck out. The leather band around the bottom of his green beret dug a wrinkle into his scalp. His face was tan. His nails were clipped. He already had a couple small ribbons above his shirt pocket and had already earned himself something of a reputation. Everywhere he ever went for as long as I knew him, Elliot always managed to get himself a reputation of some sort. In the olden days he would have been a knight. He would have had several suits of expensive armor. He wouldn't have needed a reputation. The reputation he'd come up with in the Special Forces was as a Deacon in the Mormon Church. The guys he'd been in boot camp with called him "Deacon Felton" "The Deacon" or "Deak." He was the only Mormon in an elite, newly created branch of the military. None of the big Bible belt Baptist bruisers in the Special Forces had ever known anyone from the Church of Christ of Latter-Day Saints and Elliot preached fearlessly to them from The Book of Mormon—all about how this Moroni guy, this sort of angelic fellow who glowed and walked a foot or two above the floor, told some New England dirt farmer by the name of Joseph Smith where to find some gold tablets hidden under a rock and how the tablets explained that, shortly after the resurrection, Jesus came to the United States and turned a bunch of naked savages into Christians. Then Moroni told Joseph Smith to go to Utah, build a tabernacle, start up a choir and marry a lot of chicks—and Elliot's army buddies took kindly to him the way people take kindly to the incurably insane.

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