Chapter Four in “Decades with the Squad,” by William Palmer Jervey, Jr.

This can only de described as a tragedy most ghastly. An example of the fickle nature of this thing called fate. Many young men have engaged in folly similar to that of the one in this case. Few have paid so horrible a price.

It began as a youthful spree. A teenager at the wheel, exuberance merged with excessive speed as the car roared along the crooked country road. An instant of inattention, the leaping of the ditch, the crashing through the board fence and coming to rest in the field.

When we arrived, the young man was seated at the wheel where he would have stayed but for the judicious use of a handsaw. A ten-foot section of fence had pierced his chest; with five feet of it on either side. He was mercifully dead, the board having severed the subclavian artery. He could not have lived more than a few minutes.

How many men looking at the gruesome scene and remembering the days of their own youth, would make the age-old observation, “There, but for the grace of God, go I”?