When I was on Wall Street we had a customer, an odd little Argentinian man, who ran a highly endowed fund out of a single grubby office in Lima, that was about as shady as possible, probably running Venezuelan money, but he was given the green light by compliance, and was a cash machine because he was immune to price, and when he came to NYC I was tasked with entertaining him because he was a nerd, Jewish, and from Latin America, and they thought I fit since my dad was Jewish, from Latin America, and I was a nerd, so why not.

But all he wanted to do was go to J&R, buy the latest computer equipment and model kits, then dinner in the same Argentinian steak house, and catch a Broadway show on the weekends to collect autographs on the playbill, which I left him alone for because his tastes were for flamboyant musicals.

He was excruciating to talk to, beyond for a few minutes, a combination of eccentric, affectless, and tedious, once spending an entire meal detailing the history of sidewalk design in Latin America without any sense of humor about it being a weird thing to talk about.

Then one dinner we were accompanied by an annoyingly chipper junior salesperson, who desperate for conversation, made a small joke about the Falklands War.

This odd little man put down his Coke (served lukewarm at his request) and then said, blankly, "I was there." The junior salesperson, straight from a business school that had taught him to always stay positive, you know, so you could close the deal, said, "Wow. What was that like?" and then the odd little man went on a horrifying twenty minute soliloquy, again spoken flatly, about being drafted at the age of eighteen, sent to the front with little to no training and no proper gear, to sit for a few weeks, cold, wet, and hungry, stationed in a forward outpost, while bombs constantly dropped around and on them, always in terror of a British Gurkha charge, and being knifed to death (any death but that), a few taking shrapnel hits, which festered because medical attention was so slow, before early one morning, the bombs stopped, and dark figures swarmed across the field, and bullets started whizzing over them.

They all surrendered, happily, with only one guy being nicked by a bullet when he thought of running, and when this odd little man finally got back to Argentina months later, he was treated badly, and called all sorts of nasty names.

After he finished, the salesperson, smile still intact, said, "Well, I guess that'll make anyone anti-war!" at which point he responded, again mechanically, "I collect and build models from the war," and pulled out his phone and showed photos of a replica of the HMS Intrepid, a British ship from the war, that he had built.