In a dark closet, resting carelessly on a hook, is an old army shirt, its khaki now spattered with droplets from a hundred shades of paint. There it hangs, resting lazily with its many memories. Its life really began on the shelf of an army supply depot where one day it was picked up by a young officer of the Air Corps. From that day on its adventures began.  Under a fur-lined flying jacket month after month it roared off the dusky baked clay of the Egyptian desert on another bombing run. Once, routinely unloading their cargo of bombs in the mist of whizzing flak, an engine sputtered, hit by that same whizzing flak. In a careening dive the shirt plummeted downwards, gliding to a shattering crash not two hundred feet from the guns that shot it down. In rickety old German trains, the shirt traveled as a German prisoner of war. After four miserable years, the shirt fell limply around a body which had eaten everything from Red Cross packages to cat stew as they again rumbled along in overpacked boxcars. But this time the shirt was heading for freedom. Faithfully it arrived home now to serve its owner in another way. Now it guards him against the spattering of paint. Yes, in a dark closet resting carelessly on a hook, there lies a shirt.