Mr. Thornley. This was not my opinion.
Mr. Jenner. You are saying that he interpreted your comment to be that you accused him of being a Communist, and then he made the remark, "Not you, too."
Mr. Thornley. I am sure he interpreted that that way but I certainly didn't think he was a Communist and I certainly didn't tell him so.
Mr. Jenner. To what did you attribute this inability of his to maintain reasonably cordial or at least military-service family relations with his fellow marines?
Mr. Thornley. Well, at the time I just thought—well, the man is a nut—at the very moment it happened, I dismissed it without thinking about it.
Mr. Jenner. See if you can articulate a little more, when you say "a nut," a lot of people will interpret the expression "a nut" differently.
Mr. Thornley. I understand that. I was just trying to give you my first impression first: that he was some kind of a nut, and I stopped thinking about it.
Mr. Jenner. You mean a nut in the sense of an extremist, not an organized thinker?
Mr. Thornley. I didn't think about that enough to classify it. I just thought, "something is wrong with him, maybe something is bugging him today, maybe he is crazy, I don't know what," but I just wasn't at that moment—it wasn't that important to me, I didn't feel much better than he did that morning, I am sure, so I just shrugged it off.
Later, I did reflect on it, and that, combined with his general habits in relation to his superiors, and to the other men in the outfit, caused me to decide that he had a definite tendency toward irrationality at times, an emotional instability. Once again right away, I didn't know exactly what was the cause of this. A couple of years later I had good reason to think about it some more, at which time I noticed——