The Battle is the Pay-Off [antikvár]

Introduction WHEN I first went into the army I was very unhappy. I was not permitted to enter the army as an anonymous draftee, which would have given me a sense of community with millions of other Americans. The atmosphere of public controversy which surrounded me as editor of the newspaper PM penetrated into the circumstances connected with my joining the armed forces. I was a newspaper man and i thought and still do think that newspaper publishing is an essential war occupation. But, after all, no one can shed completely one's own personal bias in such matters. I had to solve the tangle in my own way, and recalling the first World War, when I enlisted in the army at the age of seventeen, I threw off my personal bias by enlisting again and shedding my prejudice in favor of fighting this war as publisher and editor. I ceased to be unhappy. The process by which I ceased to be unhappy was the process of absorption into that vast community which is the Army of the United States. To each man this process is personal, intimate, and individual. Even if I could entirely explain it, the explanation would be out of place here. In this book there is little, for instance, about what we are fighting for or about the political situation in Europe or even about what I think of the coming peace. These subjects are missing, not because I have lost interest in them-I am quite sure there is more thinking on what the war is all about in the army than in any other large group in our society- but because-well, I can put it best by going back to my thoughts and emotions in the first month or two of training. I was then so tired physically that I could only get through a day by using every five- or ten-minute breathing spell to