"Out of the Hot Seat"

No journalist, no OCD coordinator, but a youth right out of college and training for an Army Air Corps commission wrote the week's most penetrating comment on morale. Published in the Sioux Falls Argus-Leader was a letter written back home by handsome young Flyer Jerald B. Davis, 24:

"In not too many weeks I'm to be an Army officer. But when I'm honest with myself I confess that throughout my training I've had in mind becoming an instructor, not because I thought I would be especially good as an instructor, but because I thought that would be the safest job I could find in my business.

"There, it seems to me, is the essence of the whole trouble. We are an entire nation of people who are trying to wage a war and everyone is trying, himself, to keep out of the hot seat. . . .

"Patriotism is surely something more than knowing verbatim the Pledge of Allegiance. . . . It's the feeling that you get when you hear that Jap planes are about to bomb San Francisco and you feel that if you could just get a plane you'd go up and give those yellow devils a taste of their own medicine. . . .

"It's that kind of a feeling that has about decided me to apply for active service when the time comes. . . . If I get killed--well, what the hell? We all die sometime, and very few of us get to die for a cause. And if I do get through I will have had a world of experience and the feeling that perhaps in times that try men's souls I had stood the test. . . ."

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