These are desperate days in Korea, days that try

These are desperate days in Korea, days that try men’s soul! as ■well as rack their bodies. Americans at home should stop to think •what they are asking their young eons and brothers to do, and why they are asking it. The more important question is the “Why,” because men will fight and die gladly in a great cause if only they understand what they are fighting for. The reports from the front of the bitterness and bewilderment of our troops'are too insistent and too obviously correct to be ignored. The young infantryman who said to a correspon^ dent the other day: “Damned if I see why I’m fighting to save this hellhole,” was giving expression to a tragic ignorance, but one for which his superiors and not he should be blamed.

The basic facts that every —American soldier—and for that pnatter £Yeryo.civilian—-must understand are relatively simple. The soldier in the Korean hills and the folks back home who pay higher taxes and accept controls are, to begin with, fighting for survival. Korea is only a single battle in a long war whose sphere of action is the greater part of the world. This is an acute phase of a struggle in which our liberty and our whole way of life are at stake. One filthy, bleary-eyed boy firing a bazooka at a Russian-built North Korean tank is defending the freedom of his country and everything that Americans hold dear as surely as if he were defending the shores of California or Virginia against Communist hordes. His enemy is only incidentally the fantical, misguided Korean who comes at him to kill. It is communism, totalitarianism, slavery, the police state, that is the true enemy.

The simple fact today is that there is a price to be paid—a very great price. The soldier pays it in blood, others in other ways, but there is no escaping it. If everybody concerned knows what he is fighting for, the price will be paid gladly and bravely.