The man of 1950 was not a statesman; Dean Acheson and his fellow diplomats of the free world had, in 1950, notably failed to stop the march of Communism. Nor was 1950's man a general; the best commander of the year, MacArthur, had blundered and been beaten. Nor a scientist, for science—so sure at the century's beginning that it had all the answers—now waited for the politicians (or anyone else) to find a way of controlling the terrible power that science had released. Nor an industrialist, for 1950, although it produced more goods than any other year in the world's history, was not preoccupied with goods, but with life & death. Nor a scholar, for the world of 1950 was surfeited with undigested facts, and sought its salvation not in the conquest of new knowledge but in what it could relearn from old, old lessons. 1950's man might turn out to be the aging conspirator, Joseph Stalin, but as the year closed, that dreadful prospect was far from certain; if he was winning the game and not just an inning, Stalin's historians would record that 1950 —and all other years from the death of Lenin—belonged to him. Or 1950's man might turn out to be an unknown saint, quietly living above the clash of armies and ideas. Him, too, the future would have to find.
As the year ended, 1950's man seemed to be an American in the bitterly unwelcome role of the fighting-man. It was not a role the American had sought, either as an individual or as a nation. The U.S. fighting-man was not civilization's crusader, but destiny's draftee.
The Peculiar Soldier. Most of the men in U.S. uniform around the world had enlisted voluntarily, but few had taken to themselves the old, proud label of "regular," few had thought they would fight, and fewer still had foreseen the incredibly dirty and desperate war that waited for them. They hated it, as soldiers in all lands and times have hated wars, but the American had some special reasons for hating it. He was the most comfort-loving creature who had ever walked the earth— and he much preferred riding to walking. As well as comfort, he loved and expected order; he yearned, like other men, for a predictable world, and the fantastic fog and gamble of war struck him as a terrifying affront.
Yet he was rightly as well as inevitably cast for his role as fighting-man in the middle of the 20th Century. No matter how the issue was defined, whether he was said to be fighting for progress or freedom or faith or survival, the American's heritage and character were deeply bound up in the struggle. More specifically, it was inevitable that the American be in the forefront of this battle because it was the U.S. which had unleashed gigantic forces of technology and organizational ideas. These had created the great 20th Century revolution. Communism was a reaction, an effort to turn the worldwide forces set free by U.S. progress back into the old channels of slavery.