My Small one,

From now on you will be the grand and glorious title of "Tugboat" -- you're little but very, very powerful. Day after tomorrow, and I will see you again! Each week, looking forward to that one day. It seems that the waiting is fuller -- that the purpose of waiting has grown greater since the last time. In fact, there is nothing more definite and clear to me these days than that it is right and proper that one should wait for Sunday -- that somehow all of me is tied up in it -- and that it will more than justify all the waiting. The paradox is that the mere fact that it so justifies the waiting makes the waiting more unbearable.

I'm glad to see that there's a nationwide campaign for helping out Texas City. It makes one very sick to think of all the mental anguish going on now in one place -- to know that it will last for many months -- and some of it, a lifetime. In a way, it is a lesson -- a much needed lesson.

During the war, we were pumped full of stories and notions that, somehow, we were to feel that to devastate the enemy's homeland was merely to make him uncomfortable but that he could not feel too deeply -- since he was part of a militaristic nation. We forget, in the long, desperate night, that a man loves his mother, father, sister and brother, the world over -- that even the most hardened Nazi is capable of frenzied love. There is no man so tough and unfeeling that will not bleed when cut, will starve when denied food. We knew when we were thinking those things -- we never said them -- that they were not so, that we only believed them -- used them at the moment, because it eased our minds and lent more fully to destruction. Now, the post-war world, we are reluctant to give up that notion -- because it is still useful in justifying our intolerant actions towards those people whom we still fear. Now, we have two examples -- close at hand -- Centralia, and Texas City. Multiply that a hundred times -- a thousand times, and one will glimpse what our "heartless" enemies endured.

I am not crying, "war is useless" -- I would not hesitate to shoot a man in self defense. I am not protesting our treatment (our cavalier treatment) of the defeated nations to make them "feel it". But I do say that we should keep in mind why we are doing it -- we are dealing out a medicine to them -- not an idealogy -- we do not actually believe that they are fundamentally different from us. We do not actually believe that suffering to them is less than it is for us.

I'll mail this when I go to the box tonight (for your letter).

I hope it's a nice day Sunday -- so we can be out. I'm afraid my search for the copies of the Yale Daily News has reached a dead end; not a copy in sight, and the News hasn't any suggestions. That fellow should have been on his toes when they came out, don't you think?