The average American enlisted man is quite young when he enters service, and because he is young, he is impressionable. What his senior tells him becomes a substitute for the influence and teaching that he shed when he left his home or school. That need not mean a senior in age! _He looks to his officer, even though the latter may be junior in years, because he believes that the man with rank is a little wiser, and he has faith that he will not be steered wrong._ Despite all the publicity given to VD, American kids don't know a great deal about its reality, and even though the greater number of them like to talk about women, what they have to say rarely reveals them as worldly-wise. If an officer talks straight on these subjects, and believes in what he says sufficiently to set the good example, he can convince his better men that the game isn't worth the candle, and can save even some of the more reckless spirits from a major derail. CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR KEEPING YOUR MEN INFORMED Nobody ever told the South Sea savage about the nature of air in motion. He had never heard of wind and therefore could not imagine its effects. Thus when he heard strange noises in the treetops and there was a howling around certain headlands, while other headlands were silent, he could believe only that the spirits were at work. He would strain his ear to hear what they had to say to him, and never being able to understand, he would become all the more fearful. It all sounds pretty silly. And yet civilization is a great deal like that. We pride ourselves today in saying, particularly within the western nations, that men and women are better informed than ever before in the history of the world. What we really mean by that is that they are overburdened with more kinds of fragmentary information than any people of the past. They know just enough about many major questions of the day that either they are driven to the making of fearful guesses about the unknown, or they try to close their minds to the subject, vainly seeking consolation in the half-truth, "What I don't know can't hurt me." Therein lies a great part of the problem. For it is a fair statement that if all of the mystery could be stripped from such a complex topic as the nature of atomic power, so that men everywhere would understand it, universal fear would be displaced by universal confidence that something could be done, and society would be well along the road toward its control.