As Time Goes By

In the pacifist mid-'30s the Veterans of Future Wars was the most biting, satiric anti-war crusade of them all. These were the confident college youths who knew their elders had botched the last war and the peace; they would not fall for the hollow gag of trying to make the world safe for democracy. With tongue in cheek, they demanded their prepaid bonus immediately, for a war into which they would not drag the U.S. The Chicago University chapter offered the slogan: "We'll make the world safe for hypocrisy." In a parade up Broadway, V.F.W.s carried death's-heads, the drum major a crutch. The campaign landed the V.F.W. on the nation's front pages. The U.S. that had made Merchants of Death a best-seller cheered; veterans of World War I jeered. Exploded James E. Van Zandt, national commander of the Veterans of Foreign Wars (and now a Congressman from Pennsylvania): "They're too yellow to go to war. . . . They'll never be veterans of a future war."

Last week Princeton Graduate Lewis Jefferson Gorin Jr., founder, first & only commander of the Veterans of Future Wars, was Captain Lewis Jefferson Gorin Jr. in command of an artillery company at Camp Chaffee, Ark. From North Africa, Master Sergeant Thomas Riggs Jr., onetime vice commander of the V.F.W., wrote to his parents after Bizerte:

"A spent shell fragment. . . tore a hole through my pup tent just beside me one noon while I was resting. I keep this, for I have a certain sentimental attachment for it. Had it been an inch longer, my life would have been a lot shorter. . . ."

Of the ten other Princeton undergraduates who helped Gorin and Riggs start the V.F.W., one was crippled in an auto accident and is exempt from military service, one is in an essential industry (steel). The remaining eight are in the Army, Navy or Marines.

The leader of the Columbia University chapter will enter the Navy this month. Of the four V.F.W. officers at Southern Methodist, two are in military service. The onetime head of the Stanford chapter is in the Army Air Forces; the onetime leader of Chicago University's group is a Marine instructor.

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