To answer some of the questions subscribers all over the world have been asking about how TIME gathers, verifies, writes and distributes its news.

Judging by our mail, I guess reading the lead article in last week's TIME (about the 370 furloughed Guadalcanal Marines and their trip across the U.S. on the "Home Again Special") stirred our subscribers just as deeply as meeting and talking with these boys stirred the TIME people who reported the story.

And so many of your letters ask how TIME'S editors in New York knew all the intimate things said and done on this long, excited train ride home that I thought you would like to hear how TIME found out about the Marine who jumped off the train to scrounge a piece of ice from a wagon--and the red-headed sergeant who "noticed" the 40-c- beer--and the 23-year-old corporal who was so glad to be back he "just lay in his bunk all night grinning."

As soon as the news that the Marines had landed and were about to start east came in to TIME'S News Bureau, we telegraphed our correspondents in the west and south and middle west--tipped them off to be on the lookout for the "Home Again Special"--asked for full details on the homecoming of any Marines who turned up in their territory.

In San Francisco Correspondents Robert de Roos and Fritz Goodwin hotfooted it to the Shoemaker and Naval Hospitals, spent hours talking with some of the just-arrived typhus-and malaria-ridden boys who weren't quite up to the trip across the country yet--sent a long wire about the curious, unexpected things they wanted most to know about ("What's this new leg paint the girls are wearing?"--"What's old Brooklyn look like now?"--etc., etc.)

TIME Correspondent Ed Bridges met two special trains that carried some of the Leathernecks to Atlanta . . . Marine Lieut. Diggory Venn wired us how 1,200 cheering townspeople jammed the depot at McKeesport. Pa., to meet Lieut. Mitchell Paige when he got in at two in the morning . . . and out in Chicago TIME

Correspondent Gene Cook waited in the B. & O. yards until 7:30 a.m. to hop aboard the eastbound Marine train and ride all the way to New York with it (he bunked with Lieut. Camille Tamucci, the tough guy in charge who kept dreaming of mountains of spaghetti all the way home).

Cook talked with dozens of Marines, heard their firsthand stories of Bloody Ridge and Coffin Corner and Hill 660, looked at their snapshots, dodged around them as they wrestled in the aisles, joined in when they sang Someone's in the Kitchen with Dinah.

He wrote it all up in a report that ran to 31 typewritten pages--and I wish we'd had the room in TIME to bring you all his stories--about Marine Edwards whose name must go on the long list of men whose lives have been saved by bullet-bouncing Bibles . . . about the bettingest man in the First Division, who won $29,000 but lost his furlough privilege on the turn of a card and never did get home . . . about the night-club owner in San Diego who almost turned Sgt. Owen Justin away because his identification card was too stained with jungle sweat to be legible. . . .

While Cook was highballing his way to New York, researchers here in our editorial offices were busy digging out background material on the First Marine Division--how it fought at Tulagi and Gavutu and Koli Point, at Tenaru and Matanikau and Cape Esperance (there were pages of these background facts, but they had to be told in nine published lines).

All in all, it took almost 13,000 words of correspondents' reports and researchers' material to provide the facts and background for the 1,398-word story our editors wrote for you in TIME.

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