When the Boys Come Home

The hard, unhappy-looking men kept to themselves. Along the boardwalk, in the Atlantic City bars, they avoided civilians, even shunned other soldiers who had not been overseas. The hard young men were veteran Army Air Forces pilots and crewmen. They had had 21-day furloughs at home. Now they were at the Atlantic City redistribution center, being prepared for reassignment.

This was not what they brooded over. One of them said curtly: "We don't need to be reoriented to the Army. A lot of us are damn glad to be going back overseas. What they should have prepared us for was the shock of coming home."

The Army was trying to rationalize things for them. Officers who had also been overseas lectured them on being too harsh in their judgment of apparent civilian lassitude. They were told of the great production record U.S. civilians had made in the war. They were reminded that people are only human. But the bitterness remained in their eyes, especially in the eyes of the youngest.

A Letter to Kiska. An Army chaplain, whose job it is to listen while young men talk, thought he had an explanation. He was shocked, he said, by the stories they had told him of broken marriages. He said last week: "American women have failed their fighting men. . . .

"The men come in and tell me that they are going to divorce their wives. I have little success trying to get them to patch it up. After a man has flown 70 or 90 missions over Europe, laying his life on the block to protect his home, and then finds his home has been wrecked by infidelity, there is little I can tell him to convince him he should forgive and forget."

Many of the cases he has listened to are the result of hasty marriages before men went overseas. But not all of them. "I know of one G.I., married ten years, who got a letter in Kiska from his wife asking him for a divorce. A pilot in the Thirteenth Air Force on Guadalcanal, also married for a long time, got a letter from his wife whom he hadn't seen for 18 months saying, 'I'm pregnant. I'll explain when I see you.' "

A Million Miles. Probably these were the troubles of relatively few of the returned fighting men. But, for the unhappy, alienated look in the young men's eyes, there were other reasons which they would not bother to take to a chaplain.

Said a bombardier who had been with Chennault's heavy bomber group in China for 21 months:

"When I got home Manhattan didn't seem real. The first few days it was swell. People fell all over me. Where you been? China. Tell us about it. I did. But they didn't want to hear what men have to endure. They wanted dime-novel stories of adventure. They didn't understand what I was trying to say. I couldn't get through to them. They hadn't seen it. It hadn't touched them.

"I saw people jamming the bars and hot spots and movies. Their way of life hasn't really changed a damn bit. They are a million miles away from the sufferings of war. Then one day I was riding on a subway and I heard one bastard say to another one: 'If this war lasts for two more years I'll be on easy street.' "

Along the sunny boardwalk, in the Atlantic City bars, U.S. civilians were getting a look last week at gulfs they will have to cross when the boys come home.

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