One Who Won't Return

In an eastern U.S. city, a newsman interviewed relatives and friends of one of the 23 U.S. war prisoners who have refused repatriation, to find out whether anything in his home background had made the soldier discontented with life in the U.S. The newsman's findings:

The soldier had been raised in a city slum. His father never worked steadily. His mother was a hard drinker and openly went about with other men. Their son grew up to be a sensitive, belligerent child who lived by his wits. He once missed school for 21 days because he had no shoes to wear.

The soldier's younger brother has served reformatory sentences and is now in jail facing trial for armed robbery. His sister, 16, an inmate of an institution for homeless girls, is going blind from syphilis. His father died of cancer several years ago. His mother disappeared somewhere in the rabbit warren of flophouses in their city's Skid Row.

While he lived at home, the soldier tried hard but vainly to hold his family together. Later, serving with the Army in Japan, he attempted to make a new life of his own, married a Japanese girl. Their baby died of polio before she was a year old, and shortly afterward he and his wife separated. Then he was sent to Korea to fight for the United Nations.

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