"Oh, You're Back?"

When Jim Sloan, 23, returned to Harvard after service as an Army sergeant in Viet Nam, he was laughingly labeled "the resident fascist pig of Adams House." Richard Parish, 22, was an Air Cav rifleman when a chunk of Communist shrapnel ripped his right shoulder to the joint; back in Michigan as a civilian, the Negro high school graduate was unable to pass physical examinations at either Cadillac Motors or Detroit Edison, and reluctantly began drawing disability pay. First Lieut. Leo Glover, 26, won a Silver Star and a Purple Heart near the DMZ as a Marine air controller, then turned his aerial expertise into a job as a flight engineer for Trans World Airlines in Kansas City, Mo.--but nearly busted up a cocktail lounge one night when some drunks refused to be quiet during a televised speech by General William Westmoreland.

Sloan, Parish and Glover are three of some 1,700,000 veterans who have made the painful transition from service to civilian life since the Viet Nam war became a major military effort in 1964. This year, at least 900,000 more will muster out--all of them to face an adjustment problem unique among U.S. war vets. The men who fought in World Wars I and II and Korea found gratitude and the traditional heroes' welcome awaiting them at home; the Vietvet returns with no fanfare to a nation whose response ranges from a noncommittal "Oh, you're back?" to--in some cases--downright hostility.

Great Disparity. Even in terms of Government-financed veterans' benefits, the Vietvet makes out worse than his counterparts of earlier wars. Whereas the World War II vet who wanted to further his education got full tuition, fees and book costs plus $75-a-month living allowance, the returnee from Viet Nam can expect a maximum of only $130 a month to cover everything. Currently, there are 450,000 returnees receiving G.I. schooling benefits. They enjoy slightly brighter job prospects than did their predecessors, largely because the U.S. economy is stronger than ever before. Last year the U.S. Employment Service found jobs for 1,200,000 veterans--many fresh home from Viet Nam; only 2.4% of all Vietvets are unemployed (v. 3.9% for the population as a whole).

Still, there is a great disparity on the employment scale between white and Negro returnees, best reflected by the fact that only 18% of whites re-enlist v. 46% of Negroes. Clearly, many Negroes feel that military service gives them greater opportunity (coupled with less discrimination) than civilian life.

Invitation to Revolt. For black G.I.s coming home can be hell. San Francisco's Carl Witherspoon, 21, was a track star and scholastic achiever before he joined the Marines. In Viet Nam he collected a Bronze Star and two bullets in the gut. After nine months in hospitals, Witherspoon mustered out and began looking for a job and a home for himself and his pretty wife Paulette. Frequently rebuffed and insulted, Witherspoon finally landed work with the telephone company and an apartment in a good neighborhood. Though he and his wife are rarely at home in the evenings (they work), white neighbors are already complaining about "too much noise between 6 and 9." Witherspoon was approached by Black Nationalist Ron Karenga's boys shortly after his return (he holds a karate black belt), but turned down the invitation to join the revolution. Now he is not so sure. "Sometimes I feel it was all for nothing," he says of Viet Nam. "You know, we go over there and tell them their house is dirty before we got our own house clean."

The Government is gearing up programs that should make the Vietvet's return smoother than Witherspoon's. Project Transition, set up at Fort Knox by the Defense Department, is cooperating with industry to give vets training in everything from mathematics to data processing, and has already placed some Viet Nam veterans in jobs ranging from postal clerks to oil-company salesmen. President Johnson hopes to recruit Negro vets as ghetto schoolteachers, and a bill to that end is being drafted for presentation this year.

The Urban League's veterans' program (TIME, May 26) is already functioning in eight cities--Atlanta, Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles, New Orleans, New York, San Francisco and Washington--and in some of them has found work for more than a third of its applicants. Still, even the Urban League could do nothing for one Negro soldier who had lost an arm in the war and found that prospective employers considered him not a war hero but merely a one-armed man. He decided to stay in the service.

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