The Veteran: Problem and Challenge

Abstract

IN A little corner of marshy earth close to the battered wall of Manila's Intramuros there stand a few white crosses. I have passed them many times; so have thousands of other Americans stationed in and around Manila. Probably they gave the crosses little thought, for military cemeteries are no novelties in the foughtover places of the world. I did not think about them so much, either, until I came home and tried to buy some white shirts. And then it came to me that in those two white objects-the white crosses of the world's battlefields, the white shirts of an elusive commerce-there is symbolized much of the conflict in which the returned veteran finds himself almost the moment he sets foot on1 American soil. For no matter how fast he must swim in the new and confusing tide of civilian affairs-even unto the dire search for white shirts-the veteran must always have in the back of his mind the vision of white crosses, sometimes great fields of them and sometimes only little clusters, like the few that stand beside Intramuros. A great many men have died these past few years. Whatever it was they died for,it was not in the interest of the market for white shirts, and the thousand and one similar petty complexities of the modern world. That much, at least, the veteran knows. That much, at least, will color his thinking and shape his desires for the rest of his life. Two years ago the Editors of SOCIAL FORCES asked me this question: What will the returning veteran want? I wrote an answer to it once when I sailed westward from San Francisco; I wrote a second answer over a year later as I sailed eastward from Manila; and I am writing the third attempt now, three months after returning to the United States. So this article, in itself, represents a somewhat extended metamorphosis of thought.