As Johnny Comes Marching Home

When I first came home, I wanted to get a job. They said, "Well, we'll get in touch with you." There's nothing they have; they don't have any jobs. Just like the demonstrations I've seen since I've been home. They say, well, end the war, you know, stop the war in Viet Nam and bring the fellas home. What can they give them when they get home? You know, a lot of people are going to be upset when they come home.

The speaker, Jerry Pugh, is a veteran of the Viet Nam War. In his anger and frustration, he is not unlike thousands of others across the U.S. Nearly 2,500,000 men have served in Viet Nam. In other years and other wars, they would have returned to a hero's welcome, an outstretched hand, promises of a better life. Occasionally this is still the case. Just as often, it is not.

Gilbert Pew was a tank driver in "the Nam," where he was seriously wounded. He returned home to New York to find that his wife of 1 1/2 years had become a drug addict. Soon after, she left him, and her mother had Pew evicted from the couple's apartment. Unable to find housing and without a family of his own, he lived in an abandoned Harlem tenement with rats and junkies as his only neighbors for several weeks before finding a room. "Guys look forward to getting home and getting all those benefits the Army promised while you were in," says Pew. "They're in for a big surprise, though. Viet Nam veterans don't have any benefits whatsoever."

Waiting List. There is some truth to Pew's complaint. Compared with their World War II and Korean War counterparts, Viet Nam veterans are unheralded, even unwanted. On the average younger and less skilled, they are returning to look for work in one of the toughest job situations seen in their lifetime. Yet veterans' benefits, the traditional bootstrap up when all else has failed, are woefully inadequate compared with other years. The G.I. Bill for Education, for example, once provided for full tuition, plus $75 monthly for expenses. Now it pays but $175 a month, hardly enough to meet school costs in most cases, let alone support a wife, family or even the veteran himself.

Nowhere is the problem more critical than in the nation's cities. Of the 5,000,000 currently out of work, at least one in ten is a returned serviceman, most of them from large urban areas. In New York City, where 48,000 Viet vets returned home last year, the City Division of Veterans Affairs has been stymied in its search to find jobs. In 1969, for example, the agency was able to place citywide only 3,116 vets of the 9,473 who applied. "And 1969 was a labor year," says one counselor.

Often the search for adequate housing is even more difficult. Albert Pryor has been squatting in an abandoned tenement for the last four years, much of the time attending college. He has been on the New York City Housing Authority waiting list all the while, but there is still no opening in sight. One city VA official estimates that in New York City alone there are currently more than 10,000 veterans who are forced to live with family or friends or, like Pryor, to camp illegally in empty buildings because they are unable to find quarters of their own.

The root causes of the veterans' plight are multiple, beginning with public apathy toward the Viet Nam vet. Much of the war's unpopularity has been unjustly transferred to the men who are fighting it. Never has the U.S. serviceman met with such indifference, even hostility. He is back, but who cares? Says Pew: "When a young man comes home from so-called fighting for his country and then looks to his country for help, and nobody gives, you know, nobody cares, it's just weird."

Little Appeal. Then, too, there was the military's Project 100,000, launched in 1967 to meet the rising manpower needs dictated by a lack of volunteers and by the many educational deferments. So named for the number of eligible draftees it would encompass each year (but actually a Pentagon euphemism for lowering the military's physical and mental standards), the program reached into the traditionally rejected pool of society's marginal youth, chronic dropouts and underachievers--about 175,000 in the first 28 months. Inducted, trained for battle and little else, the men who are now being processed out are often hardly better prepared for civilian life than when they entered.

The military has tried to face up to these problems with Transition Program, a project to provide job training for servicemen before discharge. Because the program is open only to those with six months or more of active duty remaining, it has little appeal. An alternative is almost immediate discharge upon return from Viet Nam. Of the 5,000 overseas returnees arriving at Fort Dix each month, for example, all but a few hundred are discharged within 48 hours. As a result, only 12,000 men enrolled for the program last year.

Meanwhile, the ranks of the disillusioned continue to grow. Casberry Carr, an Air Force jet-engine mechanic from Atlanta, experienced the ultimate irony. Discharged last September, with a wife and two children to support, he fruitlessly sought work. Finally he checked into the possibility of re-enlisting. He was told that it would take at least until April for him to get back in.

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