ARMED FORCES: 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 1½ 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.