The soldiers and the sailors came home. They came home from the Normandy landing, the Ardennes, home from North Africa and the butchering Italian campaign, home from those deadly coral atolls in the Pacific, home from Okinawa. The fighting on Okinawa had been so ghastly that it had turned the stomach of no less than General Douglas MacArthur.
We had not gone to war joyfully. Americans who were not yet middle-aged had fought in World War I. There were thousands of destroyed soldiers in the veterans’ hospitals, men who had been gassed, men with their arms and legs shot off.
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