Coming Home

​​I had always been under the impression that the veterans returning home after serving overseas during the Second World War were almost universally perceived as heroes, and treated with generosity and respect. A little-known book (that I had to track down and request on loan from a tiny community library in Kaslo) called The Veteran Years by Barry Broadfoot paints a different picture indeed. Although many veterans took advantage of government education programs and grants and did well, many others had a rough time and encountered a hard row to hoe, literally in many cases. Many of the challenges they faced were foreseeable and, perhaps, par for the course, like those men who came home to find their jobs were gone, or their girlfriends married, or even their wives having moved in with someone else while they were gone. Other predicaments were less forgivable or understandable.                                                                                                              Take the Land Grant for instance. My Dad had applied for the Canadian government’s offer of free land to returning veterans who qualified, but it appears he either changed his mind or, more likely I think, my Mom put the kibosh on the idea. Other veterans took the deal and many of them found themselves not in possession of a nice quarter section of farmland ready to be worked, but instead a large area of tree covered bushland in Canada’s boreal forest. Many former soldiers and airmen and their wives worked like medieval serfs to try and turn wilderness into a workable farm, and many of them gave up after one or two miserable seasons, exhausted and defeated.                                                                                                                                              Other veterans trying to find work met, I was shocked to discover, scorn and disrespect from older men in positions of power who had stayed home during the war years. My favourite story along these lines is found in The Veteran Years and is about a discharged Canadian Army sergeant, looking for work as a truck driver in Vancouver. The owner of the business told him he didn’t hire “army guys”. “He said he didn’t hire army guys because we were lazy, we had spent three years sitting around doing nothing in England and going up to Scotland to screw the girls, and then we went to France and killed a few Germans and screwed a lot more girls and come home, and didn’t we think we were a bunch of heroes?” Unsurprisingly, our Army veteran lost it. Perhaps remembering all the death and horror, and all the friends he had buried in shallow graves across France, Belgium and Holland, he landed a haymaker on the man’s chin and knocked him out of his chair onto the floor. He stormed out, but the Vancouver Police Department caught up with him a few hours later. He told the V.P.D. sergeant his story of why he had punched the man, and the cop not only let him go, but told him he would make a great policeman and told him how and where to apply!                                                               I think the story struck a chord with me as I remember an incident from my youth when I very nearly punched a supervisor one night. It was 1982 and I was working as an underground labourer in a copper mine in the Yukon. It was hard, dirty work – myself and my 2 coworkers were mixing and pouring cement into forms, creating reinforcing arches in the mine’s tunnels. This particular shift was a graveyard, so we were tired and at a low ebb. Part of our pay was a bonus based on how many bags of cement we used in a shift, so we were pushing the pace. It was cold, wet and the air was thick as pea soup with cement dust and the last thing we needed was a visit from a disrespectful asshole. Lo and behold, along came our supervisor that night, Jimmy K. The man was a loudmouthed pipsqueak, full of himself, tactless and boorish. Can you tell I didn’t like him? Jimmy’s trademark was that every sentence he uttered seemed to all end with a nonsensical “What the Fuck?!”. He immediately began disparaging our work effort, telling us we were lazy, that the bonus system was a waste on us, and that “the mine could pay you stiffs a $100 a bag bonus and you still wouldn’t work hard, what the fuck?!” Like our Army sergeant friend, I lost it. I felt the blood drain from my face and my fists ball up – it was like some out-of-body experience, like I was watching the event unfold on TV. Thank goodness Jimmy saw the look on my face and did an about-face and strutted away into the dark. I came within a hairbreadth from getting fired or worse. Now, if I could get that furious over something that petty, I could only imagine what the sergeant must have felt in that moment.                                                                                                                  Our veterans returned home to face challenges we can only imagine today....the days of emotional support animals, medical marijuana and counselling were far in the future, they just toughed it out. They are often referred to as The Greatest Generation for good reason.