Abstract
I went back to New York and visited Atlantic City with my wife. The army provided a month’s leave upon returning from overseas, so I spent the next 30 days relaxing with my family before reporting to Tuskegee as a flight instructor. To tell the truth, from the moment I set foot back in Alabama, I was ready to leave. It was then when I really started regretting that I hadn’t retired in July 1944. My knee and shoulder were still bothering me, I was becoming disinterested in what I was doing, and I didn’t feel the same exhilaration that I’d experienced in previous years. I guess one side of me also realized that I’d joined the military to make money. In college, I labored hard to get things that my classmates seemed to acquire easily. They had the best of clothes and seemingly anything else they wanted. I thought the army might help me do the same. I thought it would give me the financial boost that I needed to make the next step in life. Especially when my first son was born, I found myself wanting to be in a position to be able to provide for him. I knew I had to save more. In my view, even being an officer, the army just wasn’t allowing me to get where I wanted to be financially.
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Notes
Roi Ottley, “New World A-Coming”; Inside Black America (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1943).
Samuel Hynes, Anne Matthews, Nancy Caldwell Sorel, Roger J. Spiller, eds., Reporting World War II, vol. 1 (New York: Library of America, 1995).
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© 2004 Ben Vinson III
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Vinson, B. (2004). A Soldier’s Homecoming. In: Flight. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403981448_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403981448_7
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
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