Word: ex-g
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...have felt there would have been a sharp, even hostile line drawn between the returning veterans and the unsullied arriving from their preparatory and high schools but, if there was, I failed to notice much of it. What little there might have been disappeared quickly. Very few of the ex-G.I.'s wore any parts of their old uniforms or gave any overt signs of expecting or getting any preferential treatment or respect. One fellow went around with a chestful of fruit salad, as we used to call decorations, and he wore his uniform for about a year...
...camps were settling into the ordinary routines of existence. There were a few deaths and also some marriages. On Guam, an ex-G.I. named Thomas Hejl finally found and married Nguyen Thi Ut, the fiancee he had met during his tour of duty in Viet Nam several years before. Their daughter, born three years ago, was killed by a Communist gunshot as her mother carried her on a fishing boat fleeing Saigon...
William R. Corson, the newest recruit, stands in curious contrast to his brethren. A retired Marine Corps colonel-a veteran of World War II, Korea, Viet Nam and duties with the CIA - he is a clean-shaven, shorthair type. His level stare could still panic any ex-G.I. who meets him with shoes unpolished. But Corson's bill of particulars against the republic is far from novel. In fact, it is sobering to recognize how closely his analysis resembles that of the New Left six or seven years ago, minus the hysterical rhetoric...
Sack swallows these abstractions whole, yet the characters in his book are concrete enough, and very real indeed. Varoujan Demirgian is an ex-G.I. in Viet Nam who thought he had a problem-he was there for a year, says Sack, without ever killing a Communist. Robert Melvin is a black Viet veteran now totally committed to working his way up the executive ladder at a Madison Avenue advertising agency. Another black, Vantee Thompson, came home from search-and-destroy missions to find himself on riot-control duty in Baltimore, his own people becoming as hard to understand...
...fact, as ex-G.I.s know, parts of Viet Nam are spectacularly beautiful...