Across the land last week, for six warm days & nights, a troop train rumbled. It was an old train, with no fancy name. To the engineers and switchmen, it was No. 7452-C. The men on board dubbed it the "Home Again Special," and wrote the new name in chalk on the sides of the old Pullman cars. In another war there might have been brass bands at every stop. But in this pageantry-less, slogan-less war, the train just rumbled on toward New York, through the big towns and the whistle-stops.
The men aboard were 370 members of the ist Marine Division—survivors of Tulagi, conquerors of Guadalcanal; the men who mowed down the Japs like hay at Bloody Ridge, and crossed the bloody Matanikau River; the invaders of Cape Gloucester, the rain-drenched fighters of Talasea, the men who took Hill 660 when they should have been annihilated halfway up; the unnamed defenders of Nameless Hill, the survivors of Coffin Corner.
These men on the troop train, already famed in communiqués and the war's best-sellers,* were heading home for a 30-day furlough after 27 months of battle.
A little Worried. After their ship docked at San Diego, they spent 14 days just waiting around in a city none wanted to see. Finally the train left. The heroes peeled off their natty field greens and settled down in their khakis on the scratchy green seats, scared and lonely, wondering how home would be now that it was suddenly so close. "I'm a little worried about how I'll look to them, about how much I've changed. . . ."
The train clacked on slowly, through the desert and up the mountains. As the coffee cups rattled in the dining cars the little marine said: "I haven't shaken so much since the night we went around Cape Hatteras, leaving the States." At Tucumcari, there was time for a beer at the station hotel: on the first round it cost a quarter; by the second the price shot to 40¢. Said the red-haired sergeant from Rochester, not complaining, but just noticing: "Somebody's making money, and it isn't us."
The towns paraded past: Texhoma, Meade, Hutchinson, Kansas City. On the fourth day, at Moberly, Mo. (pop. 12,920), things were different. The townspeople flocked to the station with sandwiches and beer, cigarets and candy; the Moberly girls, in their summer dresses, brought their cars and took the marines for rides through the gentle hills, up & down the concrete highways that looked like the highways near home.
There was a four-hour wait in Chicago.
For the photographers, in the dim station, the heroes brought out their Jap flags and Jap sabers, leaving the pornographic Jap propaganda leaflets packed away in their sea bags.
The Silent. On the train there were long-silences, as the marines, having talked themselves out, stared at fields and the weather-stained buildings flitting by. But now & then conversation bubbled up.
Said Pfc. Marcel Beaulieu, 21, of Chicapee Falls, Mass.: "I think I'm going to stay in New York and see a couple of ball games. I've been thinking about that for a long time. I used to keep thinking about that last game I saw. . . ."