National Affairs: No Soldiers Wanted

Reservists and National Guardsmen were fed to the gills and hopping mad. Wherever they went looking for jobs, more & more employers were beginning to ask pointed questions and phrase the same harsh answers: “Sorry, we have to give it to someone we know will be here next year.”

The reluctance to take on men who might soon be in uniform had not yet spread to all employers. But there were already enough examples to support the citizen-soldiers’ gripes. In Boston, Chicago and San Francisco, reservists and guardsmen angrily complained that they were being i) passed by on promotion lists, 2) asked to quit their outfits (just about impossible) or start breaking in replacements. In Dalton, Ga., a young National Guard corporal had just been offered a better job. He inadvertently mentioned the Guard. “Whoa, just a moment,” snapped the interviewer, and called off the deal. In Atlanta, a sergeant in the Air Force Reserve hunted fruitlessly for weeks before he found a job chopping wood to feed his wife & child.

Unfair as it was, there was little or nothing to be done about the situation. An unemployed New Mexico reservist summed it up bitterly: “They tell us to be patriotic and join the reserves, so in gratitude, they make us starve.” —

National Guardsmen and regular soldiers had another special and startling gripe of their own. Under the present snafued pension laws, noted the Army Times, an Army or Air Force Reserve captain killed in Korea would leave a pension of $331.80 a month to his widow and two children; a Regular Army or National Guard captain killed by the same shellburst would leave his dependents a pension of only $130 a month. Reason: reservists come under the same pension laws as civilian employees of the Government; regulars and guardsmen (as well as all Marine and Navy personnel with more than a month’s service) under the much less liberal Veterans Administration provisions.