THE NEW VETERAN

by Charles G. Bolte '41. Reynal if Hitchcock, 1945. 212 pp. $2.00.

The readers of this magazine are familiar with the career of Charles G. Bolt 6 '41. His experiences as a volunteer in the British army immediately after graduation from college, his training in England, and the loss of his leg in the great tide-turning battle of El Alamein have been recounted on these pages. With the same courageous idealism that sent him into the battle for freedom ahead of his country, he has returned to throw himself whole-heartedly into leadership of the American Veterans' Committee. This Committee is the nucleus of a swiftly growing veteran's movement that aims to knit the veterans of World War II into an organization that considers ex-service men first as citizens, and only second as veterans.

In The New Veteran Bolte reviews his experiences, and shows how out of them emerged his ideas on what should be the peacetime role of the veteran of the present war. Clearly and cogently he shows why the new veterans can- not become junior appendages of the American Legion or V.F.W. He points out how spe- cial privileges granted the veteran in a competitive society are really gold bricks, for the welfare of any individual citizen is inseparable from the welfare of the whole. The task of the veteran, then, is to work in peace for the ideals for which he fought in war, "Peace, jobs, freedom," and to help influence national policy toward the goal of making a finer America in a peaceful world.

The book is more than an exposition of the purposes of the American Veterans' Committee; it is a persuasive credo of faith in the enduring vitality of the democratic processes through which there is "a chance to make a little more generous and hopeful future" in this new interdependent world. It is must reading for every veteran. For the non-veteran citizen it will shed revealing light on the attitude of the more thoughtful and sensitive men who returned from war.