| Summary: | They left Freehold, New Jersey, for service in World War II as six young men-to the army, the navy, and the air corps, to the Pacific, and to Europe-and they returned home alive. But on their return, they faced a new mission as America took a new shape and their community faced new pressures-farms and factories thriving, then fading; creeping suburbs and withering Main Streets; civil rights struggles and race riots. Offering a gripping look at life in wartime, Marching Homefollows each of six men overseas into battles where the enemy was clear and then back home where the lines of combat were more uncertain: the black soldier who endured the segregated army only to face race riots back home and the sailor who watched a kamikaze hurtle toward his ship and then tried to keep peace at home as a police officer. With the stories of these men, Kevin Coyne presents Freehold, with its mixture of village intimacy and city diversity, as a microcosm of the whole sweep of twentieth-century American history. It is a reminder of what America has faced and overcome and will continue to face as the nation marches forward.
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