Since V-J day more than 3,000 veterans have applied to us for jobs. If a majority of America's fighting men are returning to civilian life as matured and purposeful as the ones we have seen, this nation has a future even greater than it expects.

Many of them turn up at our offices fresh off the transports docked in the Hudson almost under our windows. They arrive singly, and in unmilitary groupings of officers and enlisted men together. Most of them are very young.

Some were so young when they went to war that they are still of high school and college age. Others were just getting started as butchers, bookkeepers, truck drivers, gasoline station attendants, etc.

One thing they tell us repeatedly is that they might not have thought of working for TIME before the war, but now they want a job which will make some contribution to the kind of world they fought for. They say that TIME is the kind of outfit they would like to work for, that they like TIME'S product and its viewpoint -- a comment which must have come largely from reading TIME'S domestic and overseas wartime editions.

Some of these veterans have a hard time putting what they mean into words. The best that a onetime truck driver, a prisoner of the Germans for two years, could do was to write: "I don't know what I could do for you people, but there must be some place for a man who is willing to work and who wants to become a part of your organization." A seaman second class was even more determined: "For my own part, I have resolved that my happiness in future work will depend to a large extent on whether I can be a useful member of an organization which works in the interest of humanity." These observations can mean only that a majority of these veterans want jobs that will give them a chance to do more than just make a living. They say, frankly, that they want work which deals in some way with the problems -- and their possible solution -- of this mixed up world.

TIME'S own war veterans have been coming home, too. Not quite 20% of them have returned, so far, but we are getting accustomed to former office boys with oak leaves on their shoulders and DSCs on their tunics.

And, with four or five exceptions, almost everybody who worked for TIME before the war wants to work for us again.

Those who are back at work have turned out to be a highly realistic group of young men with few illusions about themselves. So have almost all of the veterans who want to work for TIME. They are unqualifiedly confident, however, of their ability to get along in a civilian world that is more complicated than the one they left. Because TIME'S future, like the future of the U.S. itself, depends so much on the returning veterans, that spirit is a heartening thing to see.

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