When They Came Home
Based on the lives of the author’s grandparents, this novella depicts the life of Milton Fieth, a 21-year-old farm boy from Missouri who volunteers in 1918 with his brother and a few friends to fight overseas in France during World War I. They travel by train from Kansas across the country to embark on a ship out of New York with Company K. Shattered by the violent deaths of his good friends Herbert and Socks on the battlefield, Milton returns home in August 1919.
He and his brother Wallace are offered work helping with the harvest on a farm in Enterprise, Kansas. There he meets Edith, whose parents own the farm. Milton is a chatterbox and finds comfort talking to Edith. They get engaged and marry. From this point on, Lewis artfully portrays the contrast between the robust, rural farming existence in America and Milton’s slow psychological disintegration that begins to surface because of his war experiences.
Lewis’s thorough research accurately portrays the effects of shell shock, called Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) today. Edith’s struggles to understand what is going on and how she can help her husband are the centerpiece of this compelling story. The government’s failure to compensate its veterans, the therapies Milton undergoes, and Edith’s hopes and fears are told with an unerring eye for detail. Edith’s love for her husband, her faith, and her strong family enables her to cope and do her best to explain Milton’s journey to their two daughters.
Terri Lewis’s work is a poignant and truthful rendition of one World War I veteran’s reintegration into civilian life and the mental problems he faced. Milton’s postwar life story is just one of the over two million American doughboys who served their country and whose service and suffering were largely overlooked.
