"...the far from sad young men..."

"G.I. Metamorphosis. - 'The G.I. has it good in Austria'. So says the G.I. in Austria and he means by comparison with the lot of U.S. soldiers stationed elsewhere in postwar Europe. Soldiers would grouse even if detailed to the Garden of Eden and last week, as usual, the G.I.s in Austria were grousing at having attended a series of highminded but boring Army lectures. But in their time off, the far from sad young men went on having a good time.

Most of the 15.000 thousand U.S. cccupation troops in Austria were boys between 18 and 22. Weaned on ice cream sodas, they had known little except the good life of high-school dances and corner drugstores. The U.S. Army helped to transplant much of that life to Austria. It set up replicas of U.S. drugstores where G.I.s could take their Austrian girls for a soda (daily ice-cream consumption of the U.S. Army & friends in Vienna now runs to 60,000 scoops)."

"Time", July 29, 1946.