You read about guys like that, but you don't often see them.
In retrospect, it isn't terribly surprising that the Academy named The Best Years of Our Lives the Best Picture of 1946. In so many ways, it was precisely the film America needed at the time, depicting the difficulties faced by veterans adjusting to life back on the home front. Directed by William Wyler, who, like many of his contemporaries, served his country during the war, and filmed in stunning deep focus by cinematographer Gregg Toland, The Best Years of Our Lives is epic in length (running just ten minutes shy of three hours), but intimate in scope.
This intimacy stems from the fact that screenwriter Robert E. Sherwood, working from a novel by MacKinlay Kantor, concentrates on three vets returning to the same small town: bombadier Dana Andrews, infantryman Fredric March, and sailor Harold Russell. All face an uncertain future, especially Russell, a double amputee with hooks for hands who distances himself from his fiancée (Cathy O'Donnell, literally playing the girl next door). March seems to be the best off since he comes home to a loving wife (the always-welcome Myrna Loy), two well-adjusted children (Teresa Wright and Michael Hall), and a secure job at the bank, but he's wracked with the same sense of insecurity and drinks too much to compensate. As for Andrews, he's not only plagued by recurring nightmares, but he has difficulty landing a decent job and finds himself incapable of keeping his materialistic wife (Virginia Mayo) in the manner to which she's grown accustomed. And to further complicate matters, he's slowly but surely falling in love with Wright and she with him, but Wyler and Sherwood wisely keep that subplot from tipping over into melodrama.
The same can be said for the film as a whole, which is able to bring viewers to tears (at least it brought this one to them), but it earns every single drop. On a purely visual level, though, the most overwhelming scene comes when Andrews is strolling around an actual airplane graveyard, feeling like a piece of war surplus that is ready for the scrapheap himself. I expect there were a great many veterans who felt the same exact way.