As the plane flies into Boone City, the three men gaze down at their home town and marvel that it looks the same as it did when they left. But as they soon find out, at a distance people and places appear very different than they do up close and personal. The town and its denizens are not the same, their families aren't the same, and- most importantly- they are not the same people they were before they went to war. The expression "you can't go home again" is taken from the title of a 1940 novel by Thomas Wolfe. In it, the protagonist concludes: "You can't go back home to your family, back home to your childhood ... back home to a young man's dreams of glory and of fame ... back home to places in the country, back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting, but which are changing all the time – back home to the escapes of Time and Memory." This seems remarkably applicable to the experiences of these three men- and others- returning to their old lives following World War II.
As the taxi pulls away from the curb, Homer waves and looks after it almost longingly- as if he wishes he was still in it with Fred and Al. This is a recurring theme we'll see throughout the film: the three men- despite being from very different classes, backgrounds, and branches of service- often seem more comfortable with each other than with the families and friends that they've returned to. I'll discuss this further in the second part of this review.