I was at my grandson’s house last weekend, one of those big family things, you know? Everyone’s there, all the kids, the grandkids, even some of the great-grandkids now, which just feels... surreal. I mean, I’m 76, my memory isn't what it used to be but some things are still crystal clear, clearer than anything else, like the smell of the dust in Vietnam, that smell sticks to you, in your clothes, in your hair, in your soul, and I was just sitting there, watching them all, these beautiful young people, so full of… potential, I guess, that’s the word. And I had this thought, this almost overwhelming urge to just… say something. To share a piece of it, you know? A piece of what I’ve seen, what I’ve learned, the actual, tangible cost of some choices, the sheer weight of some decisions. Because I’ve lived through things they can’t even imagine, things that would snap them in half, I swear, just the memory of it, the constant vigilance, the way your body learns to prepare for the worst, always, even now, even after all these years of quiet civilian life, it never fully lets go. It's like a phantom limb, that feeling of imminent threat. So I tried. I actually opened my mouth, cleared my throat, and started to say something about… I don't even remember the exact thing now, something about the importance of discernment, maybe, or the futility of certain conflicts, something that felt profound to me, hard-won wisdom, earned through blood and sweat and unspeakable horror. And not one single person looked up. NOT ONE. Their heads were all bent over their phones, those little glowing rectangles, their thumbs flying across the screens, completely absorbed. It was like I wasn't even there. Like I was a ghost already, just a whisper in the room that no one could hear. And it wasn’t anger, not really, more like… a profound sense of isolation. Of being irrelevant. All that living, all that witnessing, all that surviving, and it just… evaporates. It just doesn’t matter. It’s not data they need, not information they can scroll through or ‘like’. Does everyone feel this? This obsolescence? Or is it just because of… everything? The war, the things I saw, the way it makes you see the world so differently, so starkly? I tried to tell my therapist once, back in the 80s, about the anhedonia, the emotional numbing, the way you just… disconnect. He just wrote it all down, very neat, very clinical. Adjustment disorder. Dissociative tendencies. But it’s more than that, isn’t it? It’s a fundamental alteration, a change in the very fabric of who you are, and when you try to bridge that gap, try to transmit that truth, and no one even notices you, it just… it just makes you wonder what the point was. What was the point of any of it, if it just fades into the background noise, drowned out by the constant chirping of their little machines? It feels like a kind of… erasure. A second death, in a way. And I just sat there, for the rest of the afternoon, watching them, silent, invisible, full of all these heavy, forgotten things.