I was thinking about the kid, the one who posted about his high school friends drifting apart, and it just… hit me, like a mortar blast to the chest, all that old grief I thought I'd compartmentalized. Seventy-six years old, you'd think I'd be immune to this kind of melancholy, but no, it's insidious, a slow bleed. He's twenty-two, just starting out, and he's already experiencing the attrition, the dispersion, the way people just… evaporate. I remember when I shipped out, 1968, most of us were fresh out of high school, still had that naive expectation of forever. We wrote letters, at first, thick envelopes full of news from home, news from the front. But the replies got thinner, slower. The girls moved on, found someone who wasn't half a world away and covered in jungle rot. The guys who didn't go, they had their own lives, their own routines that didn't involve waiting for a weekly casualty report. It wasn't malice, just… divergent trajectories, you know? It’s a different kind of trauma, civilian life after active duty, a sort of social amputation. You come back, and the world has kept spinning without you. Your old gang, they’re still there, physically, but the shared context is gone. They talk about their jobs, their new girlfriends, their plans for the weekend, and you’re just… listening. You’ve seen things, done things, that they can’t even imagine, and you learn quickly not to talk about it, not to inflict your reality on their comfortable little bubbles. So you withdraw, not out of resentment, but out of a kind of protective instinct, a fear of causing distress, a recognition that you're just not compatible anymore. It's a profound anhedonia, really, this inability to connect on the same wavelength. He’ll learn, that kid. He’ll learn that some connections are ephemeral, a kind of developmental necessity for a specific stage. And others, the ones forged in fire, those linger, but they don't necessarily fit into the tidy little narratives of civilian existence. It's a persistent low-grade dysphoria, this inability to truly belong again. And I don’t know if it ever truly goes away, this feeling of being an outlier, an anomaly. You just get better at carrying it, at camouflaging it, like a well-worn uniform.