"Dispatches," by Michael Herr

"Of course coming back was a down. After something like that, what could you find to thrill you, what compared, what could you do for a finish? Everything seemed a little dull, heaviness threatened everywhere, you left little relics lying around to keep you in touch, to keep it real, you played the music that had been with you through Hue and Khe Sanh and the May Offensive, tried to believe that the freedom and simplicity of those days could be maintained in what you laughingly referred to as 'normal circumstances.' You read the papers and watched television, but you knew what those stories were really all about beforehand, and they just made you angry. You missed the scene, missed the grunts and the excitement, the feelings you'd had in a place where no drama had to be invented, ever ... You wondered whether, in time, it would all slip away and become like everything else distant, but you doubted it, and for good reason."