Someday this war’s gonna end. That’d be just fine with the boys on the boat. They weren’t looking for anything more than a way home. Trouble is, I’d been back there, and I knew that it just didn’t exist anymore.

The men on the boat look toward the war’s end as a route home. The speaker knows that return is more complicated, having found that home no longer exists in the same way. The contrast makes peace seem unable, by itself, to restore what has been lost.

Context reviewed 29 September 2026