I caught a bus from Travis Air Force Base to San Francisco with almost $4,000 in cash in my pocket—a month’s advance pay and allowances, plus what I’d saved in Vietnam. Two days later, after buying a car, a couple of suits, and a modest selection of casual civilian clothes, I left San Francisco in my new 1967 Volkswagen.

I got home a few days before my best friend from high school left for Vietnam. At his farewell party, he said that he had taken my advice and made it known that he could type; he was rewarded with an assignment as company clerk in a rifle company.

My family seemed like strangers. Dad had a new business partner; after decades of struggle, his scrap metal business was beginning to do well. Mom was managing her illness with new and better drugs—when she took them. My pretty little sister had blossomed into a gorgeous young woman. She was about to marry someone she barely knew. She had decided, as I had at her age, that survival meant leaving home.

My little brothers’ fortunes were mixed. Ted’s vision had continued to deteriorate; almost housebound, his connections to the outside world were through ham radio. Matt was doing well in high school and was Stanford-bound on a full scholarship; little Steve was as rambunctious and undisciplined as he was cute.

I tried to relate to them, individually and collectively, but something had changed in me. I felt less connected to each one, less connected to my whole family. I felt that I ought to love them, but I had no idea how to do that.

After a few nights on the living room couch, I climbed into the VW and headed east. I had 45 days of leave en route to Fort Benning, and I was hungry for America.

Driving east, I calmed myself with the vast and variable vistas of the open road. I reacquainted myself with comforts that most Americans take for granted but were small, unimaginable luxuries to a grunt in a war zone. I stopped in little towns and small cities to walk around, take pictures, wash away the stench of Vietnam, and look at the country of my birth with new eyes.

Even cheap motels offered the pleasures of crisp white sheets faintly scented with citrus, fluffy fresh towels, and water that didn’t reek of iodine, household bleach, or Kool-Aid. There was hot water whenever I wanted it, burgers grilled to taste, fresh vegetables, crunchy French fries, and people who looked me in the eye and smiled.

I was home, I was healthy, I was an officer and a gentleman, and a shining future lay ahead for me. I should have been elated—but I was unable to muster much emotion of any sort.

I traveled solo and made no friends. I told no one that I was just back from the war and avoided conversations beyond perfunctory exchanges with waitresses, gas station attendants, and innkeepers. In Vietnam, something interesting, frightening, or memorable happened every day. Now I was struck by the humdrum tediousness of safety. Years later I would see this crystallized on a photo of a scribbled cardboard simply signed by “a Marine”: “To those who have fought for it, life has a flavor the protected never know.”

By the time my Volkswagen’s tires sang their way across the high span over the Verrazano Narrows into Brooklyn, I craved human contact. I needed people to hear my stories, needed to feel that I was again part of society.

Under the bridge’s northern footings lay Fort Hamilton, where a dollar got me a room for the night in the Visiting Officers Quarters. It was my first trip to New York; aside from the newsies I’d met in Vietnam, the only soul I knew in the five boroughs was my cousin Jack. Before I left California, my mother had called her sister Molly to announce that her boy was home safe and heading east; Aunt Molly insisted that if I went to New York, I must call her son Jack.

I fed a dime to a payphone and called the number Aunt Molly provided. Jack’s wife, Carol, answered; I was sure that we’d met but I couldn’t picture her. She sounded annoyed. “Jack’s busy now. If you tell me what this is about, maybe I can help you.”

A brush-off.

My cousin Jack Gelber was in the theatre. I was aware, if only barely, that he had written a sensational, long-running, highly controversial, paradigm-busting play. But I did not realize that The Connection and Jack’s brilliant use of language had helped reinvigorate America’s legitimate theater, nor that he was already considered, with Edward Albee, a founding father of the Off-Off-Broadway theater.

I hadn’t seen him since I was a small child.

“Tell Jack that his cousin Marvin Wolf is visiting New York for the first time and would dearly love to make an appointment to come see him.”

“Marvin! Aunt Cecille’s boy!” she squealed. “Hold on, I’ll find him.”

“The Cub Scout!” yelled Jack when he came on the line. “My God! You made it back alive! Look, I’ve got a house full of people and we’re just about to sit down to dinner. Can you come right away?”

I parked next to Jack’s building in the Upper West Side and was surprised to find a uniformed elevator man guarding the portal. I rode the elevator to Jack’s floor and was greeted by the haunting sound of a masterfully played violin—and it wasn’t a recording. I stood, listening, for a long moment, thinking about this new world I had discovered. When the violin stopped, I knocked on Jack’s door.

A woman in a maid uniform and a serving apron took my coat as Jack went around the room with introductions, but after a few, I gave up trying to remember names. Since we’d spoken, Jack had called his mother, or perhaps mine; I was introduced as “my cousin, a former Cub Scout, just back from Vietnam, where he won a Bronze Star and a battlefield commission.”

Jack parked me between a tall, glamorous blonde woman in her 30s and a shorter, somewhat older man; there was something familiar about his face and unruly coils of salt-and-pepper hair. Suddenly ravenous, I speared a piece of potato with my fork. I opened my mouth, already salivating.

“Battlefield commission, eh?” hissed the curly-haired man, leaning close. “So, you must have bayoneted a few babies then, right?”

I put the fork down.

I wanted to defend not only myself but my comrades. But I was so hurt and angry that all I could do was shake my head. Why would anyone say something like that to me?

“I was a combat correspondent and later the press chief,” I responded.

“Well then, you must have burned down a few villages, right? I mean, they don’t just hand out battlefield commissions!” Curly came out of his chair, assumed a boxer’s stance, cocked his fists, taunting me. “Maybe now you’re ready to fight someone your own size, like a man.”

I jumped to my feet, balling my fists.

For the record, this man, whoever he was, had three or four inches and 40 pounds on me. And if he took a swing at me, I was not going to abide by the Marquess of Queensberry’s rules. Six years earlier I had taught hand-to-hand combat to officers and officer candidates at Fort Benning, Georgia. I was going to step back and dislocate his elbow. Or throw him over the table.

A man stepped between us. Three others seized Curly and then bundled him into an overcoat. They jammed a hat on his head. His companion murmured something apologetic as they were all but pushed out the door.

“Who is that jerk?” I said as the door closed.

“You must forgive him. When he drinks too much, he likes to fight,” said Jack.

“But who is he?”

“We thought you knew! That’s Norman Mailer.”

My God! I thought he looked familiar.

After eating I was asked to explain the war. Bright, worldly people from the arts, publishing, and the theater were friendly, curious, and seemed open-minded. I struggled for answers. What was Vietnam about? Why were we involved in a civil war?

I told them of the Ia Drang campaign, savage battles against the North Vietnamese. I recounted the story, which I now (but didn’t then) know to be of dubious origin, of a pile of little arms chopped off by Viet Cong cadres after American medics inoculated village children against smallpox.

I shared my own experience of a boy who begged for a candy bar from a GI truck driver, sat on a curb to eat it, then flipped a grenade into the truck’s cab. I told them of the three little girls at Camp Radcliff’s main gate who were apprehended by military police for selling bottles of orange soda spiked with battery acid.

I described MedCap and dental missions and the Army surgical team who repaired 30 cleft palates in a single hamlet. And I talked about the election I had witnessed, and the pride that I observed in the Vietnamese voters in Bac Lieu.

But what national purpose was served by sending troops to fight in Vietnam? they asked. Are not the South Vietnamese corrupt and venal, and the North Vietnamese hostile fanatics? How could we help either side? Why were we involved in this at all? Why shed American blood for them?

Such questions had not yet begun to trouble me. It would be years before Lyndon Johnson’s lies and hypocrisy were exposed; I was ignorant of the few reports of official duplicity already published. I went to Vietnam because my democratically elected commander-in-chief had sent me. I had served with the finest men our nation could field. Of that I was proud.

But there was more, and for this, I could find no words: By reenlisting, I had deliberately put myself in line for Vietnam. I wanted to tell these sophisticated men and women, most of them a decade or two my senior, that I went to war in search of myself, under the compulsion of an irrepressible urge to prove my manhood.

I wanted to shout that I came from a long line of orphans, that I never expected to see my 50th birthday, that I hoped to pack as much living into the years that I had before cancer or heart disease or something worse claimed me, as it had so many of my ancestors.

I wanted to tell them that Vietnam would be my generation’s defining event and that I didn’t want to miss it, as my father’s poor hearing had caused him to miss serving in World War II. And that if I somehow survived into old age, I wanted to look back and know that I had served my country well.

Beyond all that, I had sought to better myself, to learn a craft, to find a useful profession. I’d been lucky enough to stand at history’s elbow for a moment as she wove the tapestry by which future generations would come to know this war; perhaps a few of my images and texts might be a tiny thread among the myriads.

And I wanted to tell them that my appointment to the officer ranks was an unplanned bonus, that I still wasn’t sure if I ought to have accepted it. I wanted to say all this, but I could not find the words.

Later, as I drove down unfamiliar city streets, shards of broken window glass crunching beneath my heels as I shifted gears, wind howling through what had been my passenger-seat window and the jimmied glove compartment door that had been plundered, banging at every bump, trying not to focus on the vandal who had broken into my new car and stolen my camera, but to replay and make sense of the fascinating evening behind me.

I realized that only one of Jack’s guests might have understood what I wanted to say. But the only man who might have grasped my feelings, the veteran who might have resonated with my mixed motivations, was Norman Mailer.

This War Horse reflection was edited by Kim Vo, fact-checked by Jess Rohan, and copy-edited by Mitchell Hansen-Dewar. Hrisanthi Pickett wrote the headlines.