*The following short story "Soldier's Home," written by Ernest Hemingway and initially published in 1925, falls within the public domain in the United States. Ignoring our own usual standards, we have refrained from abridging or altering this work. It stands independently as a reflective narrative on the experiences of young men navigating life's transitions. The protagonist, Harold Krebs is a young man from Oklahoma who is drafted during World War I to fight in Germany while in college. Upon his return home, he grapples with a sense of aimlessness, disconnection, and a wavering desire to reintegrate into society. He finds himself disillusioned with the consequences of existence and struggles to find understanding listeners for his own experiences. Despite being addressed as Harold by his mother, the narrative hints at his preference for the name Krebs, indicating a gradual erosion of his sense of self and belonging to family. *Post Script: During World War I, Ernest Hemingway volunteered to serve in Italy as an ambulance driver for the American Red Cross. In June 1918, while he was distributing chocolate and cigarettes to soldiers from a mobile canteen, he was wounded by Austrian mortar fire. "Then there was a flash, as when a blast-furnace door is swung open, and a roar that started white and went red," he recounted in a letter home. Despite sustaining injuries, Hemingway managed to evacuate a wounded Italian soldier to safety but was hit again by machine-gun fire. In recognition of his bravery, he was awarded the Silver Medal of Valor by the Italian government, becoming one of the first Americans to receive this honor. Reflecting on this experience years later in his work "Men at War," Hemingway observed: "When you go to war as a boy you have a great illusion of immortality. Other people get killed; not you. . . . Then when you are badly wounded the first time you lose that illusion and you know it can happen to you. After being severely wounded two weeks before my nineteenth birthday I had a bad time until I figured out that nothing could happen to me that had not happened to all men before me. Whatever I had to do men had always done. If they had done it then I could do it too and the best thing was not to worry about it."