What he missed — the only thing, really — were the soldiers: Dodd, Vance, Pinchock, Craighead and all the others, the men he fought for and fought with. Eighty or so men in total. That was his war. The incentives and consequences; the love and loss. They were all of it, right there.

Now one was looking for work in Wisconsin, one had killed himself, and several had returned to Afghanistan to get back into the fight. Most of them wanted to be back there, in their own ways. Like so many vets, they missed the camaraderie. And as with so many vets, their lives at home were defined less by togetherness than by isolation, which took on many forms. Dodd was in Kansas City making aerospace bolts and smoking weed on his breaks to stave off the stress of “dumb-ass civilian questions.” Simpson was working the phones at a call center for the Department of Veterans Affairs, talking to vets who wanted counseling or benefits or sometimes nothing at all, other than to talk with another combat veteran.

And Winters was living with a new wife in a new town, Rock Springs, population 23,000 strangers, only because a relative had offered a good deal on a used trailer and there was no place better to go. He had grown up on the other side of the state. His nearest friend lived two counties east; his closest fellow soldier was 300 miles away in Denver. Only a few relatives had visited their trailer and only then on Thanksgiving. It was at the edge of a small trailer park in the desolate expanse of southwestern Wyoming, where the wind whipped down from the mountains, carried over the high desert, and invaded the trailer despite the towels they stuffed under the doors. People had always come to Rock Springs to start over and to search for something: gold, coal, oil or natural gas. It was a boom-and-bust town, a place of reinvention, and now Winters had come searching, too.

Maybe he would find it at an oil rig, where he signed up for a three-week hitch hoping for camaraderie, a shared purpose and some practical jokes. But this time, the joke turned out to be his PTSD, and co-workers banged pipes at night to startle him.

Maybe at the community college, where he enrolled and then dropped out a few weeks later, after a professor who had never cleaned blood off a Humvee interrupted him during a discussion about war to correct his grammar.

Maybe at a motorcycle memorial club, where the membership code promised “honor, brotherhood and tributes to fallen riders” but where membership itself consisted of $1,000 bar tabs with people who had done nothing much worth honoring.

So instead, Winters spent most of his time inside the trailer, either with his wife or alone, lifeless in front of the television. Cartoons before work. Hunting shows in the afternoon. Network comedy in the evening. And then back online at night, when he could log onto Facebook and connect again with the men from his platoon. Even though he hadn’t seen any of them for two years, their presence on his computer screen offered the closest thing he had to a community.