It's a good thing they didn't coddle him, but put him straight into the field, because if he had had the time to consider all he'd lost… it would have driven him mad. It silently irked him that everyone assumed that new was better than old, and somehow his lack of experience with their new-fangled modern technology somehow correlated with a lower IQ. That's like thinking Jesus or Alexander the Great were somehow inferior for never knowing what a slide rule was, he thought of his heroes.
There were so many wonders to keep up with: light bulbs straight out of Flash Gordon, computers that not only fit in the palm of his hand, but also received phone calls as well… Steve just shook his head and kept his mind open for the next crazy thing waiting to be revealed; it was more than enough to fill his daylight hours with so much static and noise that he hardly had time to think. It must be different for those who grew up with these gadgets, but I can't see how they filter out all these distractions.
Nighttime, however, was a different story. They must have thought it a kindness to surround him with images of his bygone era, but all that did was rouse feelings of nostalgia. A newsreel of broken dreams plagued his subconscious, flickering black and white images – he never dreamt in color – that ended in a conflagration extinguished only by tears. Peggy, it's always Peggy's face that brought the whirlwind to an end…
The world had cured Polio and Typhus during his long slumber, but they still couldn't mend a soldier's homesick heart, so he donned the tape again, readying another heavy bag, and tried not to think about loss, only gain, as he worked up a sweat during the long witching hour.