Why is "Home Soil" by Irene Zabytko so complicated for such a short story?

The complexity of the story is indicated by the tears of
the narrator’s son, Bohdan. The two, father and son, have obviously had parallel
experiences with wartime atrocities, although we do not learn the precise nature of what
Bohdan has been through.

In light of the story’s
first-person point of view, we cannot learn what Bohdan has done because Bohdan does not
speak to the narrator about his experiences. The parallel is made complete in paragraph
30, when the narrator observes that Bohdan may never tell him what happened in Vietnam.
The narrator then confesses, “I never told anyone
either.”

Some ideas that underlie this commonness of
wartime experience are that fighting is never over, that people are called upon in
warfare to engage in hostilities that produce death, that they can never forget that
they have caused death even though they may find excuses for their actions, and that
people and governments never learn from past experience to avoid the future guilt that
state warfare creates in its citizens who participate in such
warfare.