I've just read some reviews and it interests me, I may buy it instead of waiting for it to show up at the library.

I'm interested in the pure experience of being in an isolated group at the front line.  All boredom and adrenaline hits.
Is the pure experience the one you experience the first time you are fully engaged in life and death, here and now struggle?
What does it become after that?

After you have experienced such an expansion and contraction of consciousness over a prolonged period of time how do you return to mundane realities and a life of quiet desperation?
In 'The Hurt Locker' we see the returned veteran staring down a supermarket aisle of breakfast cereals:  Froot Loops vs Count Chocula.

Some can do it and some can't. 

Is it a Victor Frankel transformation that needs to be done?  Do you need an inner well of integrity and hope?

Is the mundane life the one that takes the greater courage...fighting your own inertia and needing to find meaning in a quiet life of accounting and child-rearing?

Do we need a fire fight to know we're really alive?