Johnny Got His Gun

I read this book Johnny Got His Gun by Dalton Trumbo this past summer, and I always recall this paragraph about the main character's memory of home in Shale City, IL with his friends.

In the summer they went out to the big ditch north of town and stripped off their clothes and lay around on its banks and talked. The water would be warm from the summer air and heat would be rising off the brown-gray land like steam. They would swim for a little while then they would go back on the bank and sit around all naked and tan and talk. They would talk about bicycles and girls and dogs and guns. They would talk about camping trips and rabbit hunting and girls and fishing. They would talk about the hunting knives they all wanted but only Glen Hogan had. They would talk about girls.