The war made everything hard. It hadn't been like the other battles and scuffs and wars that had made up his people's history. This was supposed to have been the war to end all wars. It was supposed to finish itself off with the destruction of the planet and all of the people in it. (They certainly had the weapons to do so.) But instead, it just made everything worse.
No, Snake was wrong. It wasn't the war that had made life difficult. It had been coming home from the war that changed everything. He would have been better off if the fighting had never ceased.
"Doesn't matter which war you fight in. They're all the same."
Snake listened to her explanation of The City with gritted teeth. The word prison came to mind before she even spoke it. And that made him angry. Angry because he'd just spent his entire life escaping walled containment centers, only to find himself trapped in the biggest one of them all. And what was worse? The City was pretending not to be a prison, when it so obviously was.