Thank You for Your Service
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- £5.99
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- £5.99
Publisher Description
No journalist is better situated to reckon with the psychology of war than David Finkel. In The Good Soldiers, his bestselling account from the front lines of Baghdad, Finkel shadowed the men of a US infantry battalion as they carried out a gruelling 15-month tour that changed all of them forever. Now, Finkel follows many of those same men back home, in a journey that is less about geography than of psychological terrain, undertaken by people trying to heal or at the very least survive.
In Thank You for Your Service, Finkel writes with tremendous compassion about the soldiers, and about their partners and children: the heartbroken wife who wonders privately whether her returned husband is going to get better, or kill her; and the heroic victims, with the fresh taste of a gun in their mouth, who will either make the journey back to sanity or to final ruin.
Finkel takes us everywhere that the war is seeping into as it infects America: to the courtrooms that are being filled with divorce and abuse cases, and worse; to bars; and to Fort Riley, in the mental-health clinic to which the army is outsourcing its post-traumatic stress disorder cases. Thank You for Your Service is an immense act of understanding — shocking but always riveting, unflinching but deeply humane.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
From April 2007 to April 2008, Finkel, a MacArthur Fellow and Pulitzer Prize winning reporter with the Washington Post, spent a total of eight months embedded in eastern Iraq with the young infantrymen of the 2-16 as their battalion fought desperately to survive and to make Bush's troop surge a success. In 2009's The Good Soldiers (one of Publishers Weekly's Best Books of the Year), he chronicled their harrowing day-to-day experiences as their trust in the Iraqi people eroded, their nerves and comrades were shot, and IED after IED exploded. In this incredibly moving sequel, Finkel reconnects with some of the men of the 2-16 now home on American soil and brings their struggles powerfully to life. These soldiers have names and daughters and bad habits and hopes, and though they have left the war in Iraq, the Iraq War has not left them. Now the battle consists of readjusting to civilian and family life, and bearing the often unbearable weight of their demons. Some have physical injuries, and all suffer from crippling PTSD. And as if navigating their own mental and emotional labyrinths weren't enough of a challenge, they must also make sense of the Dickensian bureaucracy that is the Department of Veterans Affairs. Told in crisp, unsentimental prose and supplemented with excerpts from soldiers' diaries, medical reports, e-mails, and text messages, their stories give new meaning to the costs of service and to giving thanks. Photos.
