Standing Down

Standing Down: From Warrior to Civilian was created for Talking Service, the Great Books Foundation’s initiative to develop reading and discussion programs for veterans, as well as their families and friends.
Standing Down includes:


Forty-four selections, from Homer's Iliad to personal accounts of members of the service who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan. 


Fiction, nonfiction, poetry, essays, and memoirs that speak to past experiences, concerns, and aspirations of those who have served in the military and made the often difficult transition back into civilian life


Table of Contents


Iliad*
Homer 



The Melian Dialogue
Thucydides



Henry VI, Part I*
William Shakespeare



Letters
New York Legislature/George Washington



On Discipline In Democratic Armies
Alexis de Toqueville



Gettysburg Address
Abraham Lincoln



The Charge of the Light Brigade
Alfred, Lord Tennyson



On Caregiving
Walt Whitman



War and Peace*
Leo Tolstoy



The Moral Equivalent of War
Williams James



Why War?
Sigmund Freud



An Irish Airman Foresees His Death
William Butler Yeats



The Veteran
Stephen Crane



Italian Ordeal Surprises Congress
Anne O’Hare McCormick



Poems
Wilfred Owen



To a Conscript of 1940
Herbert Read



Soldier’s Home
Ernest Hemingway



Reporting the War in Tunisia
Ernie Pyle



Guests of the Nation
Frank O’Connor



A Negro Looks at This War
J. Saunders Redding



These Terrible Records of War
James Agee



Tarawa: The Story of a Battle*
Robert Sherrod



The Price We Pay In Italy
Eric Sevareid



Revisiting My Memoir
Edward W. Wood Jr.



Village
Estela Portillo Tremblay



It Is Dangerous to Read Newspapers
Margaret Atwood



A Rumor of War*
Philip Caputo



What It Is Like to Go to War*
Karl Marlantes



In Pharaoh’s Army*
Tobias Wolff



The Things They Carried*
Tim O’Brien



Facing It
Yusef Komunyakaa



A Piece of My Heart*
Anne Simon Auger as told to Keith Walker



A Journey Taken with My Son
Myrna Bein



Reclamation
John Berens



The Good Soldiers*
David Finkel



The Boy Without a Flag
Abraham Rodriguez Jr.



Perimeter Watch
Brian Turner



Dust to Dust*
Benjamin Busch



Medevac Missions
Ed Hrivnak



You Know When the Men Are Gone*
Siobhan Fallon*



Veterans
Brian Humphreys



The Hardest Letter to Write
Parker Gyokeres



Shallow Hands
Michael Poggi



To the Fallen
John McCary



*Indicates a selection from a longer work.