THANK YOU FOR YOUR SERVICE

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Nonfiction

Embrace their return

THANK YOU FOR YOUR SERVICE
By David Finkel
256 pp. Picador

Reviewed by Lynne M. Hinkey

David Finkel spent fifteen months on the frontlines in Baghdad with Second Battalion, 16th Infantry Regiment during the surge of 2007-2008. He documented that experience in his 2009 The Good Soldiers. In this more recent Thank You for Your Service (2014), he revisits a handful of these men, now returned home, as they deal with the experiences and the injuries, some visible some not, that still plague them from those deployments. 

Because of the continued stigma and reticence to seek help, the number of soldiers returned with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), traumatic brain injury (TBI), and suicidal depression will probably never be known. Estimates are that 20 to 30 percent have been psychologically damaged to some degree by their service in Iraq and Afghanistan. But, “[m]ost are O.K., and others are not.” 

This book gives faces and names to those others who are not. With compassion and candor, Finkel shows us the challenges these soldiers and their families – wives, widows, and children – face as they try to readjust to life at home, where few of the people they interact with can relate to their experiences. “It is such a lonely life, this life afterward,” we read of Adam Schuman’s life in Kansas. “During the war, it wasn’t that way, even in the loneliest moments, when somewhere in the big night sky was a mortar that was on its way down and there was nothing to do but wait for it...” But then he “fell apart alone and flew away alone and came home alone, and even with Saskia and Zoe and Jax [his wife and children], he has felt alone at times ever since.”

As I read, I was in awe of the courage of the families who bared their deep and painful wounds to the world, sharing the most intimate details of their lives and their struggles with the author. Can any of us who haven’t been in a war zone begin to imagine what it’s like? To be in an explosion, see friends injured or killed, watch them burn in front of our eyes, all the while knowing you have to do it again the next day, and the day after that. This small glimpse we get into that world is emotionally draining. Imagine living it. These soldiers and their families do – every day. And every day, they hope that it might be infinitesimally better than the day before. Imagine living that. Every single day. 

Not all returning soldiers have PTSD, they don’t all have anger-issues, and they aren’t all suicidal. But everyone who has served during wartime knows someone whose own story is reflected in these stories. Through them, we get a raw and honest look at the effects of war on the soldiers who fight them. The graphic details of these men’s experiences will shock some readers and the ineffectiveness of the channels available to help them will leave readers angry, but this isn’t intended as some political statement about war. It’s not an antiwar book. It’s a pro-warrior one. To support these soldiers, we need to know something of what they’ve been through and continue to go through in the aftermath. If we are really going to rally behind the troops, it can’t only be to cheer their departure to fight in wars. We must also embrace the responsibility of rallying to help them after their return. 

Thank You for Your Service isn’t a fun read. It’s not an easy read. But it is an important read. And it should be required reading. 

It should be required reading for anyone who knows someone in the military, to help better understand even a bit of what a deployment its after effects might be like. It should be required reading for those who provide services and care to vets and their families. It should be required reading for anyone who would lower taxes by cutting veterans’ benefits, services, and programs. Mostly, it should be required reading for every member of Congress, every incoming President, and anyone who has the power to send young men and women far away to fight in wars. Really, it should be required reading for all of us.


BIO


Lynne Hinkey uses experiences from her years living in the Caribbean to infuse her novels with a bit of tropical magic, from the siren call of the islands, to the terror and hysteria caused by the mysterious chupacabra. Visit Lynne at www.lynnehinkey.com 
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