Thank You for Your Service Author: | Language: English | ISBN:
B00EVQ77W8 | Format: EPUB
Thank You for Your Service Description
Audie Award Finalist, Non-Fiction, 2013
From a MacArthur Fellow and the author of The Good Soldiers, a profound look at life after war
No journalist has reckoned with the psychology of war as intimately as David Finkel. In The Good Soldiers, his bestselling account from the front lines of Baghdad, Finkel shadowed the men of the 2-16 Infantry Battalion as they carried out the infamous surge, a grueling fifteen-month tour that changed all of them forever. Now Finkel has followed many of those same men as they've returned home and struggled to reintegrate - both into their family lives and into American society at large.
In the ironically named Thank You for Your Service, Finkel writes with tremendous compassion not just about the soldiers but about their wives and children. Where do soldiers belong after their homecoming? Is it possible, or even reasonable, to expect them to rejoin their communities as if nothing has happened? And in moments of hardship, who are soldiers expected to turn to if they feel alienated by the world they once lived in? These are the questions Finkel faces as he revisits the brave but shaken men of the 2-16.
More than a work of journalism, Thank You for Your Service is an act of understanding - shocking but always riveting, unflinching but deeply humane, it takes us inside the heads of those who must live the rest of their lives with the chilling realities of war.
- Audible Audio Edition
- Listening Length: 7 hours and 51 minutes
- Program Type: Audiobook
- Version: Unabridged
- Publisher: Macmillan Audio
- Audible.com Release Date: October 1, 2013
- Whispersync for Voice: Ready
- Language: English
- ASIN: B00EVQ77W8
Commenting on this book should start with the elegiac cover image of nameless soldiers packed into a transport plane - small, faceless and an honest visual portrayal. That's what soldiers looked like, going overseas or coming home: tired and small and grinding out another day. As this easily five-star book explains, that grind continues long after the plane ride ends.
In interviews, author David Finkel has made clear he did not use the title ironically - as he said, when one says 'thank you' this book describes what those words are thanking a soldier or their families for.
This book follows soldiers and family members first chronicled in Finkel's The Good Soldiers, which told the story of an Iraq deployment in 2007-8. The years since have given Finkel the time and space to tell a post-war story with honest perspective.
Finkel scrupulously avoids the first-person narration so self-indulgently common in many wartime stories and memoirs. He does not pass judgement, or editorialize. He witnesses and chronicles events and conversations, but only rarely can a reader say with confidence what Finkel actually thought. That's a compliment - the narrative becomes the subject's story, whether it's Sgt. Adam Schumann, dealing with crippling PTSD, or Amanda Doster, who lost her husband, or others. With this objective focus, I rarely felt manipulated or emotionally distracted by a writer's demand that I feel something - the descriptions do that without needing any artificial help.
"Thank You For Your Service" by David Finkel is an intimate story that tells story about the former soldiers and severity of their integration back into society.
Somehow this is a sequel to his previously published work "The Good Soldiers" where author introduced us the soldiers of one Infantry Battalion that left for Iraq.
Their return is described in this book and reader can realize how changed they become due to their experience not matter how short it was, someone malicious could say.
These are people who have wounds that are invisible on first sight, they don't lack any of the limbs or are disabled in common sense, that would have probably helped them to be seen as victims. Instead they have PTSD and TMI, problems that are still a mysterious to most people and often misused, thereby often belittle.
We see how is difficult for them to continue living their normal lives, with their families but also on general level how difficult their society reintegration is.
The title of the book is made in somehow ironic way because this is a sentence they've been hearing lot of times since they came back but anyone besides themselves and their families know and can't understand how difficult is to be back, how strange it feels to start living again normal life after all the shocking events they've been through.
The author writes without any hesitation, his stories are powerful while he portrays former soldiers as broken men together with their families that became broken due to their war experience.
Thank You for Your Service Preview
Link
Please Wait...