Thank You For Your Service - Hardcover

Finkel, David

4.13

6,831 ratings by Goodreads

9780385680967: Thank You For Your Service

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0385680961 ISBN 13: 9780385680967

Publisher: Bond Street Books, 2013

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With a foreword by Rom�o Dallaire and an introduction by Carol Off.

No journalist has reckoned with the psychology of war as intimately as David Finkel. In The Good Soldiers, Finkel shadowed the men of the US 2-16 Infantry Battalion in Baghdad as they carried out the grueling fifteen-month "surge" that changed them all forever. Now Finkel has followed many of the same men as they've returned home and struggled to reintegrate - both into their family lives and into society at large.

In the ironically titled 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 reasonable, or even possible, to expect them to rejoin their communities as if nothing has happened? And in moments of hardship, who can soldiers 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 realities of war.

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Review:

An Amazon Best Book of the Month, October 2013: How do you make war personal? It’s not easy, especially when writing about a war that the public has basically given up on (or was never that interested in to begin with). Descriptions of violence that most of us will never see can lose their potency and trail off toward the abstract; it happens in even the best novels and nonfiction. But what David Finkel has done is to follow the troops home from Iraq to cover their “after-war.” Their struggles and suffering back in the States are easier for us to relate to, and Thank You For Your Service is an absolutely mesmerizing account of the pain and hope that they carry from day-to-day. This is an important book, and there are great truths inside, none more powerful than when Finkel writes: “while the truth of war is that it’s always about loving the guy next to you, the truth of the after-war is that you’re on your own.” --Chris Schluep

About the Author:

DAVID FINKEL is a staff writer for The Washington Post and the leader of the Post's national reporting team. In 2012 he received a MacArthur Fellowship for his journalism, and in 2006 he won the Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting for a series of stories about American-funded efforts to promote democracy in Yemen. Finkel lives in Silver Spring, Maryland, with his wife and two daughters. The author lives in Silver Spring, Maryland.

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