Military Review English Edition March-April 2014 | Page 90

BOOK REVIEWS

THANK YOU FOR YOUR SERVICE
David Finkel, Sarah Crichton Books
Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, New York, 2013
256 pages, $26.00

I

F DAVID FINKEL’S goal is to break readers’
hearts with Thank You for Your Service, he
succeeds.
In precise, lean prose, the Pulitzer Prize-winning
Washington Post reporter unflinchingly tells the
interwoven stories of the soldiers of Fort Riley’s
2-16th Infantry Battalion as they fight to survive
the “after-war” upon returning from an Iraq deployment that saw all 800, in Finkel’s words, “come
home broken in various degrees, even the ones
who are fine.”
The book unspools like coiled razor wire, stark
words interspersed with haunting black-and-white
photos purposely made plain to allow the soldiers’
lives’ vivid hemorrhaging to stand in sharp contrast.
Twenty-eight-year-old Sgt. Adam Schumann is
a case in point, plagued by flashbacks, nightmares,
and unshakable guilt as he relives his lasting trauma
moment by moment, second by second. “Emory,
shot in the head, is still draped across his back,”
Finkel writes of Schumann’s tortured memories
of comrades hit by enemy attacks, “and the blood
flowing out of Emory’s head is still rivering into
his mouth. Doster, whom he might have loved
the most, is being shredded again and again by a
roadside bomb on a mission Adam was supposed
to have been on, too, and after Doster is declared
dead, another soldier is saying to him, ‘None of
this . . . would have happened if you were there.’”
Post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and
traumatic brain injury (TBI) may be reduced to
acronyms in the press and medical journals, but
they rule the after-war world of the soldiers Finkel
follows in his fly-on-the-wall narrative.
These are the same young warriors he embedded
with and chronicled in a previous best-seller, The
Good Soldiers. Now he watches from his invisible
vantage point as their lives disintegrate on the home
front—as they beat their wives, kill themselves, terrorize their children, and despair over ever returning
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to normalcy. The collateral-damage suffering of
their parents, spouses, and children proves that
PTSB and TBI are not just conditions, but they are
communicable diseases infecting whole families
and American society for generations to come.
Whether or not they are curable diseases remains
to be seen.
Each soldier is on a mission to find relief from
these invisible war wounds and forgiveness for
the men they have become, a quest in which they
literally endure insults added to injuries. They
face insufferable irony inflicted by an intractable
bureaucracy and incredible insensitivity from an
American public so disengaged during the Iraq
and Afghanistan wars but now suddenly so eager
to blather “thank you for your service” without
understanding what it means.
One GI, his TBI-rattled brain incapable of retaining names or remembering where he parks his car,
is nevertheless forced on an arduous paper chase
through a convoluted in-processing system to gather
39 signatures just to join the Warrior Transition
Battalion, the unit formed to treat people like him.
Another, fresh from a suicide attempt during which
his wife wrested a shotgun from his hands, is sent
by treatment counselors on a therapeutic “Healing Heroes” hunting trip, where well-meaning but
clueless civilian organizers, uttering the ubiquitous
“thank you for your service,” give each participant
a shiny new shotgun.
Finkel traces the soldiers, both discharged and
active duty, as they navigate the labyrinthine systems
set up to help them. His reporting deftly reveals
a stressed military culture—staggering under the
weight of its own inflexibility and struggling to make
sense of “lessons learned” from record numbers of
suicides and something as untidy as PTSD, juxtaposed with the need for military order.
The author singles out now-retired Gen. Peter
Chiarelli, former U.S. Army vice chief of staff, for
his relentless quest to enlighten the services’ leadership on the need to ramp up suicide prevention efforts
and de-stigmatize war-induced mental illness, even
as the general feared that this dismal tidal wave had
not yet crested.
These themes and messages are subtly delivered
through the real-life, up-close-and-personal suffering
of soldiers and their families, ]ۘ