How many ‘walking wounded’—veterans knocked down by post-traumatic stress disorder (mental breakdowns from horrifying events) or TBI (traumatic brain injury)—are there around the country? A half million, more or less, counting the daily drip of suicides and new walk-ins … Embedded with the veterans, their families, their friends, and their counselors, Finkel lights up the lives of these struggling souls, who often compound their real problems by convincing themselves they're ‘weak’ for ‘abandoning’ their buddies and seeking treatment … If Finkel weren't such a vivid, compelling, heartrending writer, you'd never get through his agonizing weave of battles, from the bomb-strewn highways of Iraq to the psycho clinics of VA hospitals and many ruined homes in between. The grim litany of stories collected here brings to mind nothing so much as The Best Years of Our Lives on methamphetamines—with Dana Andrews putting a shotgun to his head in the B-17 scrapyard instead of landing a job. Some endings are happy, more or less, but most not.
Finkel absents himself from the narrative, immersing the reader in the quotidian life of soldiers and their families. Thank You for Your Service is elegantly reported, free of the entanglements of crusading self-aggrandizement on the one hand and, on the other, an overidentification with its subjects. Finkel refuses to pathologize soldiers, even as he concentrates on the 20 to 30 percent who have been psychologically damaged to some degree by their service in Iraq or Afghanistan … This is not — nor should it be — an easy book. But it is an essential one. Finkel refuses to gild the misery and ugliness of the last decade and the unpoetic aftermath of war with the kind of sentimentality that has so often clouded our thinking, not only about our military commitments but also about the veterans they produce.
Finkel, a reporter with The Washington Post, attends to what he calls the ‘after war.’ His concern is with the soldiers who return from the war zone bearing wounds — and with the loved ones on whom those wounds also become imprinted. Above all, he is concerned with wounds that may not be fully visible: the post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), traumatic brain injury and related conditions that affect roughly a half-million younger veterans. Make that a half-million and counting...To judge from Finkel’s description, the assistance rendered has been erratic, bureaucratic and ineffective, with soldiers not so much treated as processed … The hackneyed phrase providing the title for Finkel’s fine book exquisitely captures the hypocrisy pervading that relationship. The travails of those whose suffering he recounts give us a glimpse of the costs incurred and of who pays them.
Finkel...subordinated everything to his subjects, to what they experienced and saw. Michael Emory is shot in the head on the roof of a building. James Harrelson burns to death in a Humvee after it is blown up by an IED. Even more harrowing than the violence is its aftermath, first as comrades and medics try to save the injured, then as the CO visits survivors in hospital back in the US … How to convey the inner workings of ravaged minds? By moving, almost inevitably, towards the novelistic...The movement into metaphor here is anchored firmly in the sequence of actions.
This is a heartbreaking book powered by the candor with which these veterans and their families have told their stories, the intimate access they have given Mr. Finkel into their daily lives, and their own eloquence in speaking about their experiences. The book leaves the reader wondering why the Veterans Affairs Department cannot provide better, more accessible care for wounded warriors. And why soldiers suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder — which Mr. Finkel says studies show afflicts 20 to 30 percent of the two million Americans who have served in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan — must often wade through so much paperwork and bureaucracy to obtain meaningful treatment … The stories of the soldiers and their families portrayed in Thank You for Your Service possess a visceral and deeply affecting power on their own that will haunt readers long after they have finished this book.
Finkel sketches a panoramic view of postwar life, which includes not just soldiers … He bears witness, seemingly never sugarcoating or judging either the horrors these soldiers are subjected to by ghosts and guilt, or the ones they themselves inflict upon their loved ones. It is a book that every American should read to understand why our easily offered expressions of gratitude — as suggested by the book's title — are insufficient. Whatever one thinks about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, we as a society in no small way caused this pain and inflicted these scars. Trying to understand is the very least we can do.
...a stunning, moving, subdued masterpiece of a book … It’s a good thing Finkel is so compelling since he deals with subjects that are complex and grim … Thank You for Your Service takes us to a numbing roundtable where four-star generals scrutinize this month’s military suicides, which occur at a rate nearing one per day. It shows a war widow on the day she finally moves out of the house she’d shared with her husband. It describes the routine one forgetful soldier must follow simply to make it to work.
With an exceptional ear for anecdotes and obvious skill at getting people to open up, Finkel profiles men who put their fists through doors or upend furniture, who hit their wives or scream at them or ignore them, men returned from war who drink too much, pop pills and put shotguns to their heads … On the surface, Finkel tells a largely conventional, sentimental story of those we've come to know as ‘wounded warriors,’ but thanks to a subtext running through the book, it would be difficult for a reader not to take a hard look at these men who are, without question, angry and hurting and damaged … Thank You for Your Service will be justly hailed as an essential book for understanding all that came after for the soldiers who occupied Iraq. It's an important chronicle of American veterans in an age of perpetual war.
Finkel chronicles what he calls the ‘after-war,’ taking us along as soldiers from the same battalion struggle to find peace at home. They struggle with depression and anxiety and nightmares. They struggle with post-traumatic stress disorder and traumatic brain injury, better known as PTSD and TBI. They struggle to reconnect with their families and their previous selves. And in an after-war as dangerous as this, with suicides outpacing combat deaths, they struggle to stay alive … Finkel’s book is, in every sense, exceptional — exceptional for its commitment, its compassion and its execution. It is public service, a book built on extraordinary access, with reporting so relentless and writing so fine and spare that our understanding of war’s enduring cost is forever changed.
It is a better book than its predecessor, a harder book. Reading it is an act of endurance. Its violence does not have the frisson of embedded war reporting, whose events have a beginning and an end, and which tends to redeem the terrible acts of the band of brothers while placing the terrible acts of their enemy beyond explanation. Violence here...is embedded in the soldier’s being, an emotional EFP, waiting, exploding anywhere and in every direction, again and again and again … The book and everyone in it are silent on the politics of the war, and how it inflects the after-war. That, too, is a political decision. But then, as lived by Finkel and the soldiers to whom he entrusted himself for eight months, the war was felt to be outside politics, with no logic or argument, only fear and heartbreak and the effort to survive.
Finkel offers a painfully intimate account of what he calls the ‘after war’ for a few of that battalion's survivors [chronicled in The Good Soldiers]. It's not an easy book to read, even if the writing is spare and unadorned. It's filled with details about endless nightmares and suicidal thoughts, anxiety and depression, guilt and shame … It's not an overtly political book. It's more about people than policies. But, by Finkel's account, the military's response to the growing number of suicides and mental-health problems is mostly bureaucratic and ineffective.
In Thank You for Your Service, Finkel follows some of those soldiers home. As harrowing and heartbreaking as the [The Good Soldiers] was, the second may be more so, because it focuses on those for whom the war doesn't end with homecoming — and that is a very large number of soldiers … Rather than focusing on the numbers or the politics they are entwined with, Finkel tells the stories of the soldiers themselves and the families they come home to (or don't). His reporting is astonishingly intimate yet utterly respectful, taking us inside the hearts and minds of these men and their families.
Shame is in the bloodstream of Adam Schumann, whose story Finkel tells us in greatest detail. Schumann fought to save his fellow soldiers, failed and succumbed to the trauma of combat stress. He was sent home while his buddies went on fighting and dying. For Schumann, ‘it is still the day he headed home’ … Finkel’s writing is as haunting as his subject. His descriptions are taut and incisive…But what moved this reader most was Finkel’s use of his subjects’ voices to narrate.
Where The Good Soldiers provides a snapshot of a period of U.S. involvement in Iraq that will stand the test of time, his new work, Thank You for Your Service, is a disturbing template for what this country can expect to experience from the people we sent to war who came home different: post-traumatic stress, depression, suicide, domestic abuse, drug and alcohol problems … It's a testament to Finkel's considerable journalistic skills that this is no sentimental or clichéd work. His vivid descriptions of the minutiae of everyday life provide a fly-on-the-wall observation without judgment. The struggles of the modern soldier that many us have heard about (and some of us have written about) are painted more vividly and intimately than we've experienced before.
...one of the most morally responsible works of journalism to emerge from the post-9/11 era … In a series of interconnected stories, Finkel follows a handful of soldiers and their spouses through the painful, sometimes-fatal process of reintegration into American society. The author gives a cleareyed, frightening portrayal of precisely what it is like to suffer with post-traumatic stress disorder or traumatic brain injury and what it is like to have the specter of suicide whispering into your ear every day … The truly astonishing aspect of Finkel’s work is that he remains completely absent from his reportage; he is still embedded.
