Thank You For Your Service (The Cost of War) - Hardcover

Finkel, David

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1922247081 ISBN 13: 9781922247087

Publisher: Scribe UK, 2013

Synopsis

No journalist is better situated to reckon with the psychology of war than David Finkel. In The Good Soldiers, his bestselling account from the front lines of Baghdad, Finkel shadowed the men of a US infantry battalion as they carried out a gruelling 15-month tour that changed all of them forever. Now, Finkel follows many of those same men back home, in a journey that is less about geography than of psychological terrain, undertaken by people trying to heal or at the very least survive. In Thank You for Your Service, Finkel writes with tremendous compassion about the soldiers, and about their partners and children: the heartbroken wife who wonders privately whether her returned husband is going to get better, or kill her; and the heroic victims, with the fresh taste of a gun in their mouths, who will either make the journey back to sanity or to final ruin. Finkel takes us everywhere that the war is seeping into as it infects America: to the courtrooms that are being filled with divorce and abuse cases, and worse; to bars; and to Fort Riley, in the mental-health clinic to which the army is outsourcing its post-traumatic stress disorder cases. Thank You for Your Service is an immense act of understanding - shocking but always riveting, unflinching but deeply humane.

About this title

Review:

In this incredibly moving sequel, Finkel reconnects with some of the men of the 2-16 now home on American soil and brings their struggles powerfully to life . . . Told in crisp, unsentimental prose and supplemented with excerpts from soldiers diaries, medical reports, e-mails, and text messages, their stories give new meaning to the costs of service and to giving thanks. --Publishers Weekly (starred review)

The author gives a clear-eyed, 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. --Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

I'm urging everyone I know to give Thank You for Your Service just a few pages, a few minutes out of their busy lives. The families honoured in this urgent, important book will take it from there. --Katherine Boo, National Book Award winning author of Behind the Beautiful Forevers

About the Author:

David Finkel is the national enterprise editor of The Washington Post. He joined the Post in 1990 and has worked for the paper's national, foreign, and magazine staffs. He has reported from Africa, Asia, Central America, Europe, and throughout the United States, and was part of the Post s war coverage in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Kosovo. Among Finkel's journalism honours are a Pulitzer Prize for explanatory reporting in 2006 for a series of stories about US-funded democracy efforts in Yemen. He has been a Pulitzer finalist three other times, for both explanatory reporting and feature writing. A 1977 graduate of the University of Florida, Finkel is married, has two daughters, and lives in Silver Spring, Maryland.

About this edition

• Publisher: Scribe UK
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 1922247081
• ISBN 13: 9781922247087
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 272