Thank You For Your Service.

• Author: Hoadley, Stephen
• Position: Book review

THANK YOU FOR YOUR SERVICE

Author: David Finkel

Published by: Scribe Publications Pty Ltd, Brunswick, Victoria, 2013, 256pp, A$29.95.

This is a book by a compassionate author who deserves sympathetic readers. It is a book about failure, not on the battlefields of Iraq but in life after combat. It is a work of 'non-fiction journalism' about a half-dozen US ex-soldiers and their wives and families, and about the commanders, therapists and counsellors who attempt to care for them. They are a microcosm of a half-million ex-soldiers, by Finkel's estimate, afflicted to some degree by their war-time experiences, representing a quarter of all who experienced combat in Iraq and Afghanistan in the past decade.

Those chosen for Finkel's enquiry have been accepted by Veterans Administration clinics in Kansas for treatment. They occupy a segment of the post-traumatic stress spectrum between the ex-soldiers who are disturbed but can cope, on the one hand, and the hundreds who have committed suicide--at a rate of nearly one every day in 2012--on the other. They are alive but angry, disoriented, dysfunctional, and veering towards depression, despair, self-harm, or random violence against others, including loved ones.

Relying on Army records, diaries, and interviews, Finkel tells compelling stories about ex-infantrymen Adam Schumann, Nic DeNinno and Tausolo Aieti, each an effective soldier in battle but a broken man back in America. Equally harrowing are the...