Thank You for Your Service

Winner of the Carla Furstenberg Cohen Literary Prize in Nonfiction, Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and the New York Public Library Helen Bernstein Award for Excellence in JournalismOne of Ten Favorite Books of 2013 by Michiko Kakutani (The New York Times), a Washington Post Top Ten Book of the Year, and a New York Times Book Review Notable Book of the YearNamed a Best Book of the Year by The New York Times, The Washington Post, USA Today, The Economist, The Seattle Times, and Minneapolis Star TribuneNo journalist has reckoned with the psychology of war as intimately as David Finkel. In The Good Soldiers, his bestselling account from the front lines of Baghdad, Finkel embedded with the men of the 2-16 Infantry Battalion as they carried out the infamous “surge,” a grueling fifteen-month tour that changed them all forever.In Thank You for Your Service, Finkel follows many of those same men as they return home and struggle to reintegrate―both into their family lives and into American society at large. He is with them in their most intimate, painful, and hopeful moments as they try to recover, and in doing so, he creates an indelible, essential portrait of what life after war is like―not just for these soldiers, but for their wives, widows, children, and friends, and for the professionals who are truly trying, and to a great degree failing, to undo the damage that has been done. Thank You for Your Service is an act of understanding, and it offers a more complete picture than we have ever had of two essential questions: When we ask young men and women to go to war, what are we asking of them? And when they return, what are we thanking them for?