Thank You for Your Service by David Finkel

(Sarah Crichton, $26)

Against his will, Army Sgt. Adam Schumann became a changed man, said Joanna Connors in the Cleveland Plain Dealer. Readers who remember Schumann from David Finkel’s fine 2009 book, The Good Soldiers, will recall him as a superb field leader who saved the lives of many fellow soldiers when their battalion was deployed to Baghdad as part of the 2007–08 Iraq surge. But Schumann’s third tour of duty shattered him psychologically, leaving him prone to nightmares, fits of rage, and persistent thoughts of suicide. He’s just one of several veterans of the battalion profiled in this important follow-up. He’s also just one of an estimated 500,000 veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan who will suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder. “He’s still a good guy,” says his wife, Saskia. “He’s just a broken good guy.”

More than a mere follow-up, Thank You for Your Service is “a stunning, moving, subdued masterpiece of a book,” said Craig Fehrman in CSMonitor.com. Despite its frequently grim content, it has the narrative pull of a thriller. Readers will yearn to know what happens to Schumann, just as they’ll want to know the fate of Tausolo Aieti, who suffers nightmares about the comrade he couldn’t save, and Nic DeNinno, who takes 43 pills a day to cope with his physical and mental wounds. Interspersed with such stories are scenes of Pentagon officers struggling to deal with the problem of mental illness as the number of soldiers killed by suicide starts to exceed the number of those killed in combat.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

I only wish that Finkel had included some stories of battalion members who’ve successfully adjusted to life back home, said Matt Gallagher in TheDailyBeast.com. “As an Iraq vet myself, I am concerned that the narrative reinforces preconceived notions about veterans and military service”—we’re not all ticking time bombs. But the work Finkel has done here to illuminate a vast sea of suffering represents the most important kind of ground-level reporting. “If it feels overwhelming, it’s because it’s tearing apart layers of comfort and cliché for the sake of truth.”