THANK YOU FOR YOUR SERVICE
Nonfiction Embrace their return THANK YOU FOR YOUR SERVICE By David Finkel 256 pp. Picador Reviewed by Lynne M. Hinkey David Finkel spent fifteen months on the frontlines in Baghdad with Second Battalion, 16th Infantry Regiment during the surge of 2007-2008. He documented that experience in his 2009 The Good Soldiers . In this more recent Thank You for Your Service (2014) , he revisits a handful of these men, now returned home, as they deal with the experiences and the injuries, some visible some not, that still plague them from those deployments. Because of the continued stigma and reticence to seek help, the number of soldiers returned with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), traumatic brain injury (TBI), and suicidal depression will probably never be known. Estimates are that 20 to 30 percent have been psychologically damaged to some degree by their service in Iraq and Afghanistan. But, “[m]ost are O.K., and others are not.” This book gives faces and names to those...