Author explores service members' lives after they return home

Well this shot my blood pressure up.

Q.
People have an awareness of how PTSD affects soldiers, but the book also depicts how the soldiers’ families are coping. How does PTSD affect their spouses and families?

A.
Well, from the reporting I did and the people I got to know ... it is clear to me that no one knew what they were getting into. And how could they really? You don’t really know what war is until you arrive at war. And you don’t really know what the after-war is until you have come home and you are dealing with that, as well. But the book doesn’t just detail in intimate degrees what is going on with soldiers, but with wives and children as well, because they are all part of it. They were trying to regain some sense of control over lives that were suddenly feeling a little lost to them. Their lives had become reactive, a reaction to the trauma suffered overseas and it didn’t end overseas. It came back here and it continues to define their everyday actions. ... There are plenty of women, plenty of wives and girlfriends, who have been traumatized, as well. The women back here, they play a central role in this. They are not bystanders at all. Their own trauma is real, and their own attempts at healing are real. And their own strength is essential to what is happening in so many American families.

How could they know? Really? Astonishing considering we keep discovering more and more families without a clue what PTSD is after years of the DOD selling the fact they have been "educating" families all along. It is something that families like mine have been talking about for years but reporters have just been repeating what the DOD tells them. If isolated family members knew what they needed to know we'd see a lot less suicides and an lot more stronger marriages. Isolated? Yes, because if they do not hang around with other families like their's they will not discover what makes it work for other families. If they only spend time with regular families they don't have a fighting chance of staying together.

Author explores service members' lives after they return home
Army Times
By Antonieta Rico
Staff writer
November 10, 2013

In David Finkel’s new book, “Thank You for Your Service,” a follow-up to “The Good Soldiers,” the men of the 2-16th Infantry Regiment have left Iraq behind, but their war is far from over. At home, the soldiers are still battling, in what the book calls the “after-war.” The enemies are traumatic brain injury and post-traumatic stress, and Finkel documents the wreckage those cause in the lives of soldiers and their families.

In “The Good Soldiers” Finkel documented the lives of the men of 2nd Battalion, 16th Infantry Regiment, 4th Infantry Brigade Combat Team, 1st Infantry Division of Fort Riley, Kan., as they fought during the surge in Iraq. For “Thank You for Your Service,” Finkel embeds with the soldiers at home.

“The war is over in Iraq, it’s about to be over in Afghanistan, but the after-war is not even close to being over,” Finkel said. “It’s ongoing.”
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