Thank You for your Service

No journalist is better situated to reckon with the psychology of war than David Finkel. In The Good Soldiers, his bestselling account from the front lines of Baghdad, Finkel shadowed the men of the 2-16 Infantry Battalion as they carried out a gruelling 15-month tour that changed all of them forever. Now, Finkel follows many of those same men back home, in a journey less about geography than psychological terrain, undertaken by people trying to heal or at the very least survive.

In Thank You for Your Service, Finkel writes with tremendous compassion about the soldiers and their partners and children—the heartbroken wife who wonders privately whether her returned husband is going to get better, or kill her; and the heroic victims, with the fresh taste of a gun in their mouths, who will either make the journey back to sanity or to final ruin. Finkel takes us everywhere the war is seeping into as it infects America—to the courtrooms filling up with divorce and abuse cases, and worse; to bars; to Fort Riley; to the mental-health clinic to which the army is outsourcing its post-traumatic stress disorder cases.

Thank You for Your Service is an immense act of understanding—shocking but always riveting, unflinching but deeply humane.

Praise for The Good Soldiers:

'Dear soldier, before going to war, read this book.' Barry Heard

'The Good Soldiers is the most honest, most painful, and most brilliantly rendered account of modern war I've ever read.' Daniel Okrent, Fortune

'One of the best books I have ever read... Riveting, unputdownable journalism at its very finest.' Leigh Sales