Thank You For Your Service

“Depression, anxiety, nightmares, memory problems, personality changes, suicidal thoughts: every war has its after-war and so it is with the wars of Iraq and Afghanistan, which have created some five hundred thousand mentally wounded American veterans.”

Finkel defines the purpose of the book in this statement. Wars do not truly end when a treaty is signed by leaders, because those who did the fighting and the real work of war are just beginning a new chapter of conflict when they return, only now they do it without the same support and camaraderie they had while on the battlefield.

“How to grasp the true size of such a number, and all of its implications, especially in a country that paid such scant attention to the wars in the first place? One way would be to imagine the five hundred thousand in total, perhaps as points on a map of America, all suddenly illuminated at once. The sight would be of a country glowing from coast to coast.”

Here, Finkel focuses on the 500,000 mentally-wounded veterans at the time of his writing, in 2011. At that point, on average, one soldier or veteran committed suicide per day. The most recent statistics reveal that the number has skyrocketed to an average of 20 a day.

“Why does he get angry? Why does he forget things? Why is he jittery? Why can’t he stay awake, even after twelve hours of sleep? Why is he still tasting Emory’s blood? Because he’s weak. Because he’s a pussy. Because he’s a piece of shit. The thoughts keep coming, no way to stop them now, and yet when he goes into the living room and sees Saskia, he gives no indication of the pandemonium under way.”

Schumann doesn’t equate his wounds, which are internal and therefore invisible to the naked eye, with external wounds suffered by other, fellow soldiers. This, we see, is a very common attitude among those returning from war with PTSD. They believe their injuries are not wounds but rather weakness of character. This impedes their ability to seek help and heal.

“Sometimes after they fight, she counts his pills to make sure he hasn’t swallowed too many and checks on the guns to make sure they’re all there. The thought that he might not recover, that this is how it will be, makes her sick with dread sometimes, and the thought that he might kill himself leaves her feeling like her insides are being twisted until she can’t breathe.”

Saskia, Adam Schumann’s wife is full of fear and anger. She believed she could be as patient as much as Schumann needed for as long as he needed, but her patience is all but gone. Her nerves are frazzled worrying about her husband and how they are going to manage financially, now that he’s home from war and no longer an active soldier. Here, we see that for the loved ones of those with PTSD there is also real psychological damage.

“‘I am staying here forever. I am never leaving.’ She told her friends that as well, and while at first they sympathized, as the months went by, and then a year, and then another year, most of them began to lose patience with her inability to stop being so relentlessly heartbroken.”

Amanda Doster lost her husband, James, in the Iraq war and hasn’t been able to move on from that loss. She does move to another house down the street, but emotionally she remains stuck on the day soldiers arrived on her doorstep to tell her James was dead. This is another key factor in this book: that many people have a timeline they try to impose on those dealing with the wounds of war. When people don’t heal quickly enough, society seems to get frustrated with them and abandons them to deal with the pain on their own. Amanda has some friends who remain supportive, but others pull away and remove themselves from her life.

“‘I looked over and all I could see was flames and the outline of a body where he was at in the driver’s seat.’ Over and over he had written about it all, except for the one thing that he has told no one, a dream he has been having ever since: Harrelson, on fire, asking him, ‘Why didn’t you save me?’

“The dream comes every few nights. He never dreams about the soldiers he did save, only about Harrelson, and only in that way.”

This is Tausolo Aieti’s story. He manages to tell what happens that day in the Humvee, when it exploded. Aieti, with a broken leg, manages to pull out two other injured soldiers. He is told at a ceremony that he’s a hero, but he never thinks about this part, and he finds it impossible to tell people about the nightmares of Harrelson, so this haunting is a powerful force pushing Aieti to the brink of breaking down. Talking, and not talking, about the most painful memories is something most of the soldiers in the book have in common.

“The way it worked was that they joined the army because they were patriotic or starry-eyed or heartbroken or maybe just out of work, and then they were assigned to be in the infantry rather than something with better odds like finance or public affairs, and then by chance they were assigned to an infantry division that was about to rotate into the war, and then they were randomly assigned to a combat brigade that included two infantry battalions, one of which was going to a bad place and the other of which was going to a worse place, and then as luck would have it they were assigned to the battalion going to the worse place, and then they were assigned to the company in that battalion that went to the worst place of all. If you listen to the eulogies, so much of war is said to be accidental.”

Again and again are questions of why. Why them? Why did they have to be the ones on that corner? Why did he have to sit in that seat in the Humvee? Why do some soldiers come home and readjust while others never seem to recover? So much may boil down to bad luck, and that’s always so hard to accept. The what-if’s for the soldiers and their families never seem to end.

“‘I told my wife some of my stories about my experiences, and her response to me was, “You knew what you were getting into when you signed on the dotted line and I don’t feel sorry for you.” And you know what? That fucking killed me. She didn’t give a shit about me. When she said that to me, I turned to the bottle, and I never shared another fucking word with her.’”

As the author shares in a story from one of the treatment programs, sometimes the problem isn’t that a soldier won’t open up, but that those around the soldier have no sympathy or empathy for what the soldier has been through and/or continues to go through. Throughout the book, we are reminded that for many people, the war in Iraq and Afghanistan wasn’t on their radar at all. Since it is an all-volunteer military, those who went chose that path. For some, the suffering of the veterans elicits little more than apathy.

“‘I had a hard drive that I destroyed. Pictures and stuff like that, next to dead bodies, shit like that. Horrible, horrible stuff. Horrible stuff. Us hanging out with dead bodies. At the time, I mean we were rockin’ and rollin’, we were mean mean killing machines. Now I look back and I’m like, God, what were we doing? What were we thinking?’”

This is Nic DeNinno speaking while in a treatment facility. It is one of his three times in a program. This is another aspect that soldiers frequently must find a way to process. What infantrymen are taught to do is kill. To turn off that part of themselves that says it’s wrong. To do that, a soldier often must dehumanize the enemy, and sometimes a soldier is not sure who the enemy is in urban combat. It’s hard to reenter society after having that mindset, particularly if there’s been more than one deployment.

“But there is also the story of his first deployment to Iraq, when he was a    division commander who in the course of a year lost 169 soldiers. One by one, he wrote their names and hometowns on index cards that he carried in his pocket until there were too many to fit. He attended all of the memorial services and wrote 169 condolence letters in 365 days. But the worst part may have come later, at home, when it was time to erect a memorial, and he was approached by some of his junior officers who wanted 168 names on the memorial, not 169.”

General Peter Chiarelli is in charge of reducing the number of suicides among veterans and soldiers. His wife has remarked that he has no wounds from the war, and laughs off the thought. Yet Chiarelli himself later states that his greatest regret was agreeing to leave off number 169—the soldier who had committed suicide. It seems to be a burning motivation in him to make up for that decision in what he does now at the end of his career.

“He had shown up early for orientation and been given a list of thirty-nine WTB offices he would have to visit and get signatures from to prove that he had been there. He’d gone first to human resources, where the door was shut and locked and no one answered his knock even though the sign on the door said OPEN. He’d gone to the mailroom, where the guy working there had screamed over the music he was playing, ‘Are you a fast-tracker?’ ‘A what?’ Tausolo said. ‘A fast tracker,’ the guy yelled, and added a little ominously, ‘You’d know if you was.’ He’d gone to the chaplain, who wasn’t there. He’d gone to the security office to get an ID badge, where the person he handed his orders to said with irritation, ‘These are your thirty-day orders. We need your ninety-day orders. You have to go see your S-1.’ He had gone to see his S-1, who wasn’t there.”

This is how Aieti begins his treatment. Aieti has PTSD, probably TBI, ADHD, memory problems, and recurring nightmares. He can’t sleep, can’t focus, and has outbursts. This passage goes on for several more lines, and is only the first part of the day. After just this section, Aieti has collected only six of the 39 signatures he needs. The maze of bureaucracy that surrounds getting help for wounded soldiers is daunting to anyone, but to someone who is on the verge of a breakdown, it’s cruel. This passage shows something that crops up over and over in the book: that while good intentions may be there, the implementation of aid is completely unacceptable.

“That was it, all he had to say. ‘Do you hate me?’ Tausolo had asked, opening a vein to a brother in combat, and if the answer he got wasn’t quite the exoneration he’d been seeking, it would have to do, because while the truth of war is that it’s always about loving the guy next to you, the truth of the after-war is that you’re on your own.”

Aieti writes to one of the soldiers he had pulled from the Humvee that day. He’s afraid the soldier hates him for saving him. There were five men in the Humvee, and one is dead. The other four are struggling with traumatizing memories, and seeking treatment separately, and have to find a way to reach out for some kind of answer or closure. No one facilitates these needed conversations for the soldiers. They are left to sort it for themselves.

"You didn’t do anything wrong,’ he says to Tausolo.

‘I know,’ Tausolo wishes he could say back, but he knows he has.

Why else would he be here?”

Aieti is talking with Tim Jung, who is charged with helping Aieti get treatment for his PTSD and other postwar health issues. Although Aieti is a hero according to all who knew him, as witnessed by his actions that day in the Humvee, to Aieti it is never what he did right; rather, it’s what he didn’t do right that matters. It’s that he forgot Harrelson. The guilt never leaves him.

“She says: ‘I’m pissed. I’m pissed. I really am fucking pissed. I won’t get over it. He gets to go fishing. He gets to go out on weekends. I can’t do any of that. I’m always getting the short end of the stick. I am here, taking care of everything. This is not why I got married and had kids, to do this on my own. If I could take it all back, I would. I wish I had never met the man.’”

This is Schumann’s wife Saskia, speaking about her side of things while Schumann is in the four-month-plus treatment program in California headed by Gusman. She is overwhelmed, angry, and bitter. She feels like her husband abandoned her to go into treatment and she was left with all of the domestic duties. She doesn’t understand the reasoning behind the recreation he gets to engage in while in California, and she doesn’t know the extent of the hard emotional work he has to do in order to have a chance to survive when he comes home. Sometimes, she doesn’t care anymore. The life of a wounded warrior’s spouse isn’t simple, either. Finkel often implicitly makes the case that enough isn’t done to help them with practical, financial, or emotional support, or even to see what their soldier spouse is going through.

“Even the worst people have some good in them, she said, and made him a promise. If he looked for it in anyone, he would eventually find it.”

When Fred Gusman and his mother finally were away from Gusman’s abusive father, they came to live with his grandparents. His grandmother made an indelible impression on Gusman. It came to guide how he lived the rest of his life, and his mission with wounded veterans from wars ranging from Vietnam to the Iraq war. He looked for and found the good in people, and teaches those veterans to look in themselves for the good they had come to doubt was still in them.

“‘They’re always fucking drunk,’ Rob says of them.

‘They look alone’ is what Adam says. ‘They look broken.’

‘Six in the morning and they already have a beer pyramid going,’ Rob says.

‘That’s me in thirty years,’ Adam says. ‘If this doesn’t work out, that’s me.’”

Adam is aware he has to work hard to heal from the wounds he’s initially been reluctant to admit he even has. He sees two outcomes if he doesn’t heal: he’ll end up like the old soldiers at the veteran’s home, who drink and smoke all day, or he’ll kill himself. He has to make this treatment program work, and that pushes him to open up and face the horrible thoughts and fears that haunt him.

“He’s the most visibly nervous, but they all have their own ways of coping with what they’ve become. They drink and have the faces to prove it. Some of them scooter up to the cemetery at night and smoke a joint or two among the headstones of five thousand dead soldiers. Jim George says he spent fifteen years high on methamphetamine. Paul Alexander rarely says anything at all. Another of them, Mark Fischer, checks his watch over and over as noon approaches because noon is when a whistle goes off and forty-five years after Vietnam he’s still getting used to loud noises.”

These are the soldiers that live in the veteran’s home on the same property where Fred Gusman runs his program for wounded veterans. They are mostly Vietnam vets, although there is still a sprinkling of surviving WWII vets, too. They came home to no program, no help, and sometimes outright hostility. For them, the war hasn’t fully ended. Sometimes people forget they are still out there, struggling to find their way as well.

“She and the Schumanns haven’t been in touch for months. But she thinks often of them, sometimes wondering how they are, sometimes wondering why they cut her out of their lives, and so she sends the message to the last address she had for Saski and is surprised a few minutes later when she gets a reply.”

Amanda Doster sends a message to Saskia asking when she thinks the Schumanns might be able to start paying her back the money they owe her. She doesn’t really need the money, but she is hurt they’ve grown apart. This happens to Amanda more than once: she gets close to people often based on their relationship to James in the war. She tries to suck up every detail, every story, every snippet of conversation anyone shares with her. She is trying to make sense of something senseless, and more than anything, she tries to hold onto every scrap of James’s memory. Sometimes that can push people away, which is another hazard of being a war widow.

“‘I couldn’t save James—it was out of my control. So I try to control everything I possibly can.’”

This is one of the most honest moments Amanda has in the entire book. She may have had perfectionist tendencies before her husband was killed in Iraq, but afterwards, she exhibits signs that indicate possible obsessive-compulsive disorder. She needs to maintain control over the most mundane of things, and in her nitpicking and her vigorous cleaning of things already clean, she shows that the line between control and breakdown is a thin one.

“It will never happen. In a few months, Chiarelli will retire from the army. The monthly suicide meetings that he began will become something different under his successor, on whose watch the number of suicides will keep rising until it is exceeding the number of combat deaths and averaging almost one a day.”

The planned dinner to raise awareness and support for soldiers’ mental health has to be cancelled because prominent attendees pull out. It is never rescheduled, and Chiarelli retires, not having made the difference he wanted. His replacement will attempt to change things, as well, but the numbers of veteran suicides climbs steadily.

“‘None of this shit would have happened if you were there,’ Golembe had said after Doster died and meant it as a compliment.

“‘None of this shit would have happened if you were there,’ Adam had heard and nailed it into his soul as blame.”

Schumann is on his way home with Saskia from his treatment center in California and has stopped along the route to see Golembe, who had said these words to Schumann about Doster’s death. They share stories, and Golembe admits he’s not doing well. Schumann encourages him to get help, and find out if he has TBI from the bomb. But as they hug each other and remember Doster, a small bit of guilt and pain seem to subside a bit for Schumann. It’s something he probably couldn’t have done before the work he did in Gusman’s program.

“She is tired all the time now. She tried sleeping pills, then switched to an antianxiety medication, then to an antidepressant. The night before, she tried drinking, and now she is hungover.”

This is Shawnee Hoffman, former partner of soldier Danny Holmes, who killed himself in their home. She has questions she can never find answers to, and pain she doesn’t know how to manage. The soldiers have a hard time finding help and their spouses are often no different. Shawnee seems caught in an endless destructive pattern at this point, medicating, drinking and finding herself in similar relationships where she is abused and stuck due to financial issues.

“In Georgia on this same day, Michael Emory says, ‘I see life now as a second chance to correct all my mistakes,’ and that second chance allows a man who should be dead, who shouldn’t be talking, who shouldn’t be standing, who shouldn’t be walking, to make plans for another day.”

Schumann had wondered if Emory hated him for saving him, knowing there would be difficult days ahead for Emory due to his war injuries. We see that Emory not only doesn’t hate Schumann, but is thankful for what he did, and for the second chance he has. It’s a hard life, with his disabilities and loneliness, but he still finds each day a gift.