Thank You For Your Service

“The amazing thing was that no one knew. Here was all this stuff going on, pounding heart, panicked breathing, sweating palms, electric eyes, and no one regarded him as anything but the great soldier he’d always been…”

This quote is in regard to Adam Schumann, on his last day in Iraq, before leaving on a mental health evacuation. He isn’t identified by anyone as having a problem at all. No one seems to notice that Schumann is absolutely falling apart. He had lost so much weight he was gaunt, and his risk-taking behavior was chalked up to being a leader and hero.

“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.