{"id":1924,"date":"2014-06-16T22:11:16","date_gmt":"2014-06-17T06:11:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/?p=1924"},"modified":"2014-06-16T22:11:16","modified_gmt":"2014-06-17T06:11:16","slug":"review-thank-you-for-your-service","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/?p=1924","title":{"rendered":"Review: Thank You For Your Service"},"content":{"rendered":"

David Finkel’s Thank You For Your Service<\/em> shows us a cost of war that’s easy to miss or to misunderstand.\u00a0 While there is an element of polemic to Service<\/em>, this is a much deeper book than a simple call to arms.\u00a0 Finkel is able take us into the lives of soldiers who have suffered horrifically in war but have also done so invisibly.\u00a0 They are invisible because their wounds are internal.\u00a0 They bear the traumas of nightmare experiences and of physical but internal brain injuries.<\/p>\n

I’m not the writer or the journalist that Finkel is, so this review contains a lot of my conclusions from taking what he showed me and rolling it around in my head for a while.\u00a0 Essentially I’m cooking in my biases and handing that information out. All readers of Service<\/em> will do this. They will be able to do that because Finkel has been absorb the lives of these people and to depict them unflinchingly.\u00a0 He has his biases, certainly, but his presentation is multi-faceted and nuanced.\u00a0 One comes away with an understanding of the mammoth scope of the damage done, the people fighting to make it better, and the enormous and unexpected challenges facing the damaged and those trying to help.<\/p>\n

One of the key things Finkel shows is how real the injuries of these people are.\u00a0 It is difficult to explain how experiences that leave no physical marks are as debilitating and as clinical as amputations. I suspect many of you are not convinced by these sentences, which is why it’s worth reading his.\u00a0 Initial skepticism – warranted though it may be – just cannot reasonably hold up against the unrelenting evidence that one sees when you follow these people for a while.\u00a0 Basic functions of their brains are impaired; the evidence becomes too much to ignore. These aren’t touchy-feely or subtle injuries.\u00a0 They are as clear and obvious as a severed limb once you take the time to look.\u00a0 Finkel took the time to look and presents the facts in ways that cannot be ignored.<\/p>\n

The resources being spent to fix these problems are woefully small compared to the problem.\u00a0 One suspects that the people handing out the money don’t completely understand that these are real battlefield injuries, not people who are just sick of war.\u00a0 In addition to having to face life damaged, the survivors are fighting to get even the smallest assistance learning to compensate for their injuries. Facing that with damaged brains only makes matters worse.<\/p>\n

Finkel also alludes to a bigger problem.\u00a0 It’s clear that even with all the money in the world we just don’t know how to help these people.\u00a0 These people’s brains are damaged in ways no oone knows how to fix.\u00a0 They will never have proper memory function again; we don’t know how to reset that breaker.<\/p>\n

All of this makes this human cost more clear and tragic – there are many, many soldiers from our wars who are permanently and invisibly damaged.\u00a0 Their injuries crush them, their spouses, and their friends while making it appear that they are merely irresponsible, not permanently injured.\u00a0 The resources to help them are well beyond inadequate, but even with infinite resources, we don’t know what to do.<\/p>\n

We need to stop doing this to people if we can avoid it.<\/p>\n

All of this Finkel shows us without lecturing us.\u00a0 He makes us figure it out and see it ourselves.<\/p>\n

Strongly Recommended.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

David Finkel’s Thank You For Your Service shows us a cost of war that’s easy to miss or to misunderstand.\u00a0 While there is an element of polemic to Service, this is a much deeper book than a simple call to arms.\u00a0 Finkel is able take us into the lives of soldiers who have suffered horrifically […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1924","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1924","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1924"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1924\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1925,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1924\/revisions\/1925"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1924"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1924"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1924"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}