Parents of returning service members may sometimes feel that their voices are not heard. The media is saturated with stories about troops returning from deployment with mental health problems like post-traumatic stress, depression, and substance abuse. Some also return home with physical problems including traumatic brain injury, physical pain or more severe injuries like amputations. Almost all returning service members experience reintegration challenges such as readjusting to family and community, finding employment or attending school. But rarely do we hear how parents are taking on the role of supporting their sons and daughters who have served our country. In countless ways these parents provide help—and when their military child suffers significant physical or psychological injuries, they may once again become their primary caretaker. For mothers and fathers and others in a parenting role, it can be overwhelming at times, and resources are limited. Courage after Fire for Parents of Service Members provides a compassionate and accessible guide for the parents or guardians of returning troops. This groundbreaking book acknowledges the significant contribution and sacrifice parents have made for their military children, provides strategies and resources that will assist them in understanding and supporting their son or daughter, and will validate their own personal experiences. Recommendations for helping them care for their returning service member are woven throughout the book, as well as education about the importance of taking care of themselves to help prevent caregiver burnout. Vignettes and reflections from parents who have had a child deploy offer a sense of hope and community. Even in the best of circumstances, parents play an instrumental role in helping their sons and daughters successfully reintegrate after deployment. This book is a valuable resource for any parent who is seeking to better understand and support a returning military child while caring for themselves.

Offers soldiers and their families a comprehensive guide to dealing with the all-too-common repercussions of combat duty, including posttraumatic stress symptoms, anxiety, depression, and substance abuse.

Describes the author's childhood relocation from France to the U.S., where as a naturalized citizen he joined the military and served multiple tours in Afghanistan before he was wounded while protecting his patrol from a suicide bomber.

This essential guide for all military families provides helpful advice and reassurance on topics ranging from boot camp, to deployment, to PTSD, from a former "Army brat" turned mother of four military kids. When you enlist in the United States military, you don't just sign up for duty; you also commit your loved ones to lives of service all their own. No one knows this better than Elaine Brye, an "Army brat" turned military wife and the mother of four officers-one each in the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps. For more than a decade she's endured countless teary goodbyes, empty chairs at Thanksgiving dinners, and sleepless hours waiting for phone calls in the night. She's navigated the complicated tangle of emotions that are part and parcel of life as a military mother. Be Safe, Love Mom braids together Elaine's own personal experiences with those of fellow parents she's met along the way. She offers gentle guidance and hard-earned wisdom on topics ranging from that first anxious goodbye to surrendering all control of your child, from finding comfort in the support of the military community and the healing power of faith to coping with the enormous sacrifices life as a military mother requires. With hard-to-come-by information and encouragement that is like advice from a wise and trusted friend, Be Safe, Love Mom is an essential handbook to membership in a strong and special sisterhood.

Every veteran has a story. You just have to listen to it. It can be surprising how difficult it is...and also how easy...for a veteran to be able to tell their story. The impacts of combat, deployments, or even just military experience in general are felt long after a veteran leaves the service. The guns do not always go silent when a veteran leaves the military...neither should the veteran. When combat veteran and retired Army Noncommissioned Officer Duane France retired, he knew he wanted to continue to serve his fellow veterans. As a grandson, nephew, and son of combat veterans, he grew up knowing the impact of combat and military service on veterans and their families, and as a leader with five combat and operational deployments, he saw the same things happening in the service members of his generation. After starting to work as a clinical mental health counselor exclusively for veterans and their spouses, Duane started to write his observations and experiences on his blog, Head Space and Timing, located at www.veteranmentalhealth.com. This book is a collection of 52 articles designed to help veterans, those who support them, and those who care for them to understand the military experience and to change the way they think about veteran mental health.

Linderman traces each soldier's path from the exhilaration of enlistment to the disillusionment of battle to postwar alienation. He provides a rare glimpse of the personal battle that raged within soldiers then and now.

Based on his Pulitzer Prize-winning story, Jim Sheeler's unprecedented look at the way our country honors its dead; Final SaluteIs a stunning tribute to the brave troops who have lost their lives in Iraq and Afghanistan and to the families who continue to mourn them They are the troops that nobody wants to see, carrying a message that no military family ever wants to hear. It begins with a knock at the door. "The curtains pull away. They come to the door. And they know. They always know," said Major Steve Beck. Since the start of the war in Iraq, marines like Major Beck found themselves thrown into a different kind of mission: casualty notification. It is a job Major Beck never asked for and one for which he received no training. They are given no set rules, only impersonal guidelines. Marines are trained to kill, to break down doors, but casualty notification is a mission without weapons. For Beck, the mission meant learning each dead marine's name and nickname, touching the toys they grew up with and reading the letters they wrote home. He held grieving mothers in long embraces, absorbing their muffled cries into the dark blue shoulder of his uniform. He stitched himself into the fabric of their lives, in the simple hope that his compassion might help alleviate at least the smallest piece of their pain. Sometimes he returned home to his own family unable to keep from crying in the dark. In Final Salute, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Jim Sheeler weaves together the stories of the fallen and of the broken homes they have left behind. It is also the story of Major Steve Beck and his unflagging efforts to help heal the wounds of those left grieving. Above all, it is a moving tribute to our troops, putting faces to the mostly anonymous names of our courageous heroes, and to the brave families who have made the ultimate sacrifice for this country. Final Saluteis the achingly beautiful, devastatingly honest story of the true toll of war. After the knock on the door, the story has only begun.

A guide for parents of returning service members offers strategies and tips for helping veterans reintegrate and cope with the physical and mental trauma they may experience.

Now a Major Motion Picture Directed by American Sniper Writer Jason Hall and Starring Miles Teller No journalist has reckoned with the psychology of war as intimately as David Finkel. In The Good Soldiers, his bestselling account from the front lines of Baghdad, Finkel embedded with the men of the 2-16 Infantry Battalion as they carried out the infamous “surge”. Now, in Thank You for Your Service, Finkel tells the true story of those men as they return home from the front-lines of Baghdad and struggle to reintegrate--both into their family lives and into American society at large. Finkel is with these veterans in their most intimate, painful, and hopeful moments as they try to recover, and in doing so, he creates an indelible, essential portrait of what life after war is like--not just for these soldiers, but for their wives, widows, children, and friends, and for the professionals who are truly trying, and to a great degree failing, to undo the damage that has been done. Thank You for Your Service is an act of understanding, and it offers a more complete picture than we have ever had of two essential questions: When we ask young men and women to go to war, what are we asking of them? And when they return, what are we thanking them for? “Finkel sketches a panoramic view of postwar life....A book that every American should read.” —Jake Tapper, Los Angeles Times Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the New York Public Library Helen Bernstein Award for Excellence in Journalism. One of Ten Favorite Books of 2013 by Michiko Kakutani (The New York Times), a Washington Post Top Ten Book of the Year, and a New York Times Book Review Notable Book of the Year

A classic work of American literature that has not stopped changing minds and lives since it burst onto the literary scene, The Things They Carried is a ground-breaking meditation on war, memory, imagination, and the redemptive power of storytelling. The Things They Carried depicts the men of Alpha Company: Jimmy Cross, Henry Dobbins, Rat Kiley, Mitchell Sanders, Norman Bowker, Kiowa, and the character Tim O’Brien, who has survived his tour in Vietnam to become a father and writer at the age of forty-three. Taught everywhere—from high school classrooms to graduate seminars in creative writing—it has become required reading for any American and continues to challenge readers in their perceptions of fact and fiction, war and peace, courage and fear and longing. The Things They Carried won France's prestigious Prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger and the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize; it was also a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award.