57 pages • 1 hour read
David FinkelThank You For Your Service
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2013A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 2-4Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 2 Summary
This chapter opens with the woman encountered at the end of the previous chapter, the one with Schumann’s wife, at the airport, asking Schumann what happened to her husband.
The woman, we learn, is Amanda Doster, the widow of James Doster. She has come to associate the doorbell with death, beginning on the day two soldiers arrived at her home to inform her of James’s death. She asked them not to tell her until she took the cookies out of the oven and made some calls. She has been trying to stay in control ever since that moment.
At the start of the chapter, Amanda is in the process of moving to a much bigger house, which she purchased with life insurance money and the Army’s death gratuity. She’s held on to all of her dead husband’s belongings, including the last t-shirt he wore while home, a jar of sawdust he kept in the garage, and an answering machine message from him. Amanda and James have two daughters. At the time of James’s death, Grace is 3, and Kathryn is 6.
Amanda refuses to fully admit her husband is dead, and even checks his hand, in the casket, for the indentation of his wedding ring. She goes over every detail of the autopsy, and the military investigation. She even rode around town with the box of his cremated remains in her car, buckled in with a seatbelt. Finkel writes:
How do some people move on? Why isn’t she one of those people? She has asked this of friends, counselors, and other widows. Now she asks no one anymore except God and Sally, of whom she can ask anything, even whether James is really dead. Because the thing is, she is still seeing him alive (26).
Amanda goes on to say she saw him driving a pest control truck. She believes she sees him in various places and wonders if he escaped the war and will rejoin her.
Adam Schumann and James Doster became close at the end of Schumann’s last deployment. James shared Saskia’s contact info with Amanda so the two wives could meet. They emailed for a month, and met in person the week before James Doster’s death. James was scheduled to have a video phone call home, but had given the spot to Adam Schumann, as Doster was to be home, on leave, in a few weeks, and Schumann needed the call more:
And that was how Adam, who always found the hidden bombs, stayed behind on September 29. Instead of going out, he talked by video to Saskia and remained on the base afterward while James went out and got blown into pieces by a bomb that no one saw (29).
As the chapter ends, Amanda moves into her new home, bringing the box of James’s remains.
Chapter 3 Summary
This chapter focuses on Tausolo Aieti, a soldier from Doster and Schumann’s unit. Aieti is graduating from the 7-week Topeka VA inpatient PTSD program. The other men in the graduation program are Vietnam vets. Aieti is the youngest and the only one still in the Army.
Aieti is 26, from American Samoa, and married. His wife is not at the graduation. The program has soldiers recall their wartime, traumatizing events in detail. In Aieti’s case, it was a bomb hitting the Humvee he was in. Aieti suffers a broken leg but manages to pull out two injured soldiers before collapsing. However, he forgets Harrelson, the driver, whom he then sees is engulfed in flames. Aieti tells no one that he dreams a few times a week that Harrelson is calling out to him, asking why it was that Aieti forsook him. Finkel writes:
[Aieti] began to take sleeping pills to fall asleep and another kind of pill to get back to sleep when he woke up. He took other pills, too, some for pain, others for anxiety. He began to drink so much vodka that his skin smelled of it, and then he started mentioning suicide (40).
Aieti’s wife, Theresa, is four months pregnant. The two live in a small apartment in the same complex where two soldiers have already committed suicide. Aieti wants to return to serving in the Army, but he is directed to try and get into another program for wounded soldiers first. Two of his sergeants come to the interview for the program and to speak for Aieti if needed. One, Davison, was in the convoy the day it was bombed. He speaks about Aieti:
‘When you have a soldier of that caliber, you know when he’s broken, and when he’s broken, he’s gotta be fixed,’ he says. ‘To go from what he was to what he is? Something had to have broke. He needs help, and he needs to keep getting help’ (47).
We see Aieti go from building to building and person to person, navigating a maze of bureaucracy in the attempt to make it into the wounded-warrior program, all in hopes of being the soldier and the man he used to be. His wife is wary and worried, but still hopes it’s possible. He is accepted into the program, and feels a bit better for the moment.
Chapter 4 Summary
Nic DeNinno was in the same platoon of Bravo Company as Doster and Schumann. He started out feeling like a true patriot, but after 15 months of service, he had punched a civilian then pushed another down the stairs, and was now back in the US, in Pueblo, Colorado at a psychiatric unit for soldiers and veterans. DeNinno has been in this psych ward for 17 days, after becoming such a suicide concern in the same wounded-warrior program Aieti is trying to get into.
DeNinno met his wife, Sascha, when he came home from the war. She came from a family of soldiers, and had two children with a husband who came home from the Iraq war abusive. She was attracted to DeNinno, despite seeing warning signs. She married him regardless of his drinking, his flashbacks, and a drug overdose. Now, she’s six months pregnant and hopeful that the program at Pueblo will help him, and that he will be able to share his painful stories from combat with her.
As part of the program, DeNinno must keep a journal. He writes about feeling that he is on the edge of losing total control. DeNinno describes one of the traumatic events he experienced in Iraq:
‘What was left of his skeleton was hanging out of the driver side door, his helmet a different color possibly fused to his skull and his IBA and plates which made up his torso, or what was left of it. That image still haunts me, it changed me. I don’t know how many others saw that as we turned our trucks around but all I wanted was death and violence from then on. To me this is where I lost my old self’ (56).
DeNinno describes having flashbacks so real that he has full panic attacks. He sees dead Iraqis in his bathtub, dead children in his room. Part of the therapy involves the veterans and soldiers describing their stories and feelings.
We learn DeNinno had been taking 43 pills a day prior to this program.
He had been at war 400 days, give or take. He is afraid to share his dreams or his memories with his wife. When she comes to visit him at the center, he takes his journal to share one story with her. He is violent in the story, encountering civilians that US soldiers believe are harboring a high-level target. DeNinno is then told they have the wrong house. He fears what Sascha will say or think, but she doesn’t look at him differently or blame him.
When DeNinno comes home a couple weeks later, he is preparing himself to tell Sascha more about his war experiences, and to continue his healing process.
Chapters 2-4 Analysis
In these chapters, we learn the stories of a widow and two more soldiers, all from Bravo Company. A common thread is the way each has horrific memories that remain with them from the time they served. Amanda Doster fights to keep everything in order and under control. Growing up, her family wasn’t stable, and when she marries Doster at 18, he is the one who gives her life order. After James dies, in an attempt to keep him close to her, Amanda keeps all of his items organized and takes them to her new house when she moves. She can’t fully accept that he’s gone, to the extent that she doesn’t believe it’s her husband in the coffin, and that instead what she’s seeing is a mannequin. Further, she thinks she sees him around town. She can’t let go of Doster; if she believes him dead, then she must accept that he’s really gone from her life. She is wound so tightly that she seems forever on the brink of breaking down. The other figures in the narrative are right on this brink also.
Tausolo Aieti is a shadow of himself. He, too, has stories he can’t share. He doesn’t admit his actual suicidal thoughts anymore and he hates thinking that anyone will see how broken he actually is. The nightmare that includes the driver, Harrelson, is something Aieti doesn’t share with family or friends. His wife fears that he is at a breaking point, and has trouble recognizing the man who came home from Iraq. When he has the nightmares, he awakens in a violent outburst, throwing and breaking things.
Suicide is a consistent and palpable presence in the text. Two soldiers who live in the same apartment complex as Aieti have killed themselves. Suicide haunts Aieti as well, and while he does the right things to get help, nothing really seems to be helping, and those close to him wonder if he’ll make it through.
He, like everyone so far in the book, seems to have almost two different lives: their life before the war, and their life afterwards. The journey seems to be to find a way to integrate the these two lives into a single, healthy existence.
Another common link is the bureaucracy these soldiers encounter, as they try to heal. The red tape seems endless and functions counterintuitively to the idea of providing the help these veterans need. It’s important to remember that these are individuals who have been wounded psychically on a fundamental level. They have trouble doing even the most basic of things: sleeping at night, holding a baby. Asking them to keep appointment times and navigate a bevy of forms is something that many can’t manage, and is exactly why they’re seeking helping to begin with. The veterans are reaching out, saying I can’t do normal things. The powers that be then give them a bunch of normal things to do, before they can start helping. To get that help, one must answer questions a certain way, make a defined score on a questionnaire, or meet specific criteria. The medications doled out to psychologically-devastated soldiers seems unconscionable, and is noted as such by the author. To know they are likely suicidal yet give them an ample supply of pills seems irresponsible at least. While there are people on the fringes—spouses, other vets or soldiers and volunteers or doctors or therapists—who care and try, none seems fully equipped to heal these veterans.
Bits of the soldiers’ journals punctuate the text, along with powerful images. Finkel chooses not to comment on them; instead letting them stand on their own. By omitting any commentary that would tie the photos to Finkel’s words, the author reinforces the feeling of isolation these soldiers experience.
