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.
Symbols & Motifs
Trees
For Amanda Doster, trees represent the idea of who her husband James was to her:
‘No, the tree has to be done tomorrow,’ she is saying into the phone. She is talking to the owner of a nursery who dug up a baby maple tree at the old house that had been planted in honor of James. For months, it has been at the nursery, surviving on a drip line. He had promised to replant it at the new house on the third anniversary of James’s death, and now is saying he might not be able to get a crew. ‘It’s a big deal,’ Amanda says, near tears” (109).
The next day, as part of her plans for the anniversary of his death, Amanda takes their daughters to James’s grave marker. He is not buried there; rather, it’s where markers are erected for soldiers who are MIA, buried at sea, or cremated. While there, Amanda spots a perfect little acorn that’s dropped to ground near James’s headstone. Grace, one of Amanda’s daughters, puts it in her pocket, and Amanda then gets the idea to take it home. She places the acorn in a jar of sawdust James kept: “‘So if all goes well, come spring, we will plant an oak tree,’ she tells the girls with a sense of anticipation.” (123)
Amanda sees the tree as a representation of what James was and is to her: strength, grace and shelter. Something that bends but won’t break. It also represents what she feels James gave to her: stability and order.
Schumann’s Boat
Schumann purchases a boat once he’s back from serving:
It cost $17,000, trailer included, $2000 down, the rest easily financed for an American warrior, just sign here and thank you for your service, and when Adam and Saskia took it out on the lake, they became for those hours the people they imagined themselves to be. Adam, unbroken. Saskia afloat at last upon the life that was her promise. Zoe, being pulled behind the boat on an inner tube, soaked and laughing. Life was okay. That’s how they felt on the boat (83).
The boat affords the Schumanns a sense of normalcy their life has been lacking. They feel on top of the world, a happy family, enjoying things typical of a family. Later, Schumann finds a different boat in the woods near his home. The boat ties Schumann to his dad: “It was his father who taught him about boats and about fixing them. He’d had a skiff, too, much like this one, and just before he left, he and Adam had spent the afternoon on it” (85).
Schumann works on the boat and drifts for a bit in the river, then tries the motor. It does nothing, and he realizes it’s the battery. He can’t afford a new one. He paddles back: “It takes him some time, but eventually he is back home. He had really wanted a boat” (86).
For Schumann, this pair of boats represent the happy civilian life he can’t seem to maintain. The first boat has to be returned because he can’t make payments on it; the skills Schumann learned in the military not translating to a promising job thereafter. The second boat he also can’t get to function. While Schumann puts in the effort, he can’t get the results. The same thing can be said for many other aspects of his postwar life: no matter how hard Schumann tries, things seem to work out badly for him, until he enters treatment.
Houses/Homes
When Schumann was on his third and final deployment, Saskia found a small house and fixed it up. But when he came home, Schumann wasn’t ready to be around a lot of people yet, so they rented it out and moved to a farmhouse in the country. Then they had car trouble and they were just too far away from any sort of city center. So they moved back to the little house. It’s too small and not the nicest, but they can’t go anywhere else, as they are barely staying ahead of bills.
At first, Amanda Doster insists she will never leave her home when she finds out her husband, James, has been killed while serving. But after her money from the army and her insurance money comes in, she does move, though not far. The house is lovely, and big. She cannot fill it up, and struggles to maintain it to her ideal.
Tausolo and his wife, Theresa, move into an apartment complex where two soldiers recently committed suicide. As Tausolo is overwhelmed by his PTSD, and particularly the nightmares of Harrelson, he has punched holes in doors, gouged the walls with the things he throws. He is damaged internally, and therefore lashes out, damaging his domestic space.
Stephen and Christina have different issues relating to their home. Stephen served with Schumann during Schumann’s first deployment. Stephen, in a subsequent deployment without Schuman, is badly injured and comes home with severe PTSD and TBI. He has been told the more hobbies he has, the better. But now there is nowhere Christina can escape to in the house for peace of mind. It is cluttered with snakes and their assorted paraphernalia. Stephen also builds rockets, and they are all over the house. Additionally, he has begun putting together a museum of war items, with items from Vietnam and WWII, and has many of his own things encased in glass displays. They can’t live in a healthy way in their home because his hobby therapy keeps them from really living in the present.
Finkel writes that Kristy Robinson “has begun repainting the walls in the house where she stayed with her husband as long as she could, until finally, too frightened to remain, she took their baby and fled” (159). He goes on to say:
She is back living in the house now with their daughter, Summer, who was ten months old [at the time of Jessie’s suicide]. The kitchen floor still has nicks in it from the day he toppled the china cabinet. The door at the end of the hallway is still gouged from the framed family pictures that he picked up and flung. The walls are dented and scuffed from the furniture he overturned (160-61).
The houses in each family’s story bears scars or tells tales that function as symbols of the soldiers’ trauma. The hurt and pain they feel inside manifests, in nearly every case, in their respective domestic spaces.
