Contains thirty-seven narratives, drawn from letters, diaries, private memoirs, and oral histories in which American veterans describe their experiences serving in conflicts from the First World War to the twenty-first-century war in Iraq.

Autobiography by Jack Gutman depicting his experiences in World War ll.

It was early morning, June 17, 1967, and Dak To Special Forces camp in Vietnam was under attack. A mortar exploded, and West Point graduate Allen B. Clark Jr.'s life was changed forever. This is the story of how one soldier, so gravely injured that both of his legs were amputated, turned his grievous loss into a personal triumph. Clark describes his struggle through a year-long recovery and a severe bout of post traumatic stress disorder, so little understood at the time. He tells of earning his MBA from Southern Methodist University and finding employment as a personal financial assistant to Ross Perot, of moving on to public service and founding the Combat Faith Ministry, a lay ministry to veterans. Clark's story of growth and spiritual fulfillment wrested from his wartime tragedy is a testament to the resilience of the human spirit and is of special relevance in our day of so many soldiers returning wounded in body and spirit from Iraq.

A boy asks his father for help after his teacher asks each of her pupils to name a veteran whom he or she knows. The boy soon discovers that many of the familiar people who work in his neighborhood are heroes who have served in the country's military.

Featured in the NY Emmy-nominated documentary New York City's Vietnam Veterans (CUNY-TV) A collection of heartrending oral histories that topples assumptions about the people who served in Vietnam The Vietnam War was a defining event for a generation of Americans. But for years, misguided and sometimes demeaning clichés about its veterans have proliferated widely. Philip F. Napoli's Bringing It All Back Home strips away the myths and reveals the complex individuals who served in Southeast Asia. Napoli was one of the chief researchers for Tom Brokaw's The Greatest Generation, and in the spirit of that enterprise, his oral histories recast our understanding of a war and its legacy. Napoli introduces a remarkable group of young New Yorkers who went abroad with high hopes only to find a bewildering conflict. We meet a nurse who staged a hunger strike to promote peace while working at a field hospital; a paratrooper whose experiences on the battlefield left him with emotional scars that led to violence and homelessness; a black soldier who achieved an unexpected camaraderie with his fellow servicemen in racially tense times; and a university administrator who helped to create New York City's Vietnam Veterans Memorial. Some of Napoli's soldiers became active opponents of the war; others did not. But all returned with a powerful urge to understand the death and destruction they had seen. Overcoming adversity, a great many would go on to lead ambitious lives of public service. Tracing their journeys from the streets of Brooklyn and Queens to the banks of the Mekong, and back to the most glamorous corporations and meanest homeless shelters of New York City, Napoli reveals the variety and surprising vibrancy of the ex-soldiers' experiences. "For almost everyone the time in Vietnam was the most exciting and the most alive time of your life," one veteran recalls. He adds: "I still have this little trick . . . When I lie down and go to sleep, if there's something bothering me, I say, 'You're warm, you're dry, and there is no one shooting at you.'"

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