Elizabeth D. Samet and her students learned to romanticize the army "from the stories of their fathers and from the movies." For Samet, it was the old World War II movies she used to watch on TV, while her students grew up on Braveheart and Saving Private Ryan. Unlike their teacher, however, these students, cadets at the United States Military Academy at West Point, have decided to turn make-believe into real life. West Point is a world away from Yale, where Samet attended graduate school and where nothing sufficiently prepared her for teaching literature to young men and women who were training to fight a war. Intimate and poignant, Soldier's Heart chronicles the various tensions inherent in that life as well as the ways in which war has transformed Samet's relationship to literature. Fighting in Iraq, Samet's former students share what books and movies mean to them—the poetry of Wallace Stevens, the fiction of Virginia Woolf and J. M. Coetzee, the epics of Homer, or the films of James Cagney. Their letters in turn prompt Samet to wonder exactly what she owes to cadets in the classroom. Samet arrived at West Point before September 11, 2001, and has seen the academy change dramatically. In Soldier's Heart, she reads this transformation through her own experiences and those of her students. Forcefully examining what it means to be a civilian teaching literature at a military academy, Samet also considers the role of women in the army, the dangerous tides of religious and political zeal roiling the country, the uses of the call to patriotism, and the cult of sacrifice she believes is currently paralyzing national debate. Ultimately, Samet offers an honest and original reflection on the relationship between art and life.

The history of the government's treatment of returning combat veterans has been long absent from the public's awareness. Lately, a plethora of documentaries presenting the wounded veterans' plights are currently making their way into the American public's consciousness. After their initial treatments, the wounded service members from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan face an ongoing battle to receive appropriate care and financial assistance. The Department of Veteran Affairs has historically been drastically under funded, under staffed, and overworked. The costs and consequences of war are unpredictable. America is unprepared. A book most relevant to the current situation of our government's treatment of the homecoming warrior is Soldier's Heart by Lee Burkins. This book is possibly the most honest inquiry of war and its consequent trauma ever written by a combat soldier. Burkins, a former Green Beret, writes with the emotional firepower of an automatic weapon. Novelistic in nature, Soldier's Heart weaves and braids the grime, blood, and guts of the experience of war with the world's past historical treatment of the warrior returned home. He humorously reveals the uncompromising assault he and a handful of pugnacious veterans made upon the bureaucracy's neglect of the combatants. Sit in a Veterans rap group, walk the jungles with the tribal warriors Burkins led in combat and follow the inner world of a warrior's struggle to comprehend the reasons behind humanity's penchant for war and the government's reluctance to acknowledge the trauma now known as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. ( A story from Soldier's Heart

The commanding officer of an infantry battalion in Vietnam in 1969 recounts how he took over a demoralized unit of ordinary draftees and turned it into an elite fighting force, and describes its accomplishments.

In the wake of Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home and Art Spiegelman’s Maus comes cartoonist Carol Tyler’s multigenerational graphic memoir, You’ll Never Know. The author chronicles her fraught relationship with her father, Charles, a WWII veteran, and how the war affected their lives through both childhood and adulthood. You’ll Never Know is also a tribute to servicemen and women, dramatizing the trauma of the war on the Greatest Generation and those who followed. Tyler’s ink and watercolor narrative is in turns sprawling and gimlet-eyed: compassionate and enraged. Her father’s memories are woven into her own, which span her Catholic, Midwestern childhood; her troubled marriage; her daughter’s struggles; and her efforts to care for her aging parents. Even though Tyler’s work has an accessible, homemade feel (the organizing metaphor of the book is a photo album with “snapshots” of Tyler family life), You’ll Never Know is a sophisticated graphic work about war, love, and loss.

In June 1861, when the Civil War began, Charley Goddard enlisted in the First Minnesota Volunteers. He was 15. He didn't know what a "shooting war" meant or what he was fighting for. But he didn't want to miss out on a great adventure. The "shooting war" turned out to be the horror of combat and the wild luck of survival; how it feels to cross a field toward the enemy, waiting for fire. When he entered the service he was a boy. When he came back he was different; he was only 19, but he was a man with "soldier's heart," later known as "battle fatigue."

War and PTSD are on the public's mind as news stories regularly describe insurgency attacks in Iraq and paint grim portraits of the lives of returning soldiers afflicted with PTSD. These vets have recurrent nightmares and problems with intimacy, can’t sustain jobs or relationships, and won’t leave home, imagining “the enemy” is everywhere. Dr. Edward Tick has spent decades developing healing techniques so effective that clinicians, clergy, spiritual leaders, and veterans’ organizations all over the country are studying them. This book, presented here in an audio version, shows that healing depends on our understanding of PTSD not as a mere stress disorder, but as a disorder of identity itself. In the terror of war, the very soul can flee, sometimes for life. Tick's methods draw on compelling case studies and ancient warrior traditions worldwide to restore the soul so that the veteran can truly come home to community, family, and self.

To preserve our peace of mind and our way of life, the men and women of the United States military often sacrifice their youth-and sometimes even their lives. They steadfastly guard the futures of millions of people they will never meet. Now over seventy-five riveting stories bring to life these heroes and the loved ones they have fought for. Organized in six themed sections: patriotism, inspiration, faith on the frontlines, love and family, honor and sacrifice, and dedication and courage. Stories from a Soldier's Heart honors those who carry in their warrior hearts the world's hope for freedom.