For soldiers and their families, wars never end. The memories come home, occasionally in triumph, but more often in unpredictable and debilitating ways barely visible to the larger public. Most accounts rightly focus on the soldier's struggles. Compelling and revealing, Patrick Smithwick's War's Over, Come Home is a rare and intimate account from a family's vantage point, an essential perspective often missed. Their transcontinental efforts to find Iraq war veteran Andrew Smithwick-son, brother and once a friend to many-are a disturbing and eloquent testament to the cascading impact of a single case of PTSD. Smithwick, a gifted storyteller who has written an acclaimed trilogy about steeplechase racing, has noted elsewhere, "Not for a moment did I imagine that one day I'd be pulling blankets off the faces of homeless men in Seattle, San Diego, Santa Fe, New York, Baltimore, Orlando. Or tapping on their shoulders and asking, 'Is that you, Andrew?'" Despite its hopeless moments and recurring despair, War's Over, Come Home is, at its heart, a love story about a family's resilient and at times, blind commitment to finding Andrew. The sightings, the close calls, his brief return home are inspiring, yet thus far confounding and fruitless. When does one stop looking? War's Over, Come Home will strike home with a wide range of readers, from families similarly afflicted by PTSD to policymakers at the Pentagon, from family counselors to sociologists, and most of all to general readers curious about an otherwise invisible world.
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