Military Veterans: Recommended Books

A brilliant graphic memoir, and a loving son's exploration of his tumultuous relationship with his father, told through the lens of the Vietnam War and its lasting effects long after returning home.

An in-depth and troubling look at a little-known group of immigrants-non-citizen soldiers who enlist in the US military. While the popular image of the US military is one of citizen soldiers protecting their country, the reality is that nearly 5 percent of all first-time military recruits are noncitizens. Their reasons for enlisting are myriad, but many are motivated by the hope of gaining citizenship in return for their service. In Green Card Soldier, Sofya Aptekar talks to more than seventy noncitizen soldiers from twenty-three countries, including some who were displaced by conflict after the US military entered their homeland.

Everything in 2034 is an imaginative extrapolation from present-day facts on the ground combined with the authors years working at the highest and most classified levels of national security. Sometimes it takes a brilliant work of fiction to illuminate the most dire of warnings: 2034 is all too close at hand, and this cautionary tale presents the reader a dark yet possible future that we must do all we can to avoid.

Spotlights the challenges faced by our increasing cadre of military women when their service ends and they become civilians. Combining research with narrative, this book exposes common threads of lived experience and reviews the latest data on military women.

Since the first English settlers landed at Jamestown with the legacy of centuries of European warfare in tow, the military has been an omnipresent part of America. This book explores this relationship from its origins in the thirteen colonies to today's ongoing conflicts in the Middle East.

This book presents the latest in neuroscience and resiliency research alongside the personal stories of military veterans to advocate for an empirically validated training protocol.

After completing military service, veterans can have a difficult time finding employment when returning to civilian life. This book is designed to help all transitioning military personnel, regardless of service, branch, rank, rating, time in service, time in grade, or specialty.

Former Navy SEAL Senior Chief James Hatch tells a fierce, moving tale of being badly wounded on a special ops mission that ended his two-decades-long military career; his searing recovery; and the struggle to live life off the speeding train of war.

In Wounds of War, Gordon describes how the VHA, tasked with a challenging patient population, does a better job than private sector institutions offering primary and geriatric care, mental health and home care services, and support for patients nearing the end of life.

An invaluable resource for veterans seeking clear, actionable guidance to navigate the often complex landscape of VA benefits and assistance programs.

Cristina-Ioana Dragomir profiles Lily, Alexa, and Vikrant, three immigrants of varying nationalities and backgrounds who chose military service as their way of becoming American citizens. Privileging the trio's own words and experiences, Dragomir crafts a human-focused narrative that moves from their lives in their home countries and decisions to join the military to their fraught naturalization processes within the service.

This book analyzes these military women's portrayals in world cinema, examining movies from Israel, the United Kingdom, Italy, the United States, Japan and others. It includes theatrical releases, direct-to-video productions, and made-for-television films. Chapters organize films by decade produced, and topics covered include the women's sexuality, maternal and marital status; leadership skills; actual jobs performed; and the accuracy of depiction. The book also discusses how each film reflects the contemporary social issues of the nation in which it was produced.

At War with Women reveals how post-9/11 politics of gender and development have transformed US military power. In the mid-2000s, the US military used development as a weapon as it revived counterinsurgency in Iraq and Afghanistan. The military assembled all-female teams to reach households and wage war through development projects in the battle for "hearts and minds." This book provides an analysis of US imperialism that keeps the present in tension with the past, clarifying where colonial ideologies of race, gender, and sexuality have resurfaced and how they are changing today.

Despite the bias and mistreatment most Mexican Americans faced in the US, some 500,000 fought bravely for their country during World War II. Their stories range from hair-raising accounts of the Battle of the Bulge to gut-wrenching testimony about cannibalism in the Pacific.

This book tells the stories of freeborn northern African Americans in Philadelphia struggling to maintain families while fighting against racial discrimination. Taking a long view, from 1850 to the 1920s, Holly A. Pinheiro Jr. shows how Civil War military service worsened already difficult circumstances due to its negative effects on family finances, living situations, minds, and bodies. At least seventy-nine thousand African Americans served in northern USCT regiments.

The US military has done an about-face on gender and sexuality policy over the last decade, ending Don't Ask, Don't Tell, restrictions on women in combat, and transgender exclusion. Contrary to expectations, servicemembers have largely welcomed LGB inclusion--yet they continue to vociferously resist trans inclusion and the presence of women on the front lines. In this book, Cati Connell identifies the homonormative bargain that underwrites these uneven patterns of reception and whose gains have come with significant concessions.

In 2017, President Obama, in his final Oval Office interview, was asked who gave him hope for the future of the country, and Jason Kander was the first name he mentioned. Suddenly, Jason was a national figure. As observers assumed he was preparing a run for the presidency, Jason announced a bid for mayor of Kansas City instead and was headed for a landslide victory. But after eleven years battling PTSD from his service in Afghanistan, Jason was seized by depression and suicidal thoughts. He dropped out of the mayor's race and out of public life. And finally, he sought help.

The letters of Sgt. Percy Smith, a World War II soldier, and his memories as an aging veteran reveal how military training, wartime, and occupation brought out strengths, vulnerabilities, and changing judgments about fellow soldiers, military leadership, the enemy population, and home.

Explore the physical, emotional, social, economic, and psychological impact of military service and the problems that veterans face when they return to civilian life.

The book provides a structured methodology for building interest and trust among veterans to conduct interviews, design oral history projects, archive and use these oral history interviews.

Wartime military service is held up as a marker of civic duty and patriotism, yet the rewards of veteran status have never been equally distributed. Certain groups of military veterans: women, people of color, LGBTQ people, and former service members with stigmatizing conditions, discharges, or criminal records, have been left out of official histories, excised from national consciousness, and denied state recognition and military benefits.

Southern Voices: Biet Dong and the National Liberation Front presents oral histories from former members of an elite squad of Viet Cong operatives, focusing on their experiences during what is known, in Vietnam, as the American War. Author Michael Robert Dedrick conducted interviews with eight former Biet Dong (the equivalent of Ranger or Special Forces divisions in the US military) and sheds new light on this clandestine group.

This collection of seventy oral histories, drawn from across the country, features interviews conducted by the author and his colleagues for their American Radio Works documentary, Korea: The Unfinished War, which examines the conflict as experienced by the approximately 600,000 Black men and women who served.

You've served your country, now let the country serve you Veterans Benefits Guide For Dummies is your clear and concise guide to the benefits available to you from the VA and other government organizations. You have access to physical and mental healthcare, financial services, long-term planning, education, and much more.

An engaging collection of essays focusing on American veterans. This book considers veterans in America and the ways in which our society needs better to understand who they are and what they have done on the nation's behalf--and the responsibilities that follow this recognition.

War at the Margins offers a broad comparative view of the impact of World War II on Indigenous societies. Using historical and ethnographic sources, Lin Poyer examines how Indigenous communities emerged from the trauma of the wartime era with social forms and cultural ideas that laid the foundations for their twenty-first-century emergence as players on the world's political stage. With a focus on Indigenous voices and agency, a global overview reveals the enormous range of wartime activities and impacts on these groups, connecting this work with comparative history, Indigenous studies, and anthropology.