The best books that capture struggling war veterans returning to civilian life

I’m recommending The Sun Also Rises because it was the first book to capture the essence of soldiers who struggled to return to civilian life. They used alcohol to hide their pain and drown their PTSD, their struggles with masculinity or to regain it, and inability to love. I like the way this book captures the feelings soldiers have when they leave the service, such as loss of purpose. Soldiers today returning from the wars similarly struggle with alcohol, drug abuse, and all too prevalent suicide. However, the sun will rise tomorrow. 

The book is much more comprehensive than the film. For me this is an exemplary story of finding redemption and forgiveness after the worst of human imposed torture and misery. Like so many veterans, WWII veteran Louis Zamperini kills the war demon with alcohol. His relationship with his wife and family suffer until Billy Graham helps save him. One of the messages is that hatred will lead you down a self-destructive path. Overcoming your demons and finding forgiveness and redemption will set you free. I raced through this book.

I chose this series, not because of the fun crimes Scotland Yard Inspector Rutledge solves, but because he is a soldier from WWI who battles PTSD. He experiences some of the symptoms other soldiers had, or have, following a traumatic war experience. His dead corporal constantly pesters him throughout the series by being a voice in his head. Additionally, after his fiancée leaves him following the war, he has intimacy issues and cannot express his feelings for the woman he loves. To cope with his sleeplessness and PTSD, he immerses himself in the cases he’s assigned. This series, in part, inspired my book. 

I chose this historical fiction trilogy that explores British officers’ experience with shell shock, later defined as PTSD, during WWI because in that war it was first identified by doctors. It mixes fictional and historical characters, most notably poets Sigfried Sasson and Wilfred Owen, and their stay at a military psychiatric hospital, Craiglockhart in Scotland. Like the other books I recommend, this trilogy details the effects of war on a soldier’s identity and masculinity (many at the time thought these shell-shocked soldiers were less than men for not having a stiff, upper lip and carrying on). And Barker does it with sarcasm and clever dialogue. This trilogy shows how Freudian psychology was first used to treat those who had PTSD from the effects of war. The first book in this trilogy, in part, inspired my own book on the effects of a soldier returning from current wars. 

I chose Redeployment because it’s a quintessential collection of stories told through a contemporary lens about the monotony, and so often the absurdity, of soldiering in general, and combat oftentimes in particular, and the struggle soldiers have when they return to civilian life, which is difficult to say the least. This collection highlights many of life’s, or more particularly, war’s questions of purpose that so often reverberate in a soldier’s psyche long after they return home.