Veteran & Military-Connected Students Guide to the Library: Books & Other Library Materials

When it comes to veteran mental health, there are some preconceived notions about what it means. After over a decade and a half of sustained combat operations and high operational tempo, the topic of veteran mental health has emerged into the public consciousness.This book is a collection of articles that first appeared on the Head Space and Timing blog, ranging from reflections on how to raise accurate awareness about veteran mental health, to discussions about how to see veteran mental health as mental wellness instead of mental illness. Developing a greater understanding about the importance of and the need for stable and positive veteran mental health can lead to a post-military life that all service members desire.

When combat veteran and retired Army Noncommissioned Officer Duane France retired, he knew he wanted to continue to serve his fellow veterans. As a grandson, nephew, and son of combat veterans, he grew up knowing the impact of combat and military service on veterans and their families, and as a leader with five combat and operational deployments, he saw the same things happening in the service members of his generation. After starting to work as a clinical mental health counselor exclusively for veterans and their spouses, Duane started to write his observations and experiences on his blog, Head Space and Timing. This book is a collection of 52 articles designed to help veterans, those who support them, and those who care for them to understand the military experience and to change the way they think about veteran mental health.

Duane France is a retired Army Noncommissioned Officer, combat veteran, and clinical mental health counselor. With his blend of lived experience and clinical training, this book explores the need to undergo a psychological transition from one phase of life to another. Whether a service member is carrying the impact of past experiences, currently undergoing transition and change, or are trying to establish who they will become, Military in the Rear View Mirror can help service members, veterans, their families, and those who support them understand more about the military mindset.

Eric Burleson describes the unique psychological challenges that veterans face as they transition out of the military and provides an actionable framework to address those challenges. Combining research from neuroscience, clinical psychology, psychiatry, and focusing specifically on the veteran experience, This book provides information and exercises to ease the transition process for those who served our country.

The military experience offers a domain of inquiry about the human condition that can often be instructive about other life spheres as well. Accordingly, this book covers a wide spectrum of study that can help us to better understand the lives of military personnel, veterans, and their families.

Veterans' Journeys Home is a vivid portrayal of military life and its aftermath for US troops who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan. Highlighting the challenges US veterans face in today's changing military culture, the book depicts the haunting and visceral memories of returning soldiers, conversations with mental health providers, and offers an alternative approach to healing the emotional wounds of war. For anyone seeking a deeper understanding of the human costs of recent wars this book is invaluable. It combines a moving narrative with a penetrating analysis of the welfare and post-conflict treatment of veterans.

Shauna 'Doc' Springer is a licensed psychologist and one of the world's leading experts on psychological trauma, military transition, suicide prevention, and close relationships. In Warrior: How to Support Those Who Protect Us, Doc Springer offers an intimate, truthful account of how our bravest citizens may struggle, and provides actionable insights and real solutions for mental crises.

From Marine sniper Jake Wood, a riveting memoir of leading over 100,000 veterans to a life of renewed service, volunteering to battle, hurricanes, tornados, wildfires, pandemics, and civil wars, and inspiring onlookers as their unique military training saved lives and rebuilt our country. When Jake Wood arrived in the States after two grueling tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, he watched his unit lose more men to suicide than to enemy hands overseas. Reeling, Jake looked for a way to direct their restlessness towards a new mission--and put their formidable skills to good use.

When an earthquake struck Haiti in 2010, Jake had his answer. He convinced several fellow veterans to join him on a ragtag mission to provide desperately needed aid. Despite the high stakes, they were able to untangle complex problems quickly and keep calm under pressure.In this raw, adrenaline-filled narrative, Jake recounts, how, over the past 10 years, he's built the disaster response organization Team Rubicon, and seen the work provide a lifeline back to purpose for the heroes among us. Not only do these intrepid volunteers race against the clock to aid communities after Hurricane Sandy, Hurricane Harvey, COVID-19, and hundreds of other disasters; they also fight for something just as important--each other.

On November 21, 2010, U.S. Marine Lance Corporal Kyle Carpenter was posted atop a building in violent Helmand Province, Afghanistan, when an enemy grenade skittered toward him and fellow Marine Nick Eufrazio. Without hesitation, Carpenter jumped on the grenade, saving Eufrazio but sacrificing himself. Severely wounded, it took dozens of surgeries and almost three years to reconstruct his body--yet his spirit was unbroken. This is his story of how he battled back from the gravest challenge to forge a life of joyful purpose.

The Vietnam War was one of the most heavily documented conflicts of the twentieth century. The political and cultural changes the war brought about continue to resonate, even as a new generation of Americans grapples with its own divisive conflict. America and the Vietnam War: Re-examining the Culture and History of a Generation reconsiders the social and cultural aspects of the conflict that helped to fundamentally change the nation. With chapters written by subject area specialists, America and the Vietnam War takes on subjects such as women's role in the war, the music and the films of the time, the Vietnamese perspective, race and the war, and veterans and post-traumatic stress disorder.

In recent years, the question of war and sacrifice has been a major topic of political debate and controversy. If our country goes to war for reasons we endorse, what is our responsibility to share in its sacrifices? Does supporting a war mean serving in it? Does it mean encouraging our children to do so? Such questions have been posed by the so-called 'chickenhawk' phenomenon: pro-war leaders and their pro-war children who call on Americans to assume the burden of war and its sacrifices, but avoid those sacrifices themselves. President Bush and other architects of the Iraq conflict were the most prominent chickenhawks. Cheyney C. Ryan argues that the chickenhawk issue is not just a matter of personalities_it will remain with us for a long time even though the Bush administration has left office. Ryan poses fundamental questions of war and personal sacrifice, pointing to the basic disconnection in American politics generally between the support for war and the willingness to assume its costs, which he calls 'Alienated War.' Calling for the reinvigoration of civic involvement, this illuminating and insightful book offers both a philosophical and historical exploration of America's citizen-soldier tradition and the consequences involved in separating the citizenry from the armed forces.

Far from the bright picture found in propaganda and nostalgia, the Second World War was a grim and brutal affair, a long and lonely effort that has never been fully reported. Revealing the true costs of conflict on those who fought, The Deserters is an elegant and unforgettable story of ordinary men desperately struggling in extraordinary times. Journalist Charles Glass delves deep into army archives, personal diaries, court-martial records, and self-published memoirs to produce this dramatic and heartbreaking portrait of men overlooked by their commanders and ignored by history. Surveying the 150,000 American and British soldiers known to have deserted in the European Theater, The Deserters: A Hidden History of World War II tells the life stories of three soldiers who abandoned their posts in France, Italy, and Africa. Their deeds form the backbone of Glass's arresting portrait of soldiers pushed to the breaking point, a sweeping reexamination of the conditions for ordinary soldiers. With the grace and pace of a novel, The Deserters moves beyond the false extremes of courage and cowardice to reveal the true experience of the frontline soldier.

A forgotten history that explores how army veterans returning to reservation life after World War I transformed Native American identity. Drawing from archival sources and oral histories, Thomas Grillot demonstrates how the relationship between Native American tribes and the United States was reinvented in the years following World War I. During that conflict, twelve thousand Native American soldiers served in the U.S. Army. They returned home to their reservations with newfound patriotism, leveraging their veteran cachet for political power and claiming all the benefits of citizenship-even supporting the termination policy that ended the U.S. government's recognition of tribal sovereignty.

A Foxhole View is a powerful and moving oral history of the Korean War. Here are highly personal accounts of the war from the rank and file of the infantry--told in the distinctive voices of Hawaii's soldiers.

The definitive history of World War II from the African American perspective, written by civil rights expert and Dartmouth history professor Matthew Delmont. Over one million Black men and women served in World War II. Black troops were at Normandy, Iwo Jima, and the Battle of the Bulge, serving in segregated units and performing unheralded but vital support jobs, only to be denied housing and educational opportunities on their return home. Without their crucial contributions to the war effort, the United States could not have won the war. And yet the stories of these Black veterans have long been ignored.

In 1861, Francis Moore appeared to be a perfectly ordinary, twenty-three year old man: a carriage maker in the bustling Mississippi River town of Quincy, Illinois. And there he might well have lived out his life in unadventurous comfort. But then the Civil War burst out, and Moore, along with most of his friends, like young men North and South, rushed to enlist in the army. His cavalry regiment soon set off for what proved to be four years of warfare, plunging him into harrowing experiences of battle that would have been unimaginable back in his small hometown and that uprooted him, body and soul, for the remainder of his life. Enter The Story of My Campaign, the remarkable Civil War memoir of Captain Francis T. Moore, which historian Thomas Bahde here offers in an original edition to contemporary readers for the first time.

With US soldiers stationed around the world and engaged in multiple conflicts, Americans will be forced for the foreseeable future to come to terms with those permanently disabled in battle. At the moment, we accept rehabilitation as the proper social and cultural response to the wounded, swiftly returning injured combatants to their civilian lives. But this was not always the case, as Beth Linker reveals in this provocative book. Linker explains how, before entering World War I, the United States sought a way to avoid the enormous cost of providing injured soldiers with pensions, which it had done since the Revolutionary War. Emboldened by their faith in the new social and medical sciences, reformers pushed rehabilitation as a means to "rebuild" disabled soldiers, relieving the nation of a monetary burden and easing the decision to enter the Great War. Linker's narrative moves from the professional development of orthopedic surgeons and physical therapists to the curative workshops, or hospital spaces where disabled soldiers learned how to repair automobiles as well as their own artificial limbs. The story culminates in the postwar establishment of the Veterans Administration, one of the greatest legacies to come out of the First World War.

The Wounded World recounts the dramatic story of W. E. B. Du Bois's reckoning with the betrayal of Black soldiers during World War I--and a new understanding of one of the great twentieth-century writers. When W. E. B. Du Bois, believing in the possibility of full citizenship and democratic change, encouraged African Americans to "close ranks" and support the Allied cause in World War I, he made a decision that would haunt him for the rest of his life. Seeking both intellectual clarity and personal atonement, for more than two decades Du Bois attempted to write the definitive history of Black participation in World War I. His book, however, remained unfinished. In The Wounded World, Chad Williams offers the dramatic account of Du Bois's failed efforts to complete what would have been one of his most significant works. The surprising story of this unpublished book offers new insight into Du Bois's struggles to reckon with both the history and the troubling memory of the war, along with the broader meanings of race and democracy for Black people in the twentieth century.

The guide for student veterans who want to win the college battle. Utilize the unique skills and discipline you gained in the military to succeed in higher education. In ten straightforward lessons designed by a veteran for veterans, you will learn how to navigate the transition to civilian life, build your team and resume, deal with with political professors, and endure to graduation. Maintain your military bearing and unwavering determination in your next chapter. Make your college success nonnegotiable. You've earned the GI Bill, and now it's time to grit your teeth and use it.

Tracing the college experiences of Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans, Ellen Moore challenges the popular narratives that explain student veterans' academic difficulties while showing how these narratives and institutional support for the military lead to suppression of campus debate about the wars, discourage anti-war activism, and encourage a growing militarization.

A smart, snappy, and comprehensive guide for the millions of adults who are thinking about going--or going back--to college and want to know how to do it right. For younger and older adults alike, starting or returning to school presents different challenges than those encountered by teens fresh out of high school and heading straight to college. Countless Americans take on this task while working, raising kids, caring for parents, volunteering, serving in the military--and in some cases all of the above. Never Too Late will help readers jump-start a new professional path or speed down the one they're already on. This book offers an essential reference for adults seeking a richer life--and a meaningful place in our rapidly changing economy and world.

See Me for Who I Am is a powerful collection of 20 thought-provoking essays by student veterans. Their stories aim to undermine stereotypes created by popular media, and bridge the gap dividing them from those they fought to protect.

Taking Flight by Perry LaRoque, Ph.D. is the essential guide to college that provides practical information and strategies for the millions of diverse learners, nontraditional students, and people with disabilities who attend college every year. The book was written for students who learn differently, have disabilities, or are overwhelmed by the prospects of a complex college landscape, but is also a must-read guide for parents, educators, and support professionals. Currently only 20% of diverse learners who start college will actually graduate. This statistic can change with the right support and requisite knowledge, and Taking Flight is that first step toward graduation. LaRoque explores these topics by using personal stories, humor, frank advice, and years of expertise. Taking Flight addresses the truly relevant topics and issues needed for happiness and success in college and provides readers with not only how to do well in the system, but how to overcome a system not designed for today's diverse learners.

With the passage of the Post-9/11 GI Bill in 2008, more than 1.4 million service members and their families became eligible for higher education benefits, and veterans from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan enrolled in colleges and universities in record numbers. The first wave of research about these new student veterans focused primarily on describing their characteristics and the transition from military service to civilian life and the college campus. This new edited collection presents findings from the second wave of research about student veterans, with a focus on data-driven evidence of academic success factors, including persistence, retention, degree completion, and employment after college.

After years of dedicated service, leaving might be the hardest mission for any military leader. If you're standing at the threshold of transition, fear and uncertainty are unspoken obstacles that can erode your confidence and excitement for what comes next. If you've already transitioned, you might still be struggling to find your place in society. No matter what you're feeling or where you are in this process, Jason Roncoroni and Dr. Shauna Springer want to partner with you on the journey for what happens next. Jason, an executive coach, and Doc Springer, a licensed psychologist, have combined their expertise and decades of experience to create the most comprehensive guide available for military leaders seeking happiness and fulfillment in life after the military. Beyond the Military applies the military decision-making process to help you confidently navigate transition.

After twenty years of combat and counter-insurgency, a generation of Afghan, Iraq, and Global War on Terror veterans struggle to integrate back into civilian society and lead productive lives. As the wars these men and women have participated in continue--while they simultaneously recede to the past--many feel a sense of estrangement from their country, friends, and prior lives. In Front toward Enemy: War, Veterans, and the Homefront, Daniel R. Green uses his own experiences with war from having served five military and civilian tours in Afghanistan and Iraq and provides a different perspective on the transition home. This book bridges the gap between war veterans and their fellow citizens, sheds light on the quiet conversations that take place among veterans about their experiences, and enriches the collective understanding of how wars affect people.

Each year nearly 250,000 servicemembers transition to the civilian world. Faced with numerous forks in the road, most servicemembers and their families want useful advice on making smart re-careering, relocation, and retirement decisions. Representing the most comprehensive treatment of the subject, this book is jam-packed with essential information on the details of finding employment, relocating to great communities, and starting a business. Includes timeless tips on identifying skills, setting goals, writing resumes, networking, conducting an online job search, attending job fairs, contacting military-friendly employers, interviewing, accepting job offers, advancing careers, and much more.

Ever since the days of Homer, warriors have faced an epic battle for which many were ill-prepared - coming home after a life of military service. Whether you served three years or thirty, transitioning to civilian life is an Odyssey in its own right. Despite over 40,000 veteran advocacy organizations trying to assist military members, massive corporate hiring programs for veterans, and increased efforts by the Department of Defense, veteran transition is tough stuff - not just for our military service members but their families as well. Many veterans say that transition to civilian life is the biggest obstacle they've ever faced.

What if it didn't have to be this way? What if everything you needed for a happy and prosperous transition was already inside you? What if the very warrior ethos forged in the mission-focused environment of military service was the single greatest asset in your kit bag? Mission America combines a no B.S. look at the realities of military transition and an eye-opening perspective on how to leverage the highly relevant warrior attributes you already possess.

Since 9/11 and before, American warriors have faced combat in difficult and adverse theaters with dedication, courage, and remarkable inner fortitude. Our nation supports them during their time in the fight, and "thank you for your service" has become a common civilian affirmation. But what happens when these men and women return from the battlefield? What is waiting for them at home? How does our society prepare these indispensable citizens for the confusion, absurdity, and trauma of their transition back to everyday life? Marine combat veteran David J. Danelo's message is simple--those who return to peace after war possess a power that must be discovered, honored, and treasured. The Return: A Field Manual for Life After Combat tells how our military and civilian cultures can protect and nurture this potent gift.

Ask combat veterans to name the worst experience of their lives, and they'll probably tell you it was war. But ask them to choose the best experience, and they'll usually say it was war, too. For those who haven't served in combat, this is nearly impossible to understand. The spectrum of emotions experienced by a combat veteran is far wider than that experienced in civilian life, and for that reason it can be hard for a veteran to re-assimilate.

What is it about war that soldiers miss? This is a question every civilian should try to understand. Weaving together a wide range of stories, from the flight deck of a U.S. aircraft carrier off Syria to climbing a forbidden Himalayan pass into Tibet, this moving, insightful book explains one of the most everlasting human pursuits--war. But it is also about coming home and confronting another kind of struggle, which we all share--the search for happiness. In this collection, Nolan Peterson writes of war from the perspective of both combatant and witness, taking us from missions over Afghanistan as an Air Force special ops pilot to the frontlines against ISIS in Iraq, and to trench and tank battles in Ukraine. Interweaving his reports with a narrative of his own transformation from combat pilot to war journalist, he explores a timeless paradox: Why does coming home from war feel like such a disappointment?

Paul Baumer enlisted with his classmates in the German army of World War I. Youthful, enthusiastic, they become soldiers. But despite what they have learned, they break into pieces under the first bombardment in the trenches. And as horrible war plods on year after year, Paul holds fast to a single vow: to fight against the principles of hate that meaninglessly pits young men of the same generation but different uniforms against each other--if only he can come out of the war alive.

National Book Award finalist, Iraq war veteran, novelist and poet Kevin Powers creates a deeply affecting portrait of a life shaped by war. Letter Composed During a Lull in the Fighting captures the many moments that comprise a soldier's life: driving down the Texas highway; waiting for the unknown in the dry Iraq heat; writing a love letter; listening to a mother recount her dreams. Written with evocative language and discernment, Powers's poetry strives to make sense of the war and its echoes through human experience.

One early morning on a Norfolk beach in Virginia, a dead body is discovered by a man taking his daily swim--Arman Bajalan, formerly an interpreter in Iraq. After narrowly surviving an assassination attempt that killed his wife and child, Arman has been given lonely sanctuary in the US as a maintenance worker at the Sea Breeze Motel. Now, convinced that the body is connected to his past, he knows he is still not safe. Seasoned detective Catherine Wheel and her newly minted partner have little to go on beyond a bus ticket in the dead man's pocket. It leads them to Sally Ewell, a local journalist as grief-stricken as Arman is by the Iraq War, who is investigating a corporation on the cusp of landing a multi-billion-dollar government defense contract. As victims mount around Arman, taking the team down wrong turns and towards startling evidence, they find themselves in a race, committed to unraveling the truth and keeping Arman alive--even if it costs them absolutely everything.

Matterhorn is an epic war novel in the tradition of Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead and James Jones's The Thin Red Line. It tells the story of a young Marine lieutenant, Waino Mellas, and his comrades in Bravo Company, who are dropped into the mountain jungle of Vietnam as boys and forced to fight their way into manhood. Standing in their way are not merely the North Vietnamese but also monsoon rain and mud, leeches and tigers, disease and malnutrition. Almost as daunting, it turns out, are the obstacles they discover between each other: racial tension, competing ambitions, and duplicitous superior officers. But when the company finds itself surrounded and outnumbered by a massive enemy regiment, the Marines are thrust into the raw and all-consuming terror of combat. The experience will change them forever.

Phil Klay's short-story collection Redeployment takes readers to the frontlines of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, reflecting on what happened there and what happened to the soldiers who returned. Interwoven with themes of brutality and faith, guilt and fear, helplessness and survival, the characters in these stories struggle to make meaning out of chaos. A Morturary Affairs Marine tells about his experiences collecting remains--of U.S. and Iraqi soldiers both. A chaplain sees his understanding of Christianity, and his ability to provide solace through religion, tested by the actions of a ferocious Colonel. A young Foreign Service Officer is given the absurd task of helping Iraqis improve their lives by teaching them to play baseball. These stories reveal the intricate combination of monotony, bureaucracy, comradeship and violence that make up a soldier's daily life at war, and the isolation, remorse, and despair that can accompany a soldier's homecoming. Across nations and continents, Klay sets in devastating relief the two worlds a soldier inhabits: one of extremes and one of loss.

A classic work of American literature that has not stopped changing minds and lives since it burst onto the literary scene, The Things They Carried is a ground-breaking meditation on war, memory, imagination, and the redemptive power of storytelling. The Things They Carried depicts the men of Alpha Company: Jimmy Cross, Henry Dobbins, Rat Kiley, Mitchell Sanders, Norman Bowker, Kiowa, and the character Tim O'Brien, who has survived his tour in Vietnam to become a father and writer at the age of forty-three.

Eden lies in a hospital bed, unable to move or speak. His wife Mary spends every day on the sofa in his room. We see them through the eyes of Eden's best friend, a fellow Marine who didn't make it back home--and who must relive the secrets held between all three of them as he waits for Eden to join him in whatever comes after. A breathtakingly spare and shattering novel that explores the unseen aftereffects--and unacknowledged casualties--of war, Waiting for Eden is a piercingly insightful, deeply felt meditation on loyalty, friendship, betrayal, and love.