On June 14, 1911, the largest ship in the world left the docks in Southampton, 80 miles southwest of London, on her maiden voyage to America. Topped by four smokestacks and stretching nearly three football fields long, the imposing vessel sailed first to Cherbourg, directly across the English Channel in France, then to Queenstown, Ireland, then through the iceberg-filled Arctic Ocean to New York City.

The seven-day voyage to New York was uneventful. The Olympic was the first of three new liners that would be sailing between the Southampton and New York City. During World War I, the Olympic carried troops and cargo in support of the war. Then she remained in service as an ocean liner until1935, when the Depression and competition made large ships much less profitable.

Her sister ship, the Britannic, launched in 1914, had brief pre-war service as a passenger ship, and then was refitted as a hospital ship for the war. It was sunk by a mine in 1916. The third Olympic-class ship was launched in 1912. Its maiden voyage was cut short by an iceberg, as were the lives of most of its passengers.

Never heard of the Olympic or the Britannic? Nor have most of us. But we have all heard of the other sister ship. The voyage of the Titanic is as well known in Beijing as it is in Brisbane, Bangalore, and Baltimore.

The soldiers in David Finkel's book Thank You for Your Service are the Titanic. If War is Hell, Finkel shows the reader of this grim book that life after war can be as bad as—or even worse than—war itself. Finkel's relentless chronicle of two surviving soldiers, two soldiers who take their own lives, the widow of a soldier killed in Iraq, and the soldiers' families left me exhausted.

In addition to following the lives of enlisted soldiers and their families in the aftermath of war, Finkel takes us to the top of the Army's chain of command for a look at how the vice chief of staff of the Army leads the effort to cut the suicide rate among soldiers. He also shows us the people trying to help soldiers or get help for them.

If Finkel wrote a similar book about Olympic-class vessels, it would chronicle a half-dozen survivors and a widow from the Titanic along with a few of the people trying to help them.

It would be easy for most readers to come away from this book angry at the Veterans Administration, or at Congress, or the President, or anyone else who is supposed to be caring for the veterans of our wars. I am a soldier and the father of three women in their early 20s. In those very conflicting roles, I am happy the women in the lives of the soldiers in this book stood by their men when they came back from Iraq depressed, abusive, and dangerous to everyone around them. But in at least two cases, the father in me was hoping those abused wives would take their children and run.

The wrenching problems Finkel documents so well have a larger context that this book does not address. When I told my wife about this book, her first reaction was, "You came back so normal." We really hadn't talked about it much, but it was clear she was and is relieved that I did not return depressed, sad, angry, lonely, bitter, or lost—one or more of these would be an average-to-good day for the soldiers and their families in Finkel's book.

The significance of the title of this book deserves its own examination. People who live in the most populated parts of America have little contact with soldiers, except to say "Thank you for your service" in an airport or a restaurant.

People walk up to me in airports and restaurants and thank me for my service. They buy my coffee at Starbucks. They smile. This may seem trivial. But I first enlisted in 1972, during the Viet Nam war, three months before my draft number came up. I was 18. Less than two years later, with the draft ended and the war winding down, I flew home in uniform. My right hand and right eye were bandaged. My face was swollen from the bits of metal still lodged in my skin. I would fully recover after being blinded and peppered with shrapnel in a live-fire missile testing accident.

No one in Logan Airport, Boston, thanked me for my service.

One of the heart-wrenching scenes in the book takes place in Warrior Transition Battalion. The WTB is the place where veterans who are not ready for civilian life get the services they need to rejoin civilian life, or at least try to get those services. Tausolo Aieti, one of the soldiers the book follows in his recovery, avoids the funeral of a 21-year-old soldier in the WTB who took his own life. We get a brief report of the service in the chapel. During the service, one of the eulogists steps to the podium and "declares in the most mystified voice, 'What is there to say at this point except thank you for your service?' "

In this sad context, "Thank you for your service" could not be a more hollow gesture. Every soldier, sailor, airman, and Marine serving in the past decade has heard that phrase from people who clearly have no connection to the military or the undeclared wars of this century. But for those of us who served during Viet Nam, "Thank you for your service" would have put us in shock, a welcome shock. I had a 23-year break in service. I left the all-volunteer Army when it was still in disrepute. I re-enlisted in 2007 into an Army that gets more respect than any other public institution. What a change.

When someone thanks me for my service, I deeply wish some of the guys I served with 40 years ago could put on the uniform for just a day to hear those words.

Finkel's book reaches into the depths of what soldiers who served in this war are being thanked for. A few months before I deployed to Iraq in 2009, I visited Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio. BAMC (Bam-See is what everyone there called it) is one of the treatment centers for soldiers who have lost limbs. I met soldiers who lost as many as three limbs and were in the process of rehabilitation.

But Finkel's soldiers have injuries that go deeper than their bodies. When you see young men and women fighting back from physical injury, it makes the story Finkel tells even more sad. At BAMC I saw a soldier speed along the walkway on two spring-like prosthetic legs. Nothing could bring his legs back, but he looked very happy to be moving. Two years before I met that soldier, I was MEDEVACed from the scene of a downhill bicycle racing crash with a smashed vertebra and nine other broken bones. I remember how happy I was the first day I got out of bed wearing a neck and chest brace, walking the halls of the hospital with my IVs on a rolling hanger. Having your wits and knowing you will get better is a rush.

Brain injuries don't give that thrill. Fighting against the invisible scars of PTSD, Adam Schumann is lost inside his own injuries. His wife Saskia tries to live with the depression and rage and the withdrawal. But she has lost the man she married even when he is physically present. Adam was a model soldier and a good husband when he left for his third tour in Iraq. A different man came home. Schumann's story ends on a relatively happy note, with the possibility of recovery.

In the tenth chapter we follow the last months of Jessie Robinson before he commits suicide. At the opening of the chapter we learn how Jessie killed himself and we get the Army version of how he died. The rest of the chapter is told in large part in text messages Jessie's wife Kristy started saving in her phone because "things had gotten bad enough that she wanted a record of what was happening."

She wrote the messages hurriedly and hid them in a "Tasks" folder in the phone. Here are a few:

November 1: "Jessie overturned the coffee table. He took my cell phone away from me. When I tried to leave the house he held me and pushed me back inside the house. I was holding Summer [Jessie and Kristy's infant daughter] in my arms durring [sic] all of this. He said if I called the police they would take Summer away from both of us. He wouldn't let me near the front door or patio door."

December 25: "This morning Jessie left at 9 a.m. When I got out of bed I found the Christmas tree tossed off the deck into the back yard. He came home just after 2 p.m., took a shower and went to bed."

January 20: "Jessie woke up at 5:00 and began yelling again. He said that tomorrow he is going to raise a stink. He grabbed my hair and ear and shoved my face to the bed while I was feeding Summer."

April 10: "Jessie was arrested for domestic battery."

That was her last entry. She left with Summer soon after. At that point, Jessie's suicide— an overdose of acetaminophen—was three months and nine days away. We follow Kristy for another year as she tries to put her life back together.

Finkel's book is important for anyone who wants to understand PTSD and just how bad the invisible injuries of war can be. Finkel gives you the Titanic. Now let's turn to the Olympic.

In 2004, Alpha Company 1-106th, part of an Illinois-based Army National Guard Aviation Battalion, deployed to Iraq for 15 months. One of their missions was flying their Blackhawk helicopters in support of 2nd Battalion, 2nd Infantry Regiment, 1st Infantry Division, commanded by Lt. Col. Peter Newell, the lead Army unit in the Battle for Fallujah.

Several books have been written about the Battle for Fallujah in 2004. Newell earned a Silver Star in that battle for leading his battalion to victory and leaving his armored vehicle under fire to recover one of his soldiers.

When I deployed to Camp Adder, Iraq, with Task Force Diablo in 2009, Alpha Company 1-106th was our air assault company. Many of the flight crew soldiers who deployed in 2004 were back in 2009—most in new roles through promotions, but still together. Peter Newell, now a Colonel, was the Camp Adder commander. During the deployment, I flew to the Iran-Iraq border on Newell's Blackhawk and on several other missions with Alpha Company.

One of the first missions I flew with them was to Al-Kut, a routine supply mission to a MEDEVAC forward base. We had a few hours to kill on the ground in Al-Kut, so I talked to each of the four men on the flight crew. They were just four regular guys from Alpha Company who were assigned this particular mission. They're not special in any unhappy way, so—like the Olympic—nobody tells their story.

In the left pilot seat was Chief Warrant Officer Patrick Schroeder, an Instructor Pilot with 21 years of service. A native of Sherman, Illinois, he joined the Army in 1988 and served as a UH-1 "Huey" mechanic for four years before attending flight school. He has been a pilot "24/7" ever since. In 2003 he took a job as one of the pilots who fly the Governor of Illinois. Because he deployed in January of 2009, Schroeder served as a pilot for Governor Rod Blagojevich from shortly after the time he took office in 2003 until shortly before the notorious governor was removed from office in 2009.

Schroeder would say nothing about flying the governor except that he enjoyed the times he was able to fly Lieutenant Governor Patrick Quinn and looks forward to flying for Governor Quinn when he returns from deployment. Schroeder was married just a month before his current deployment and took his R&R (Rest and Recreation) leave as a honeymoon in Australia.

Next to Schroeder in the right pilot seat was Chief Warrant Officer Nathan McKean of Decatur, Illinois. McKean served 12 years, beginning with four years in the Navy building bombs on the aircraft carrier USS Stennis and in a combat search and rescue unit based in San Diego. McKean came home in 2001, enrolled in college, and joined the Army National Guard.

After leaving active duty, McKean decided he needed a good job that would allow him time off for military duty—lots of time off. In 2002, he took a job as an engineer on the Norfolk Southern Railroad. Within a year he was training to go to Iraq, then left for a deployment of 15 months.

Soon after he returned, he went to flight school for a year, then had additional training before his current tour in Iraq. McKean estimates he has worked on the railroad for 2-1/2 years, but has more than seven years' seniority.

Behind McKean on the right side of the Blackhawk was Sgt. Steve Sunzeri of Naperville, Illinois. Sunzeri has six years in the Illinois Army National Guard. From 2003-7 he served as a scout and infantryman with Charlie Company 2-106th Cavalry. In 2006 he completed the requirements for a Bachelor of Arts degree in history. Then in 2007 he reclassified to become a flight crew chief, deploying in 2009 with Alpha Company.

In the left seat behind the pilot was the door gunner, the youngest member of the crew and the one with the most combat deployments. Cpl. Michael Randazzo, of Queens, N.Y., is on his third deployment in six years of Army National Guard service. In 2009 he was 24 years old. Randazzo enlisted shortly after graduating from high school, serving first as an infantryman on a 15-month combat tour. When he returned from Iraq, Randazzo worked for an executive protection company until June 2008, when he volunteered to return to Iraq as a door gunner. Near the end of that tour, he volunteered for a second consecutive tour as a door gunner with Alpha Company.

After the 2009 deployment, he planned to go back to the U.S., apply to flight school, and deploy to Afghanistan as a pilot.

Who flew the Blackhawks that moved troops and rescued wounded soldiers in Iraq and still perform those missions in Aghanistan? Soldiers like these. All of Alpha Company went home together in January of 2010. Nearly all of the flight companies in the Pennsylvania National Guard that deployed with Alpha Company to Camp Adder in 2009 have already been to Afghanistan since that deployment.

I am glad Finkel wrote Thank You for Your Service and that Farrar, Straus & Giroux published it. The tale of the saddest survivors of Iraq needs to be told. But important as they are, these stories do not represent even a large fraction of the total experience of American soldiers in the Iraq War. Most of us came home and went back to work and raising families. Many others made the military a career and either have retired or plan to.

Most soldiers, like the Olympic, served when their nation was at war, then sailed through good weather and storms for the rest of their life and peacefully retired.

Neil Gussman is the strategic communications and media relations manager for Chemical Heritage Foundation, a library and museum in Philadelphia. He is also public affairs NCO for the 28th Combat Aviation Brigade, Pennsylvania Army National Guard.

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