Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ

Please everyone take my review with a grain of salt. I feel I'm not the intended audience for this book, and did not have the background, knowledge, or experience to enjoy this as much as I feel someone could have. I'm not a war genre reader, or a short stories reader. So I'm not sure why I thought I'd love this as much as other reviews have glowed. Most of it's reviews are 5 stars.

This is a short story collection of different psychological impacts the war- specifically the Iraq war can have on members of the military- particularly the marines. I think this does a GREAT job of getting an inside view of the realities not only of being on the warfront- but how coming 'home' can feel afterwards, and dealing with PTSD, changed relationships, changed viewpoints and mindsets military (wo)men might have. One of the most interesting subjects I found was the relationships between wife/husband of bf/gf before and after deployment. This is a tough subject to write on. It's not a fun read. But it's informing and educational. I don't have any family who has been in the military, but have had a few friends who never really wanted to talk about their experiences. I can now understand more why.

The most interesting stories to me were 'the baseball one' where a guy is tasked with the odd job of teaching Iraqi kids how to play baseball and give out equipment and uniforms to form a team game. I also like the story about a girl interviewing a vet- and her lack of understanding, and how veterans pick and choose who to tell what, and who not to tell-based on the situation.

Unfortunately, I lack the basic knowledge of the military. And there was a lot of assumed knowledge. There were so many acronyms that flew over my head, making it hard to understand the story. I ended up having to google some of the reoccurring ones just to make sense of things. Also, these were short stories- but often blended together without any different voice or tone. The narrators were supposed to be different with varying backgrounds, but it often got muddled between story to story blurring the lines in between and making it confusing to me.

Even though you didn't rate this highly, your description sounded really good to me . . .so thanks for sharing your thoughts in detail anyway. I think I might like it.