The Invisible Front: Love and Loss in an Era of Endless War

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An Amazon Best Book of the Month, October 2014: If I were to tell you that this fascinating book chronicles the life of a war hero, you’d likely expect to be reading about a Patton-like figure barking out orders or a “Mark Owen” telling of the capture of Osama Bin Laden. But while Mark Graham was a lifelong soldier who saw more than his share of fighting, it is his actions off the traditional battlefield that make him impressive. (I say “traditional” battlefield, because the way author Yochi Dreazen depicts the complicated, violent life of soldiers pre and post deployment, you get the feeling an American army base is almost as horrific a theater of war—just one that’s more local.) Churchgoing Mark and Carol Graham were a typical lifelong Army couple: they lived on bases and had two sons and one daughter, all of whom were friendly, popular, patriotic kids who roomed together while students at the University of Kentucky; Kevin and Mark were both in ROTC and both planned to deploy to Iraq or Afghanistan. Kevin never made it: he committed suicide a few weeks after his graduation from officer training school; Jeff was blown to bits soon after his arrival overseas. What surely would have destroyed most families strangely fortified theirs; instead of quitting the army, which Mark briefly considered, he vowed to devote the rest of his career to “fixing” it. Realizing that some troops suffered wounds you could not see, he launched programs to remove the stigma of suicide and to educate leaders about Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome. Along the way he met with extraordinary resistance—from bosses and underlings (some of them women)—for being too “soft”; one particularly disturbing incident involved a fake “Hurt Feelings” questionnaire, devised by soldiers themselves, in which respondents were asked to declare themselves either a “pussy” or a “queer” or “a little bitch” for seeking help. Eventually, some of Graham’s ideas were implemented, but it was a case of too little too late; suicides and PTSD violent incidents continued to increase and eventually, he was forced out of the service. Still, the Grahams persevere, rejecting high paying consultancies in the private sector in favor of giving speeches and seminars around the country so that other families won’t suffer as they have. And if that doesn’t make them heroes, it’s hard to say what would. – Sara Nelson