END OF ACTIVE SERVICE

“Really, though, when you get down to it, most everything is a war story, right?”

Dean Pusey is having a tough time adjusting to life back in Indiana after having served four years as a Marine in Iraq. He’s living with his (adoptive) mother and stepfather, working at UPS, and hanging out with his childhood best friend. None of it, however, is going well, and Dean is still at war—if only with himself and PTSD. Floundering on his way to becoming “someone” rather than “anyone,” Dean struggles to discern whether he is the problem in all his relationships, including the one he never had with his birth mother. Unfortunately, the discernment process involves a lot of alcohol, some drugs, bar fights, a rifle, and pretend battle exercises. Flashbacks to brutal episodes Dean witnessed and participated in during his tours of duty come fast and furious, but Dean is not ready, willing, or able to reveal what he’s still carrying around in his head. Debut novelist Young deftly maneuvers between Dean’s postdischarge life and the corrosive and brutalizing events of his military service and clearly conveys the jarring realities of transitioning from wartime to lifetime. As Dean narrates the course of what he promises will be a love story—while opining that war stories underpin almost every experience—humor and perceptive insights mark the storytelling; people he meets want to hear about his war experiences, but what they really want to do is to tell him about their own, or secondhand, war stories. Young, the author of Eat the Apple (2018), a memoir detailing his own service with the Marines in Iraq, delivers a cleareyed, nonsentimental chronicle of the corrosive and far-reaching effects of war and its inevitable aftermath.

War is hell, but Young shows us that what happens afterward can be worse.