Redeployment(98)

I am deeply indebted to the Hunter MFA program, without which I would be a much weaker writer. Thanks to everyone I met there, students and faculty, and to Susan Hertog, whose Hertog Fellowship provided funds while I was working on this book.

The other major influence on this book was the NYU Veterans Writing Workshop, which was created by Ambassador Jean Kennedy Smith and NYU, and which provided an invaluable space for me to interact with other veteran writers. Thanks to everyone involved, especially Deborah Landau, Zachary Sussman, Sativa January, Brian Trimboli, Emily Brandt, Craig Moreau, and the Disabled American Veterans Charitable Service Trust.

I’d like to thank John Freeman, who gave me my first opportunity to publish a short story.

Thanks to my agent, Eric Simonoff, and to everybody at WME—Claudia Ballard, Cathryn Summerhayes, Laura Bonner, and others.

Thanks to Tom Sleigh, who has helped guide my writing life since I first met him ten years ago at Dartmouth College.

Thanks to my parents and to my brothers—Byrne, Ben, Jon, and Dave. And of course, thanks to the aunties—Aunt Mimi, Aunt Pixie, and the late and dearly missed Aunt Boo.

The writing of this book required a lot of research, and below are some of the books I consulted:

David Abrams’s Fobbit, Giorgio Agamben’s The Open, Omnia Amin and Rick London’s translations of Ahmed Abdel Muti Hijazi’s poetry, Peter Van Buren’s We Meant Well, Donovan Campbell’s Joker One, C. J. Chivers’s The Gun, Seth Connor’s Boredom by Day, Death by Night, Daniel Danelo’s Blood Stripes, Kimberly Dozier’s Breathing the Fire, Nathan Englander’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank, Siobhan Fallon’s You Know When the Men Are Gone, Nathaniel Fick’s One Bullet Away, Dexter Filkins’s The Forever War, David Finkel’s The Good Soldiers, Jim Frederick’s Black Hearts, Matt Gallagher’s Kaboom, Jessica Goodell’s Shade It Black, J. Glenn Gray’s The Warriors, Dave Grossman’s On Killing and On Combat, Judith Herman’s Trauma and Recovery, Kirsten Holmstedt’s Band of Sisters, Karl Marlantes’s Matterhorn, Colum McCann’s Dancer, Patrick McGrath’s Trauma, Jonathan Shay’s Odysseus in America and Achilles in Vietnam, Roy Scranton’s essays and fiction, the Special Inspector for Iraq Reconstruction Report Hard Lessons, Bing West’s The Strongest Tribe and No True Glory, Kayla Williams’s Love My Rifle More Than You.