For soldiers and their families, wars never end. The memories come home, occasionally in triumph, but more often in unpredictable and debilitating ways. Most accounts focus on the soldier’s struggles. Patrick Smithwick’s War’s Over, Come Home is a rare and intimate account from a family’s vantage point, an essential perspective often missed. Their transcontinental efforts to find Iraq war veteran Andrew Smithwick—son, brother and once a friend to many—are a disturbing and eloquent testament to the cascading impact of a single case of PTSD.
Smithwick, a gifted storyteller, has noted, “Not for a moment did I imagine that one day I’d be pulling blankets off the faces of homeless men. Or tapping on their shoulders and asking, ‘Is that you, Andrew?’”
War’s Over, Come Home will strike home with a wide range of readers from families similarly afflicted by PTSD to policy makers at the Pentagon, from family counselors to sociologists, and most of all to general readers curious about an otherwise invisible world
Patrick Smithwick’s wonderful books have always started from home—the beautiful terrain around Monkton, Maryland. He grew up the son and nephew of the steeplechasing Smithwick brothers, A. P. (“Paddy”) and Michael, and rode in the great Maryland Hunt Cup himself. Here he focuses on a family tragedy, the effect of two tours of duty in the Iraq War on his son Andrew, who returned with severe symptoms of PTSD and has lived as a wandering homeless man for most of the years since. The narrative of the family’s searches for Andrew has the intensity and suspense of a thriller. As Andrew’s troubles, distant as they are, gnaw at the family fabric, Smithwick handles the agreements and disagreements, the quarrels, his own and others’ occasional pettiness, with just the right level of clear-eyed depth. He is equally fair with the laws of privacy that sometimes prevent the family from finding out what they want to know, and the balance between their rights and Andrew’s is a central problem. No one who cares about the plight of today’s veterans should miss this splendid book.
—HENRY TAYLOR, Pulitzer Prize winning poet and author of This Tilted World Is Where I Live: New and Selected Poems 1962-2020
Patrick Smithwick’s Sisyphean quest to find his son, a decorated two-tour Marine adrift in America and battling PTSD, takes him deep into the lives of the homeless, the lost, and the forgotten. Smithwick writes with devastating honesty about his harrowing and heartfelt journey to dark and tragic corners of the country, which puts himself and his loved ones at risk, while ultimately affirming the unbreakable bond of family. This intensely personal narrative is a call to action on behalf of veterans, twenty-two of whom commit suicide every day.
—RICHARD DRESSER is a playwright and the author of the novel It Happened Here. He is President and a founding member of the Writers Guild Initiative, which conducts writing workshops all over the country with veterans, wounded warriors, LGBT asylum seekers, exonerated death row prisoners, nurses on the front lines of covid, and many other groups, with a mission of giving a voice to populations not being heard.
This powerful and heart-wrenching book by Patrick Smithwick is far too familiar a story to some and far too unfamiliar to others. Through Patrick’s raw and honest story of a father’s journey to find his son, Andrew, a two-tour Marine veteran who is suffering from PTSD and homelessness, readers gain a deep understanding of the hidden costs of war and the struggles that many veterans face when they return home. This book is a must-read for anyone who wants to truly understand the challenges facing our veterans and their families and to help raise awareness and support for the critical mental healthcare needs of our nation’s heroes.
—ZACH ISCOL,U.S. Marine captain in Iraq from 2001-2007, founder of the Headstrong Project in 2012, which offers free mental health care to veterans and their families and serves as commissioner of New York City Emergency Management
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