Bringing Them Home: The Untold Cost of Putting Mission First

War is not romantic. The movies have spent decades making it look that way, but the men and women who come home know better, and Anna Paulina Luna is determined to tell a truer story. Bringing Them Home follows several young service members through the full weight of what military life actually involves: fierce and feminine O'Neil, who surprises everyone by enlisting; Jake, straightforward and steady, a friend who becomes something more; Ace, O'Neil's closest companion on base; and Jonas, Jake's friend and teammate. Together they navigate the relationships, friendships, hardships, and quiet devastations that the uniform brings. This is not, as Luna is quick to say, another book about PTSD, or rather, it is not only that. It is a book about the question that underlies PTSD and everything like it: what constitutes normal for people who have seen what these people have seen? People change. Growth requires it. What happens when the circumstances that force that growth are the particular circumstances of war, and military love, and the people who go and the people who wait and the ones who don't come back? Bringing Them Home is a book about all of that, based on true events, told without the glamour.