The Untold War - Book Review

By Abbey-Robin Durkin, PhD

A large gap exists between the experiential understanding of military and civilian behavioral health providers and the opportunities for them to truly walk in the  shoes of our soldiers. Helping to bridge this gap are the powerful stories documented in Dr. Nancy Sherman’s book, The Untold War, which can provide a backdrop to support a variety of clinical encounters. The narratives in this book educate the reader about a number of logic traps that warriors mentally confront, which can easily sabotage psychological recovery. For instance the military value of “leave no one behind” can be interpreted subjectively in a damaging way after combat, and become the foundation for irrational guilt. There are many vignettes in this book where service members have great difficulty justifying their apparent survival in a situation because they believe they had to sacrifice a specific military value they hold dear to live. A troop may have survived because they took cover, which could then lead them to call into question whether or not they exemplified Courage and deserve to be alive today.

The Untold War is a timely sequel to Stoic Warriors as it builds on the compelling premise that much of how the military philosophically prepares troops for battle can be their psychological undoing in the aftermath. The vignettes in this book delve into the multidimensional elements of guilt and grief experienced by many service members once they return home by using their own words and descriptions of events, as well as commentaries regarding the unfair and painful sting of “lessons learned.”

With dozens of dramatic stories from struggling service members forging resolutions for events previously thought to be unspeakable, this book is a powerful guide, both for clinicians who have never been there and for those in uniform still trying to find a way to dig out from a seemingly bottomless pit of guilt and demoralization. Dr. Sherman also highlights that while these topics may seem confined to austere intellectual communities, they actually weigh on the hearts and minds of our nation’s armed forces on and off the battlefield every day.