Standing Down: From Warrior to Civilian

Standing Down: From Warrior to Civilian was created for Talking Service, the Great Books Foundation’s initiative to develop reading and discussion programs for veterans, as well as their families and friends. Standing Down includes:

Forty-four selections, from Homer's Iliad to personal accounts of members of the service who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Fiction, nonfiction, poetry, essays, and memoirs that speak to past experiences, concerns, and aspirations of those who have served in the military and made the often difficult transition back into civilian life

Table of Contents

Iliad*
Homer

The Melian Dialogue
Thucydides

Henry VI, Part I*
William Shakespeare

Letters
New York Legislature/George Washington

On Discipline In Democratic Armies
Alexis de Toqueville

Gettysburg Address
Abraham Lincoln

The Charge of the Light Brigade
Alfred, Lord Tennyson

On Caregiving
Walt Whitman

War and Peace*
Leo Tolstoy

The Moral Equivalent of War
Williams James

Why War?
Sigmund Freud

An Irish Airman Foresees His Death
William Butler Yeats

The Veteran
Stephen Crane

Italian Ordeal Surprises Congress
Anne O’Hare McCormick

Poems
Wilfred Owen

To a Conscript of 1940
Herbert Read

Soldier’s Home
Ernest Hemingway

Reporting the War in Tunisia
Ernie Pyle

Guests of the Nation
Frank O’Connor

A Negro Looks at This War
J. Saunders Redding

These Terrible Records of War
James Agee

Tarawa: The Story of a Battle*
Robert Sherrod

The Price We Pay In Italy
Eric Sevareid

Revisiting My Memoir
Edward W. Wood Jr.

Village
Estela Portillo Tremblay

It Is Dangerous to Read Newspapers
Margaret Atwood

A Rumor of War*
Philip Caputo

What It Is Like to Go to War*
Karl Marlantes

In Pharaoh’s Army*
Tobias Wolff

The Things They Carried*
Tim O’Brien

Facing It
Yusef Komunyakaa

A Piece of My Heart*
Anne Simon Auger as told to Keith Walker

A Journey Taken with My Son
Myrna Bein

Reclamation
John Berens

The Good Soldiers*
David Finkel

The Boy Without a Flag
Abraham Rodriguez Jr.

Perimeter Watch
Brian Turner

Dust to Dust*
Benjamin Busch

Medevac Missions
Ed Hrivnak

You Know When the Men Are Gone*
Siobhan Fallon*

Veterans
Brian Humphreys

The Hardest Letter to Write
Parker Gyokeres

Shallow Hands
Michael Poggi

To the Fallen
John McCary

*Indicates a selection from a longer work.