There’s a determined stoicism to Sara, coupled with a tender, inner anguish, which will ring true to anyone who ever sent a loved one off to war. She’s proud of her son Jason but terrified for him; disdainful of any man her age who didn’t serve but wary of those who did; and fascinated but skeptical of the SEAL ideology being absorbed by her son. Her relationship with the military and the wars aren’t black and white, but a messy, ambiguous swirl of gray, something that doesn’t exist in Internet commentary. This swirl of gray is at its most churning in the novel’s opening pages, as Sara awaits word regarding the fate of her son, who’s gone missing in action during a mission overseas. From there, Carpenter alternates between the past and the present, showing us Jason’s idyllic childhood in rural Pennsylvania, Sara’s own private battles as her son goes on deployment after deployment, and then overseas with Sara herself trying to find her missing son.

This is an earnest book, a rare thing for a post-Catch-22 war novel of the literary ilk. The characters in Eleven Days are privileged in pedigree and possess access to power, but still find purpose in wearing the uniform, a refreshing break from the “Poor boy goes to battle, finds only destruction” narrative that’s been mimicked repeatedly since Tim O’Brien’s masterful works on the Vietnam War. While 99.9% of military mothers wouldn’t be allowed the access and information Sara is, that’s beside the point. Good fiction like this bears emotional authority that transcends the question of whether something “could” occur. Even as we journey with Sara from Pennsylvania to Washington, D.C. and beyond, the specter of the family members who have served their country on the home front in such isolated silence since 9/11 goes with us. Sara lives out a dark, twisted fantasy so many of them must’ve begged the heavens for on sleepless nights or long days without an email or phone call. Like many before her, Sara is called to fulfill a duty she never signed up for, but does so with resolve, because she understands that’s what must be done.

It’s disturbing how many commentators dismiss women in the military as a “social experiment” and sexual assault as an inevitable outcome of it. If women must serve, this argument continues, they should be barred from combat deployments or remain in separate units.  

I’ve yet to see anyone making this argument call for gender-segregated universities or other institutions, so presumably they believe these issues are unique to a military setting. Are they arguing that military men are more likely to be rapists than civilian men or that our troops are completely incapable of controlling their behavior? That seems an astonishing proposition, and one that I think the vast majority of law-abiding, responsible military men would find profoundly insulting.

Some, including Gen. Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, have argued that the military policy banning women from combat jobs and units contributed to a climate that tacitly tolerated sexual harassment and assault of women—and that increasing women’s access to combat roles will drive down rates in the long run. I agree: studies show that when women gain greater equality, sexual assaults decline (although there may be a short-term “backlash effect” as men react to women’s shifting status).

Six or seven years ago I read an article about our troops in Iraq—how they were being sent out in unarmored vehicles, and being blown up by IEDs, and receiving traumatic brain injuries as a result. These were often undiagnosed, partly because the military was reluctant to remove troops from combat and partly because treatment was expensive. I just couldn’t get those three things out of my mind: the unarmored vehicles, the injuries, and the reluctance to treat. It was clear that we weren’t really protecting our troops. This made me wonder about the consequences of this war. So that article was the beginning. It was a new world for me—I’m a Quaker. I hardly even knew anyone who was in the military.

Conrad is a Marine officer who joined up in 2001, while he was a classics major in college. “The classical writers love war, that’s their main subject,” he tells his parents. “Being a soldier was the whole deal, the central experience. Sparta, the Peloponnesian War, the Iliad. Thucydides, Homer, Tacitus.” What was the meaning of ancient Sparta to you as you worked on this book?

My first encounter with the connection between the Marines and the ancient world was in a memoir called One Bullet Away, by Nathaniel Fick. Fick was a classics major at Dartmouth, and he became a Marine lieutenant in Iraq, and the combination fascinated me. As I learned more about Marine culture, I was intrigued to learn that Fick was not alone. References to the classics are rife among Marines, and their culture is full of intellectual threads: Marines are very conscious of their ancient forebears. They read the classics. One of Fick’s enlisted men was reading The Iliad during their trek across the desert toward Baghdad. The Spartans (who are the attackers in The Iliad) are commonly used by Marines as references to a heroic-warrior culture—they name their units the Spartans and their combat outposts Sparta. And the word “Sparta” is sometimes used as an adjective to mean “awesome.” Sparta itself is a very present and powerful idea among Marines.

The war left its mark on every part of British life, no town too small not to have a war memorial, with a long list of the dead carved in stone, no college, school or public building without a plaque inside the door bearing an endless list of names of those who were killed in Flanders, on the Somme or elsewhere, no poetry more often recited than that of Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, Rupert Brooke, and Robert Graves. To this day, I, like many in Britain, still wear a poppy on Nov. 11.

The war left its mark on history too, erasing empires, replacing Austro-Hungary with a dangerous brood of Eastern European and Balkan mini-nations, carving up the Ottoman Empire into colonies, soon to become statelets, with artificial frontiers containing populations of different ethnic and religious backgrounds who hated each other, and bringing about the birth of Fascism, Communism, and Nazism—for the Second World War, awful as it was, was merely a reprise of the First with some minor switching of smaller powers, and the addition of a war in the Pacific to that in Europe. The years 1914-1918 were, and will perhaps always remain, our mental image of Armageddon: the mud, the trenches, the barbed wire, the squalor, the millions of dead for no good purpose.

Well, the passage of time has done its work, the fault line in the world is no longer the Rhine, but the Yellow Sea, what remains of the trenches is merely a grisly tourist attraction, the seemingly endless landscape of well-tended military cemeteries on the Western Front did not scare us away from fighting a second world war, and will doubtless not prevent us from fighting a third, despite Woodrow Wilson’s hope that it was “a war to end war.”

A few days later we were back on our way, preparing to leave the huge base at Camp Leatherneck and head downrange to the battalion and company positions where we would spend the majority of our deployment. My team of six women and I were headed to Third Battalion, First Marines, or “the Balls of the Corps,” as they called themselves, in Garmsir district. Arriving at the flight deck to catch our helicopter, we were greeted by Oliver North, of all people, and learned he was traveling with us to cover the progress in the area for a news program. Colonel North was excited to see women embracing a new mission and took the time to pose for photos with us. But he was soon reminded of how his beloved Corps sometimes operates: his luggage and gear were misplaced. He ended up waiting for the next flight, but that left an open seat in the helicopter’s cockpit for me.

I was excited to fly through the night on a Marine Corps “bird.” It was blacked out so we couldn’t be easily spotted, but as we approached Marjeh district—a highly “kinetic” area that Marines were still battling to pacify—the pilot swerved sharply as we took fire from the ground. I glanced at the crew chief behind me, clinging to his machine gun and firing into the night. In the cockpit, the pilots vigorously punched buttons and maneuvered the aircraft. I could only think about my girls sitting behind me.

When we finally landed, we disembarked in a field of gravel and were welcomed by a tired female Marine who was ready to go home and see her husband and kids. I could see and feel the excitement in her team members’ eyes that their replacements had arrived.

Simpson was in Afghanistan on the day that two pressure cookers stuffed with fireworks and shrapnel detonated by the finish line at the Boston Marathon,  and jolted the whole homeland. His wife’s stepfather had been a spectator close enough to the bombs to be shaken and Simpson emailed him, a message from a warrior who had dedicated his life to keeping us safe.

“I wish there was something I could have done better in my job to keep this evil from happening,” Simpson wrote.

Twelve days later, Simpson himself encountered a bomb, an IED. The 30-year-old was still alive when he reached an army hospital in Germany, thanks to experience that medics, trauma teams, and surgeons have acquired from thousands of such catastrophic causalities over a decade of war—the same hard-earned expertise that was credited with saving so many victims of the Boston bombing. He was joined in Landstuhl Regional Medical Center by his wife, Krista, the mother of their sons, 3-year-old Michael and 16-month-old Gabriel. 

Well before the Marine Corps knew him, Nate was already a scholar-athlete and a leader, student president of his elite prep school in Pebble Beach, California, captain of the water polo and swim teams at Williams College in Massachusetts, and an accomplished classical pianist and a poet. “He had plenty of career options,” his younger brother, Austin, said to me this weekend.

But Nate chose the Marine Corps in response to 9/11 and out of a larger sense of civic duty, which he wrote about in his application to become a Marine officer. “The price we pay for the liberties and luxuries we enjoy in this country is eternal vigilance,” he wrote. “I wish to put my money where my mouth is by having the honor to serve.”

Today, I find myself asking how many other sons and daughters who “had options” like Nate had will rise to the occasion, but there are troubling signs that privileged Americans, at least, are sitting on the sidelines. I attended Yale University’s graduation ceremony last week and found that only one brave student out of the entire graduating class is joining the U.S. Army. Disturbingly few kids from top schools go on to any kind of government service, opting instead for jobs in finance and consulting and law.

A culvert packed with explosives presents a particularly dangerous and challenging problem. If the bomb remains unfound, and the attack proceeds as planned, the damage to an armored vehicle driving over it is catastrophic. Find the device and simply blow it in place, and you have shut down a highway for weeks or months, until over-taxed engineers can finally fix the span. If the culvert hole is too small, an EOD robot can’t access it. If the bomb is too big, the robot isn’t strong enough to pull it out.

It was because of this last condition that Sergeant Popp found himself on his hands and knees in the bomb suit, 80 pounds of overlapping Kevlar plates, yanking out the device by hand. The bag itself Popp freed with a grunt and tossed harmlessly to the side. No, the bomb that nearly killed him was a second device, hidden in the ground, specifically placed to kill the bomb technician responding to clear the culvert. Popp was set up. He shifted his weight from his left knee to his right, and his world exploded.

At 3 in the morning, the phone rang in a home in tiny Lanesville, Indiana. No one answered, so the answering machine picked up. Shouts, screams, and confusion, silence, pause, and the phone rang again. The home’s occupant was now awake, so he answered.

Members of the First U.S. Infantry Division landed in North Africa on November 8, 1942, in the first test of American military power against the Germans. They fought until the Germans surrendered in Tunisia the following May. They invaded Sicily three months later. In June 1944, they were among the first troops to hit the Normandy beaches into the face of ferocious German counterfire. Without rest, they drove across France and fought in the Hürtgen Forest, the Ardennes, the Battle of the Bulge, and the Siegfried Line. They suffered almost 20,000 casualties, a loss rate of more than 100 percent for their original contingent of 15,000. Some were bitter that other units did no fighting at all, while they never rested. A minority reacted to the constant strain by shooting themselves in the foot or running away.

It is not up to us to judge them. Dr. Allen Towne, a First Division medical officer, wrote in his memoir Doctor Danger Forward, “It is hard for anyone who has not been exposed to long periods of hard combat to understand what this can do to even the best units.”

Few American boys of the “greatest generation” were prepared psychologically for war. Psychiatrists deferred enlistment for more than 1.7 million men before training began. Those who saw action nonetheless broke down in such numbers that psychiatric units were stationed in forward medical-aid stations to help traumatized men back to the front. The U.S. published a booklet called Psychology for the Fighting Man, Prepared for the Fighting Man Himself in 1943 as a soldier’s guide to mental well-being. Its observations were telling. Two stand out:

Talk about humbling.

And there were 19 other stories just like DeWitt’s. Men who had suffered, survived, and come to Crawford, Texas, to join their brothers in fellowship for Memorial Day weekend for the third annual Wounded Warrior 100K ride, sponsored by former president George W. Bush.

It’s easy for critics to make partisan remarks, like “George Bush should be riding with wounded warriors, ’cause he caused their wounds.” But most would withhold such cheap shots if they’d ever observed the countless meetings he has held over the years with families of the fallen and wounded vets—and purposefully never publicized. He carries a profound respect for our military men and women and understands and appreciates more than anyone the sacrifices they have made. And he is determined, through the Military Service Initiative of the Bush Presidential Center, to find ways to help veterans with jobs, housing, education, their families, and women’s issues.

Still, he couldn’t recall the name of his unit. This was not the case for the Second World War, which he was careful to distinguish from the First, and during which he had served in Alaska with the 250th Coastal Artillery. He changed the subject to that second war, too, every chance he got, despite my repeated questions about the first. Concerned, I went online the next day, looked through census records, and quickly determined that Merlyn Krueger had, indeed, been born in Westwood, California, to Herman and Anna Krueger.

But not in 1895.

Dad’s temper made ours a house of turmoil. But our family never tied his condition to the war. Not only was TBI an unknown affliction in midcentury America, we pretended that the war was in the distant past. It wasn’t discussed.

This changed as the men from dad's unit neared their ’80s. They were suddenly talking. One told me I was the first person he talked to about the war.

In my new book, I look at how the war affected the rest of their lives. Many never got over it. This is something that we should think about on Memorial Day weekend. Knowing their trauma helps us understand what today’s soldiers and their children face in the coming years.

The Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives program under the Civil Affairs and Military Government Sections of the Allied armies was established in 1943, and the 400 service members in the MFAA were mostly art historians and museum personnel who were known as Monuments Men. In anticipation of the Allied invasion, Gen. Dwight Eisenhower issued a statement to the Allied Army during the summer of 1944, regarding the protection of art treasures:

Shortly we will be fighting our way across the continent of Europe in battles designed to preserve our civilization. Inevitably, in the path of our advance will be found historical monuments and cultural centers which symbolize to the world all that we are fighting to preserve. It is the responsibility of every commander to protect and respect these symbols whenever possible.

The Monuments Men accompanied the Allied armies to locate at-risk art and monuments that may be damaged or stolen in the chaos of war, and then preserve them as best they could in the field. Their story is one of intrigue, espionage and heroism, with the survival or destruction of the greatest treasures of human civilization hanging in the balance. The entire contents of the Uffizi Museum, the museums of Paris, and the treasures of dozens of churches were stripped by the Nazis. The Germans hid the contents of occupied Europe’s museums—tens of thousands of masterpieces—for use after the war. Many were stored in secret underground storage facilities, like the salt mine that was converted into a hi-tech art warehouse in the Austrian Alps at Alt Aussee, which contained 12,000 of the most important works that were destined for Hitler’s Linz museum. The Monuments Men led detective-work searches for hidden and stolen art, and followed just behind the front lines, trying to secure monuments that were damaged, like the Ponte Santa Trinita (Holy Trinity Bridge in Italian) in Florence, blown up by retreating Nazis to slow the advance of the Allies, the fire-bombed monastery of Monte Cassino, and the bomb-shattered Camposanto in Pisa. Robert M. Edsel’s absorbing, thoroughly researched gallop of a history book, Saving Italy, focuses on the efforts of the Monuments Men to protect and recover the art of Italy.

One of the things that comes through really strongly when you’re serving overseas—and it’s true of Iraq, Afghanistan, Southeast Asia, and the Horn of Africa, where I went—is you’re struck by the incredible power and capability of young Americans. I had joined when I was 26 and I was older, working with guys who were 19 and 20 years old. To see the kind of endurance, patience, fortitude, and thoughtfulness that they conducted their duties with in places like Iraq, where it’s 107 degrees outside, you’re wearing body armor, and inside Humvees, and then have to step out and, at a moment’s notice, engage a potential terrorist or speak with a family inside a home, was really impressive. The other thing is that people really do look to the United States for leadership. When you go anywhere in the world, almost always the longest line is the line outside the U.S. Embassy with people waiting to get a visa. There’s a profound respect for the idea of what America offers—that anyone can come and find a way to build a life here.

When I came home from duty, I flew back to the States, woke up the next morning, and drove off the base. I remember driving by a Wendy’s drive-thru, and there were all these people sitting in line at the Wendy’s. Forty-eight hours before, I had been in a helicopter that was getting shot at in Iraq. I remember wanting to stop my truck and go out and ask these people if they knew what was happening overseas. People have a tremendous respect for the U.S. military, but they don’t really understand what this generation of soldiers has endured. I also visited some friends at the Naval Hospital in Bethesda, Md., and the most serious injuries I saw weren’t people who had lost their eyes or their legs. The most serious challenge was when people lost their sense of purpose.

The idea behind our organization The Mission Continues is to create a way for veterans to serve in their community, and by doing so, they can rebuild a sense of purpose themselves while at the same time making their community stronger. All of these men and women came back with all of these great skills, talents, and abilities, and they were searching to find a way to build that same sense of accomplishment and purposeful work at home that they had overseas.