Life After Deployment: Military families share reunion stories and advice

 Author's Summary

Life After Deployment captures the tender and moving stories of military families during their reunion. Service members and their spouses, parents, fiancées, and children share the joy and anxiety of homecoming, the adjustments of living together again, and how they coped with anger, depression, PTSD, injuries, grief, and other challenges. Some families had fairytale endings. Most worked hard to rebuild their relationships after much time and change. A few suffered great losses. These military families talk candidly about what their experience was really like, offering hope and advice to others who walk this journey.

MWSA Review

MWSA 2007 Gold Medal for Non-Fiction, Reference, How-To

A great sequel to "Surviving Deployment!"  Life After Deployment is author Karen Pavlicin’s sequel to her award-winning book “Surviving Deployment”. Mrs. Pavlicin has written another important book for the military family and their friends and relatives.

The writer is a wife of a Marine with multiple deployments, and this book deals with the many problems faced by wives and families when their servicemen return from deployment. These are not theoretical problems – these are the problems faced by too many families today: dealing with the children – re-establishing parental authority – PTSD – intimacy issues...plus how to best handle combat deaths and injuries…this book is filled with practical solutions Mrs. Pavlicin has elicited from the thousands of wives and families who have – and are – facing these issues.

With so few Americans volunteering to serve in the military (approx 0.03 % of the population), there is a deplorable lack of data and professional assistance for these families; most therapists have no clue how to deal with the anger of a child whose father died in Iraq or came home missing a limb from an IED attack in Afghanistan – this book is the first step to filling that void.

This book should be given to every spouse as his or her serviceman steps off the airplane back onto US tarmac. Well-written and thorough, the issues raised here are important ones that these families need to recognize and face, and Mrs. Pavlicin – the widow of a multiple-deployed Marine – does a first-rate job taking care of her now over-extended military family. High Recommended !!

Reviewed by: Andrew Lubin (2007)