The Hero Next DoorStories of Patriotism and Purpose
ABC News veteran Martha Raddatz gathers a dozen portraits of post-9/11 service members and the people who love them. It's narrative nonfiction about endurance: what pushes ordinary people to do extraordinary things, and what they keep carrying long after the moment itself has passed.
From the review
Raddatz has spent twenty-five years standing close to the people in this book, and that long acquaintance is its spine. She doesn't write the military as an abstraction or a policy fight. She writes specific people on their specific worst days, then keeps following them into the years that come after, which is usually where the real story lives. A naval officer survives the Pentagon on 9/11, and the day reorganizes everything that follows. A Marine lowers himself down a rope under fire to reach a wounded officer in the mountains of Afghanistan. A surgeon rethinks how brain trauma gets treated in a war zone, because the old methods are saving no one. These aren't only adrenaline scenes. Raddatz cares about what's left once the adrenaline drains out.
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