Lonely Warrior

He went to war believing in something. He came back believing in nothing. This is the unsparing portrait of one young American soldier whose idealism was annihilated in the trenches of France, and who returns home to find that the person he was has died alongside millions of others in the mud. His family cannot reach him. His job is a cage. His fiancé waits for a ghost. What remains is a man who has seen too much and feels too little, burrowing into deliberate numbness rather than face the outrage of what was done to him and what he was made to do. Washburn writes with brutal clarity about the invisible wound that a generation carried home from the Great War, capturing the terrible loneliness of the man who survives but cannot rebuild. It is a novel that understands how war doesn't end when the fighting stops, and that the hardest battle is the one fought in silence, in the ordinary rooms of an ordinary American life.