It's been a while since we saw any progress on the PTSD film Thank You for Your Service, the big-screen adaptation of David Finkel's non-fiction book that focuses on veterans returning from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. When last we visited this project, Steven Spielberg was rumored to be directing from a script by Oscar-nominated screenwriter Jason Hall. The American Sniper scribe has already completed his draft, but new reports have Hall making his directorial debut on the picture as well.

As THR reports, DreamWorks acquired the rights to the unpublished story back in May of 2013, with Spielberg and Hall coming onboard the project shortly thereafter. Following in the vein of American Sniper's theme of reorienting to suburban life after serving in the military, Thank You for Your Service centers on three veterans returning home from war "who struggle to integrate back into family and civilian life, coping with the horrific memory of a war that threatens to destroy them long after they’ve left the battlefield."


Image via Amazon[/caption]

Here's the book's synopsis (via Amazon):

No journalist has reckoned with the psychology of war as intimately as David Finkel. In The Good Soldiers, his bestselling account from the front lines of Baghdad, Finkel embedded with the men of the 2-16 Infantry Battalion as they carried out the infamous "surge," a grueling fifteen-month tour that changed them all forever.

In Thank You for Your Service, Finkel follows many of those same men as they return home and struggle to reintegrate--both into their family lives and into American society at large. He is with them in their most intimate, painful, and hopeful moments as they try to recover, and in doing so, he creates an indelible, essential portrait of what life after war is like--not just for these soldiers, but for their wives, widows, children, and friends, and for the professionals who are truly trying, and to a great degree failing, to undo the damage that has been done. Thank You for Your Service is an act of understanding, and it offers a more complete picture than we have ever had of two essential questions: When we ask young men and women to go to war, what are we asking of them? And when they return, what are we thanking them for?