Goodbye to All That Again concerns the odyssey of an Iraq War veteran who must complete his journey past desert combat and academic strife in order to reclaim his heroic identity. The novel uses a fragmented storytelling mode that offers readers thirteen years of the protagonist’s timeline in a nonlinear sequence. Through this technique, the novel evokes the cognitive disassociation experienced by individuals who suffer Post Traumatic Stress and echoes the postmodern practices employed by American military novelists such as Joseph Heller and Tim O’Brien for the last sixty years. GOODBYE TO ALL THAT AGAIN seeks to intervene in the discourse of the American war novel by updating the depiction of military members from unwilling draftees, the situation Heller and O’Brien portray, to that of career-driven volunteers. The novel also considers adjustment concerns raised by the political correctness movement, a bar to civilian reintegration unknown by prior generations of veterans. In doing so, the writer hopes to adjust the zeitgeist, a major concern of his practice as detailed in his STATEMENT OF PURPOSE, toward a more accurate representation of military members so that society can more effectively meet their needs.

This qualitative study seeks to extend the existing body of scholarly literature on returned veteran civilian reintegration by exploring "hero" and "Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder" narratives. The character of the hero, as a social construct located within hegemonic notions of masculinity, is widely portrayed and believed to possess highly prized, extraordinary, almost superhuman personal qualities. However, this widely disseminated belief stands at odds with some of the stories returned veterans tell. This qualitative study explores and illuminates the enigmatic intersectionality of hero and PTSD narratives. Extant hero and PTSD narratives contain paradoxical implicit meanings embedded within them. The hero is understood to be fearless, strong, independent, and physically and emotionally tough. PTSD, on the other hand, implies personal deficiencies, enervation, dependence, diffidence, and other personal shortcomings. The apparent contradictions between these two cultural narratives elucidate how hero narrative are founded less in the lived reality as experienced by returned veterans and more in socially circulating stories about returned combat veterans as disembodied people. Most problematic is the tendency for widely circulating stories about them as the hero character to disguise the reality of day-to-day life as returned combat veterans live it. Through narrative analysis it is revealed that the popular cultural image of veterans as strong, independent, and courageous "warriors" may conflict with reality as lived by combat veterans. Paradoxically, however, returned combat veterans may employ the hero narrative in making sense of themselves. As a result, returned combat veterans may find it difficult to act in ways inconsistent with the hero narrative, such as asking for help, admitting a damaging personal problem, exacerbating the civilian reintegration experience and potentially significantly lowering returned combat veterans' quality of life. This problem may be especially salient for veterans experiencing symptoms of PTSD who may feel trapped between two the cultural narratives of hero and victim.