from my review:
. . . I could have been grumpier about it all, and maybe have taken the time to explain to him that the “thank you” gesture had already become a cliché. That it had become meaningless, despite any earnest good will he felt. I could have gone deeper, even held forth on the way that phrase was just too easy to say, that not knowing what the person being thanked had actually done or lived through made the whole gesture in no small way inauthentic. I thought too of my veteran friends from the three or four wars now in my lifetime, especially those friends who carried a weight of post-traumatic distress. How the thank you phrase itself kept knowledge of that kind of distress at arm’s length, boxed up, sealed, quarantined.
Read the full review in “Five Simple Words” in Medic in the Green Time.