Decades before the American Revolution, Benjamin Franklin lamented that English settlers were constantly fleeing over to the Indians -- but Indians almost never did the same. Tribal society has been exerting an almost gravitational pull on Westerners for hundreds of years, and the reason lies deep in our evolutionary past as a communal species. The most recent example of that attraction is combat veterans who come home to find themselves missing the...

A U.S. Army platoon, captured in the Korean conflict, is whisked to Manchuria for three nightmarish days of experimental drug-and-hypnosis- induced conditioning that transforms the men into human time bombs. Returned to the United States as war heroes, one of them is used by his mother to promote her Joseph McCarthy-like husband's political career.

Today, America has nearly eighteen million living military veterans, from the Greatest Generation to men and women coming home from recent tours in Afghanistan and Iraq. They join the now-silent ranks of American veterans reaching back to our earliest conflict, the Revolutionary War.

Parents of returning service members may sometimes feel that their voices are not heard. The media is saturated with stories about troops returning from deployment with mental health problems like post-traumatic stress, depression, and substance abuse. Some also return home with physical problems including traumatic brain injury, physical pain or more severe injuries like amputations. Almost all returning service members experience reintegration challenges...

"Mat Best may be the only man alive known for both crazy-intense military ops and crazy-funny YouTube videos. In Freedom On!, he uses the gallows humor and ribald sensibility that earned him over a million Facebook followers to tell his personal story of military service and the bumpy transition to civilian life and successful entrepreneurship. Beginning as a teenager in a military family dealing with 9/11, continuing through the intensity of four...