Crossings: A Doctor-Soldier’s Story

Amazon.com Price: $12.50 (as of 11/11/2019 00:31 PST- Details)

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Description

Each juncture in Jon Kerstetter’s life has been marked by a crossing from one world into some other: from civilian to doctor to soldier; between healing and waging war; and between compassion and hatred of the enemy. When an injury led to a stroke that ended his careers as a doctor and a soldier, he faced the most difficult crossing of all, a recovery that proved as shattering as war itself.

Crossings is a memoir of a fantastic, powerfully drawn life, one that started in poverty on the Oneida Reservation in Wisconsin but grew by force of will to encompass a remarkable medical practice. Trained as an emergency physician, Kerstetter’s thirst for intensity led him to volunteer in war-torn Rwanda, Kosovo, and Bosnia, and to sign up for the Army National Guard. His three tours in the Iraq War marked the height of the American struggle there. The story of his work in theater, which involved the whole thing from saving soldiers’ lives to organizing the joint U.S.–Iraqi forensics team tasked with identifying the bodies of Saddam Hussein’s sons, is a bracing, unprecedented evocation of a doctor’s life at war.

But war was once just the beginning of Kerstetter’s struggle. The stroke he suffered upon getting back from Iraq led to serious cognitive and physical disabilities. His years-long recovery, impeded by near-unbearable pain and complicated by PTSD, meant overcoming the perceived limits of his body and mind and re‑‑ imagining his own capacity for renewal and change. It led him not only to writing as a vocation but to a deeper understanding of how healing means accepting a new identity, and how that acceptance will have to be fought for with as much tenacity as any battlefield victory.

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