From TidePool Press
Patrick Smithwick: War's Over, Come Home: A Father's Search for His Son, Two-Time Veteran of the Iraq War
Presentation and Book Signing
Sunday, October 22, 2023 at 5pm

Books available for sale in the shop or purchase here.

... The narrative of the family’s searches for Andrew has the suspense of a thriller ... No one who cares about today’s veterans should miss this splendid book.
–Henry Taylor, Pulitzer Prize winning poet and author of This Tilted World Is Where I Live: New and Selected Poems 1962–2020.

... Smithwick writes with devastating honesty about his harrowing and heartfelt journey to dark and tragic corners of the country, which puts himself and his loved ones at risk, while ultimately affirming the unbreakable bond of family. This is a call to action on behalf of veterans, twenty-two of whom commit suicide every day.
–Richard Dresser, playwright and author of It Happened Here, founding member of the Writers Guild Initiative giving a voice to populations not being heard. ...

This book is a must-read for anyone who wants to truly understand the challenges facing our veterans and their families and to help raise awareness and support for the critical mental healthcare needs of our nation’s heroes.
–Zach Iscol, U.S. Marine captain in Iraq, 2001–2007, founder of the Headstrong Project, and serves as commissioner of New York City Emergency Management.

For soldiers and their families, wars never end. The memories come home, occasionally in triumph, but more often in unpredictable and debilitating ways. Most accounts focus on the soldier’s struggles.

Patrick Smithwick’s War’s Over, Come Home is a rare and intimate account from a family’s vantage point, an essential perspective often missed. Their transcontinental efforts to find Iraq war veteran Andrew Smithwick—son, brother and once a friend to many—are a disturbing and eloquent testament to the cascading impact of a single case of PTSD.

Smithwick, a gifted storyteller, has noted, “Not for a moment did I imagine that one day I’d be pulling blankets off the faces of homeless men. Or tapping on their shoulders and asking, ‘Is that you, Andrew?’” War’s Over, Come Home will strike home with a wide range of readers from families similarly afflicted by PTSD to policy makers at the Pentagon, from family counselors to sociologists, and most of all to general readers curious about an otherwise invisible world.

Patrick Smithwick is the author of the acclaimed trilogy of steeplechase racing memoirs, Racing My Father, Flying Change and Racing Time. He has won awards for newspaper features, short stories, and magazine pieces while working as a steeplechase jockey of Thoroughbred racehorses, and as a Chesapeake Bay waterman, newspaper reporter and English teacher.

Patrick and his wife Ansley live on a farm in Maryland, and are the parents of three children: Paddy, Andrew and Eliza.