It is slightly puzzling how someone might review this book poorly, unless they're so detached from life they don't know any war veterans. In modern times, war veterans are everywhere in English speaking countries. Wounds in modern war are even worse than during Korea or Vietnam, and modern technology and medicine means that war wounded don't have to lie in bed after they close up. They are out and about, and I suspect we'll see proper working exoskeletons in under 10 years time, so the paraplegics can walk again.
Unseen Academicals is about a war veteran, though this isn't immediately apparent as the story begins, instead confusing him with a particularly reviled race on the Discworld. It is about how war veterans are treated and distrusted and overall not regarded well enough, not respected for both their sacrifice to keep us safe as for their restraint upon returning home to a world that may need more chlorine in its gene pool.
It is also about how Academics are disconnected from the world outside their ivory tower of publically funded communism, examples of which I found in a university owned set of perfect, maintained, visitor bungalows in Livermore which existed to serve visiting Doctors of science coming to Livermore Labs, home of the Hydrogen Bomb, which is an upgraded Atom Bomb which can flash fry a big city rather than a small one. Livermore Labs and Sandia (Los Alamos) Labs are both cited, like Oxford, as examples of letting blowhards talk themselves into an easy job of pretension and laziness by being so obscure nobody can fire them. Geologists used to do the same thing as USGS but eventually the complaints from pregnant coed field lab assistants convinced then Democratic President Clinton to fire them all. And he did, too. This impacted me by making my career worthless a year before I graduated. I have never forgiven him, but it was their own faults for being such randy, useless bastards. I don't forgive them either. They had it coming. Those same bastards are running global warming research scams and seducing braless hippy chicks at dinner party fundraisers today, while their exes continue to collect alimony or child support and the professors keep a low profile and work off the books as much as possible. Absolute Bastards, but at least they're not the worst sort of bastards. They don't generally kill their girlfriends. Ahem.
They story also contains bits on the start of fashion models and the fashion institution out of a medieval culture that is evolving out of the functional armor stage and into the showy pretty stuff, and why footballers seem to attract fashion models because they're both so very dumb.
Still, the war veteran plot is the key one and how many authors today write about that? Respect to Terry Pratchett, once more. I kinda wish that he'd franchise the Unseen University to diploma mills with actual classrooms, with the stated intention of doing exactly what modern colleges do, namely waste state and Federal money and poorly educate and impoverish the youth who attend them. It would be honest and hilarious.
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