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Redeployment
Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ Choice Award
Nominee for Readers' Favorite Fiction (2014)Phil Klay's Redeployment takes readers to the frontlines of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, asking us to understand what happened there, and what happened to the soldiers who returned. Interwoven with themes of brutality and faith, guilt and fear, helplessness and survival, the characters in these stories struggle to make meaning out of chaos.
In "Redeployment", a soldier who has had to shoot dogs because they were eating human corpses must learn what it is like to return to domestic life in suburbia, surrounded by people "who have no idea where Fallujah is, where three members of your platoon died." In "After Action Report", a Lance Corporal seeks expiation for a killing he didn't commit, in order that his best friend will be unburdened. A Morturary Affairs Marine tells about his experiences collecting remains - of U.S. and Iraqi soldiers both. A chaplain sees his understanding of Christianity, and his ability to provide solace through religion, tested by the actions of a ferocious Colonel. And in the darkly comic "Money as a Weapons System", a young Foreign Service Officer is given the absurd task of helping Iraqis improve their lives by teaching them to play baseball. These stories reveal the intricate combination of monotony, bureaucracy, comradeship and violence that make up a soldier's daily life at war, and the isolation, remorse, and despair that can accompany a soldier's homecoming.
Redeployment is poised to become a classic in the tradition of war writing. Across nations and continents, Klay sets in devastating relief the two worlds a soldier inhabits: one of extremes and one of loss. Written with a hard-eyed realism and stunning emotional depth, this work marks Phil Klay as one of the most talented new voices of his generation.
In "Redeployment", a soldier who has had to shoot dogs because they were eating human corpses must learn what it is like to return to domestic life in suburbia, surrounded by people "who have no idea where Fallujah is, where three members of your platoon died." In "After Action Report", a Lance Corporal seeks expiation for a killing he didn't commit, in order that his best friend will be unburdened. A Morturary Affairs Marine tells about his experiences collecting remains - of U.S. and Iraqi soldiers both. A chaplain sees his understanding of Christianity, and his ability to provide solace through religion, tested by the actions of a ferocious Colonel. And in the darkly comic "Money as a Weapons System", a young Foreign Service Officer is given the absurd task of helping Iraqis improve their lives by teaching them to play baseball. These stories reveal the intricate combination of monotony, bureaucracy, comradeship and violence that make up a soldier's daily life at war, and the isolation, remorse, and despair that can accompany a soldier's homecoming.
Redeployment is poised to become a classic in the tradition of war writing. Across nations and continents, Klay sets in devastating relief the two worlds a soldier inhabits: one of extremes and one of loss. Written with a hard-eyed realism and stunning emotional depth, this work marks Phil Klay as one of the most talented new voices of his generation.
288 pages, Hardcover
First published March 4, 2014
1,169 people are currently reading
28.9k people want to read
About the author
Phil Klay
11Ìýbooks457ÌýfollowersPhil Klay is a veteran of the US Marine Corps. His short story collection Redeployment won the 2014 National Book Award for Fiction and the National Book Criticsâ€� Circle John Leonard Prize for best debut work in any genre, and was selected as one of the 10 Best Books of 2014 by The New York Times. His nonfiction work won the George W. Hunt, S.J., Prize for Journalism, Arts & Letters in the category of Cultural & Historical Criticism in 2018. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, and the Brookings Institution’s Brookings Essay series. He currently teaches fiction at Fairfield University.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 3,107 reviews
January 27, 2014
Maybe everything is just fucked. I blast off a review pointing out how bad a shitty poetry is and it is one of my most popular reviews. Thank you all for the votes but I wish more of my thank-yous got seen by as many people as that particular fuck you.
There is certainly no fuck you here, this collection of stories about Marines is awesome. It's the kind of book that reminds me why I spend so much time reading, it makes all the sometimes dry spells of mediocre and mildly forgettable books all worth it.
These twelve stories cover all sorts of experiences of being a Marine (mostly, one story is from a civilian's point of view and another from someone in Army, but Marines are still present in all the stories) deployed in the Middle East, life after deployment and what being in a war does to you. Each story is it's own particular view of the war and the people engaged in it. A Marine just back who had been involved in shooting dogs in Iraq, Chaplins, Adjuncts working desk duty and are now living in New York City, Marines in the infantry, collecting the bodies of dead soldiers so they can be processed and sent back to America, driving convoy, engineers who repair roads, working artillery, doing psyops. A civilian is charged with teaching Iraqi children about baseball because one rich constituent believes this is important to lasting change in the country. People try to come to terms with what they are doing, fight and engage in missions they don't understand. Face almost certain death because of bad decisions. Try to deal with civilians once they have done their tours.
I can't do this book justice. Each story is so engaging and each one has it's own unique take. It's raw in it's emotions. It's unflinching in the reality it presents and it doesn't succumb to neat moralization or tidy answers for the dilemmas the various soldiers face.
This is another example of the pile of amazing books being released in 2014.
There is certainly no fuck you here, this collection of stories about Marines is awesome. It's the kind of book that reminds me why I spend so much time reading, it makes all the sometimes dry spells of mediocre and mildly forgettable books all worth it.
These twelve stories cover all sorts of experiences of being a Marine (mostly, one story is from a civilian's point of view and another from someone in Army, but Marines are still present in all the stories) deployed in the Middle East, life after deployment and what being in a war does to you. Each story is it's own particular view of the war and the people engaged in it. A Marine just back who had been involved in shooting dogs in Iraq, Chaplins, Adjuncts working desk duty and are now living in New York City, Marines in the infantry, collecting the bodies of dead soldiers so they can be processed and sent back to America, driving convoy, engineers who repair roads, working artillery, doing psyops. A civilian is charged with teaching Iraqi children about baseball because one rich constituent believes this is important to lasting change in the country. People try to come to terms with what they are doing, fight and engage in missions they don't understand. Face almost certain death because of bad decisions. Try to deal with civilians once they have done their tours.
I can't do this book justice. Each story is so engaging and each one has it's own unique take. It's raw in it's emotions. It's unflinching in the reality it presents and it doesn't succumb to neat moralization or tidy answers for the dilemmas the various soldiers face.
This is another example of the pile of amazing books being released in 2014.
December 13, 2014
The writing here is excellent and this offers a necessary look at war and its effects but there is a sameness across the stories that I didn't love. By the end of the book, not one character was distinct in my mind.
September 9, 2020
Realism is masterfully achieved in this collection of short stories. All the short stories are alike in the theme of our modern war. They're told with anecdotal precision in modern vernacular, so it is never boring. All of them are written in the first person POV, which makes the entire work more personal.
Bottom line: It really is one very important read...
Bottom line: It really is one very important read...
June 14, 2021
"In “Redeployment,� Phil Klay, a former Marine who served in Iraq, grapples with a different war but aims for a similar effect: showing us the myriad human manifestations that result from the collision of young, heavily armed Americans with a fractured and deeply foreign country that very few of them even remotely understand. Klay succeeds brilliantly, capturing on an intimate scale the ways in which the war in Iraq evoked a unique array of emotion, predicament and heartbreak. In Klay’s hands, Iraq comes across not merely as a theater of war but as a laboratory for the human condition in extremis. “Redeployment� is hilarious, biting, whipsawing and sad. It’s the best thing written so far on what the war did to people’s souls."
Dexter Filkins -- The New York Times Book Review
Deep down, I was secretly rooting for Emily St. John Mandel's "Station Eleven" but when the National Book Award for fiction was awarded to Phil Klay for "Redeployment", which I was almost done reading, I smiled with gratitude and approval.
When Phil Klay walked up on stage and started reading his notes for his acceptance speech, the myriad of emotions running across his face, which he painstakingly tried to subdue, held the audience captive from the first word to the last.
I cannot do justice to this collection of stories. They are the most brutally honest, unflinchingly raw and morally complex accounts of what the Irak and Afghanistan wars did to the minds and bodies of the most innocent, the most naive and the bravest of all of us: the soldiers and Marines who served and still serve over there. Whether or not you supported or understood these wars, you cannot not feel an extraordinary sense of empathy for these young men and women thrown into the pits of hell and expected to come out unscathed.
I will leave the last words to him, from his incredible essay "After War, a Failure of the Imagination", published in the New York Times earlier this year:
"It’s a powerful moment, when you discover a vocabulary exists for something you’d thought incommunicably unique. Personally, I felt it reading Joseph Conrad’s “Lord Jim.� I have friends who’ve found themselves described in everything from science fiction to detective novels. This self-recognition through others is not simply a by-product of art � it’s the whole point. Hegel once wrote, “The nature of humanity is to drive men to agreement with one another, and humanity’s existence lies only in the commonality of consciousness that has been brought about.�
To enter into that commonality of consciousness, though, veterans need an audience that is both receptive and critical. Believing war is beyond words is an abrogation of responsibility � it lets civilians off the hook from trying to understand, and veterans off the hook from needing to explain. You don’t honor someone by telling them, “I can never imagine what you’ve been through.� Instead, listen to their story and try to imagine being in it, no matter how hard or uncomfortable that feels. If the past 10 years have taught us anything, it’s that in the age of an all-volunteer military, it is far too easy for Americans to send soldiers on deployment after deployment without making a serious effort to imagine what that means. We can do better."
The essay can be read in its entirety here:
And then you can rush and get a copy of this superb collection of stories.
Dexter Filkins -- The New York Times Book Review
Deep down, I was secretly rooting for Emily St. John Mandel's "Station Eleven" but when the National Book Award for fiction was awarded to Phil Klay for "Redeployment", which I was almost done reading, I smiled with gratitude and approval.
When Phil Klay walked up on stage and started reading his notes for his acceptance speech, the myriad of emotions running across his face, which he painstakingly tried to subdue, held the audience captive from the first word to the last.
I cannot do justice to this collection of stories. They are the most brutally honest, unflinchingly raw and morally complex accounts of what the Irak and Afghanistan wars did to the minds and bodies of the most innocent, the most naive and the bravest of all of us: the soldiers and Marines who served and still serve over there. Whether or not you supported or understood these wars, you cannot not feel an extraordinary sense of empathy for these young men and women thrown into the pits of hell and expected to come out unscathed.
I will leave the last words to him, from his incredible essay "After War, a Failure of the Imagination", published in the New York Times earlier this year:
"It’s a powerful moment, when you discover a vocabulary exists for something you’d thought incommunicably unique. Personally, I felt it reading Joseph Conrad’s “Lord Jim.� I have friends who’ve found themselves described in everything from science fiction to detective novels. This self-recognition through others is not simply a by-product of art � it’s the whole point. Hegel once wrote, “The nature of humanity is to drive men to agreement with one another, and humanity’s existence lies only in the commonality of consciousness that has been brought about.�
To enter into that commonality of consciousness, though, veterans need an audience that is both receptive and critical. Believing war is beyond words is an abrogation of responsibility � it lets civilians off the hook from trying to understand, and veterans off the hook from needing to explain. You don’t honor someone by telling them, “I can never imagine what you’ve been through.� Instead, listen to their story and try to imagine being in it, no matter how hard or uncomfortable that feels. If the past 10 years have taught us anything, it’s that in the age of an all-volunteer military, it is far too easy for Americans to send soldiers on deployment after deployment without making a serious effort to imagine what that means. We can do better."
The essay can be read in its entirety here:
And then you can rush and get a copy of this superb collection of stories.
November 12, 2015
Irritating! Annoying! Draining!
Wayyyyyyy too much profanity!
The 'in-house' jargon, (acronyms), were absurd. I'm not familiar with complex military
terminology. Much of this 'audible' came off feeling like ramblings.
It wasn't easy to difficult to follow.
This wasn't a book I was dying to read --(making things clear upfront) --
however, it's the new chosen pick for my local book club....so I was game.
I downloaded this book from my library on my over drive app -and started listening.
AWFUL... just plain awful!
People really took value away from this book? No me!
I felt like I was being talked to ...'to death'! When the narrators were not saying fuck
and Bullshit - their stories were choppy descriptions and short sentences.
All the stories felt repetitive and the characters similar. I get it..these guys were messed up by war!!! - clear!
I can't for the life of me understand why this book won the National Book award...
and I don't understand all the high ratings. I know what I listened to.
I wouldn't consider this a classic war book - at all! But if readers got value - and the author felt some grief-relief... then great, but
I already learned - with the Vietnam war-- how horrific war is...young men severely damaged, the complete waste war is........ I found this book too tiresome to listen to and too much cuirsing and sarcasm.
Nope... no Thank You!
Wayyyyyyy too much profanity!
The 'in-house' jargon, (acronyms), were absurd. I'm not familiar with complex military
terminology. Much of this 'audible' came off feeling like ramblings.
It wasn't easy to difficult to follow.
This wasn't a book I was dying to read --(making things clear upfront) --
however, it's the new chosen pick for my local book club....so I was game.
I downloaded this book from my library on my over drive app -and started listening.
AWFUL... just plain awful!
People really took value away from this book? No me!
I felt like I was being talked to ...'to death'! When the narrators were not saying fuck
and Bullshit - their stories were choppy descriptions and short sentences.
All the stories felt repetitive and the characters similar. I get it..these guys were messed up by war!!! - clear!
I can't for the life of me understand why this book won the National Book award...
and I don't understand all the high ratings. I know what I listened to.
I wouldn't consider this a classic war book - at all! But if readers got value - and the author felt some grief-relief... then great, but
I already learned - with the Vietnam war-- how horrific war is...young men severely damaged, the complete waste war is........ I found this book too tiresome to listen to and too much cuirsing and sarcasm.
Nope... no Thank You!
May 15, 2023
My grandfather battled in WWII, and as a child, I'd beg for tales of valor. But he never spoke of the war, kept silent - his memories free. Reading Redeployment, I came to begin to understand the horrors that haunted him; and although I longed for his stories, his silence spoke louder than words.
The marine stepped off the plane and onto American soil, his eyes scanning the familiar faces in the crowd. He was home, but he knew that nothing would ever be the same. The weight of his memories pressed down on him suffocating his spirit. He felt adrift, a solitary figure in a world that no longer made sense. The trauma of war had left its mark, and he wondered if he could ever truly leave it behind. He struggled to adjust to civilian life, to find meaning in a world that seemed so different from the one he had left behind. But still he pressed on, hoping that somehow, someway, he could find his way back to a life that made sense. He was left with nothing but his memories, the weight of the dead, and the story he told to keep himself from falling apart�
The unnamed soldier stood on the barren field; his hands stained with the blood of his fallen comrades. The bodies lay scattered around him, a grim reminder of the cost of war. He wondered if the sacrifice was worth it, if anything could justify the loss of so many lives. As he watched his comrades fall one by one, he felt a sense of rage and despair building within him, threatening to consume his soul. As he looked out at the desolate landscape, he knew that the only certainty was death�
Twelve powerful stories by Phil Klay where we start getting a glimpse on the absurdity of war and the difficulty of conveying its reality to those who haven't experienced it. Klay's writing is both visceral and raw, painting a picture of the dehumanizing effect of the war and the way in which it can strip soldiers of their individuality. Soldiers feel lost and abandoned, their faith shattered - falling adrift in a world torn apart; there is no going back, must keep moving forward, one day at a time, and hope that will make it out alive.
Orders received, Objectives are clear: a fight for a cause worth dying for (or was it all just a cruel joke).
"Even without hope, you must try�"
4.25/5
The marine stepped off the plane and onto American soil, his eyes scanning the familiar faces in the crowd. He was home, but he knew that nothing would ever be the same. The weight of his memories pressed down on him suffocating his spirit. He felt adrift, a solitary figure in a world that no longer made sense. The trauma of war had left its mark, and he wondered if he could ever truly leave it behind. He struggled to adjust to civilian life, to find meaning in a world that seemed so different from the one he had left behind. But still he pressed on, hoping that somehow, someway, he could find his way back to a life that made sense. He was left with nothing but his memories, the weight of the dead, and the story he told to keep himself from falling apart�
The unnamed soldier stood on the barren field; his hands stained with the blood of his fallen comrades. The bodies lay scattered around him, a grim reminder of the cost of war. He wondered if the sacrifice was worth it, if anything could justify the loss of so many lives. As he watched his comrades fall one by one, he felt a sense of rage and despair building within him, threatening to consume his soul. As he looked out at the desolate landscape, he knew that the only certainty was death�
Twelve powerful stories by Phil Klay where we start getting a glimpse on the absurdity of war and the difficulty of conveying its reality to those who haven't experienced it. Klay's writing is both visceral and raw, painting a picture of the dehumanizing effect of the war and the way in which it can strip soldiers of their individuality. Soldiers feel lost and abandoned, their faith shattered - falling adrift in a world torn apart; there is no going back, must keep moving forward, one day at a time, and hope that will make it out alive.
Orders received, Objectives are clear: a fight for a cause worth dying for (or was it all just a cruel joke).
"Even without hope, you must try�"
4.25/5
December 7, 2014
Veteran's Day- November 11th
To all our War Veterans: with tremendous appreciation and pride, a heartfelt Thank You for your bravery and steely character not just on the battlefield, but in resuming Life after it.
There are two ways to tell the story. Funny or sad. Guys like it funny, with lots of gore and a grin on your face when you get to the end. Girls like it sad, with a thousand-yard stare out to the distance as you gaze upon the horrors of war they can't quite see.
- Phil Klay:
The Iraq conflict is clearly emerging as the war narrative of our country. With its highly sophisticated and damaging weaponry, our veterans are left with the intense stories of the ill-gotten, complex myriad of physically and psychologically devastating injuries. is a raw, gut wrenching, dis-embowelling short story collection focused on the Marine's tour in Fallujah: a window through which to view the Iraq experience from the most important perspective - through the eyes of those who served there.
These vivid portraits detail palpitating combat action in the call of duty, undeniable courage and loyalty to one's fellow soldier; intense stories of the war hero, who is sometimes the antihero; his disenchantment from the glorified myth: that the 'American soldier went to war and came back all the stronger for the experience'; the dehumanization effect of war indelibly sketched between the lines; the devastating battle wounds and deep psychological scars; the shattering impact and permanent damage to both soldiers' and civilians' lives; stories that end in the silent question of the soldier's intact morality and wholesome future.
In the streets: firefights, sniper attacks, gore and guts, gas-bloated dead hajji in the sun, unseeing eyes bulging toward the sky. It could have been you but he got fucked.
Insurgent hiding in the stinking pool of liquid shit, waiting to fire on you as you turn your back. You saw him first, so he got fucked.
Little Iraqi faces peering out a window, the mother screaming in horror, the fourteen year old kid obliterated by your rifle fire. Never-mind he was holding an AK, it was either him or you, and he got fucked.
You did what you had to do to survive; maybe injured civilians in the process. Bombs, missiles, IED's, bone shattering rounds, torture, scattered limbs, seared flesh. You survived, but you still got fucked.
Home now. No sleep. When it fitfully comes, you return to the battlefield in dreams and odd memories. "When I thought back on it, there were the memories I had, and the stories I told, and they sort of sat together in my mind, the stories becoming stronger every time I retold them, feeling more and more true." Wounds too deep, so much pain, it hurts too much. "A human being in enough pain is just a screaming animal."
No one comes home from the war unchanged.
On coming home, did our governmental institution expect it to be a calm and easy transition into the 'after' life for you? You're now an unemployed or unemployable war vet; have they nonchalantly condemned you to subsist on the inevitable artificial life support of Disability or the stuporous numbness of perpetual inadequate medical management?
Phil Klay noticeably avoids taking political positions that would have interfered with his true purpose - the human experience of the war itself. Quite frankly, too many troops did not fully grasp why they were even there. Klay contrasts the gravity of this war of ambiguous missions, with the injection of some levity, for example: revealing the farcical projects like building irrelevant, flawed infrastructure; or the circumlocution in providing medical care and jobs for Iraqi women still in an oppressed society based on their religion. Klay's writing is powerful and compelling, most of all, realistic.
I can't recommend this book highly enough. might probably become a modern war classic. In any event, it has my vote.
To all our War Veterans: with tremendous appreciation and pride, a heartfelt Thank You for your bravery and steely character not just on the battlefield, but in resuming Life after it.
There are two ways to tell the story. Funny or sad. Guys like it funny, with lots of gore and a grin on your face when you get to the end. Girls like it sad, with a thousand-yard stare out to the distance as you gaze upon the horrors of war they can't quite see.
- Phil Klay:
The Iraq conflict is clearly emerging as the war narrative of our country. With its highly sophisticated and damaging weaponry, our veterans are left with the intense stories of the ill-gotten, complex myriad of physically and psychologically devastating injuries. is a raw, gut wrenching, dis-embowelling short story collection focused on the Marine's tour in Fallujah: a window through which to view the Iraq experience from the most important perspective - through the eyes of those who served there.
These vivid portraits detail palpitating combat action in the call of duty, undeniable courage and loyalty to one's fellow soldier; intense stories of the war hero, who is sometimes the antihero; his disenchantment from the glorified myth: that the 'American soldier went to war and came back all the stronger for the experience'; the dehumanization effect of war indelibly sketched between the lines; the devastating battle wounds and deep psychological scars; the shattering impact and permanent damage to both soldiers' and civilians' lives; stories that end in the silent question of the soldier's intact morality and wholesome future.
In the streets: firefights, sniper attacks, gore and guts, gas-bloated dead hajji in the sun, unseeing eyes bulging toward the sky. It could have been you but he got fucked.
Insurgent hiding in the stinking pool of liquid shit, waiting to fire on you as you turn your back. You saw him first, so he got fucked.
Little Iraqi faces peering out a window, the mother screaming in horror, the fourteen year old kid obliterated by your rifle fire. Never-mind he was holding an AK, it was either him or you, and he got fucked.
You did what you had to do to survive; maybe injured civilians in the process. Bombs, missiles, IED's, bone shattering rounds, torture, scattered limbs, seared flesh. You survived, but you still got fucked.
Home now. No sleep. When it fitfully comes, you return to the battlefield in dreams and odd memories. "When I thought back on it, there were the memories I had, and the stories I told, and they sort of sat together in my mind, the stories becoming stronger every time I retold them, feeling more and more true." Wounds too deep, so much pain, it hurts too much. "A human being in enough pain is just a screaming animal."
No one comes home from the war unchanged.
On coming home, did our governmental institution expect it to be a calm and easy transition into the 'after' life for you? You're now an unemployed or unemployable war vet; have they nonchalantly condemned you to subsist on the inevitable artificial life support of Disability or the stuporous numbness of perpetual inadequate medical management?
Phil Klay noticeably avoids taking political positions that would have interfered with his true purpose - the human experience of the war itself. Quite frankly, too many troops did not fully grasp why they were even there. Klay contrasts the gravity of this war of ambiguous missions, with the injection of some levity, for example: revealing the farcical projects like building irrelevant, flawed infrastructure; or the circumlocution in providing medical care and jobs for Iraqi women still in an oppressed society based on their religion. Klay's writing is powerful and compelling, most of all, realistic.
I can't recommend this book highly enough. might probably become a modern war classic. In any event, it has my vote.
May 1, 2018
If I had to sum up my feelings about this book in one word, could I do that? What word would I choose to describe this stunning collection of short stories? Thought-provoking, perfect, intense, brutal, authentic, raw, heartbreaking, honest, hard-to-read, brilliant, unforgettable...luckily, I don't have to describe this in a word because quite frankly, I don't think I could. I'm supposed to be reading All The Light We Cannot See (the 28-day library loan that is due back in three days) but I picked up Redeployment and I didn't want to put it down. I'm not a fan of short stories and might not have read this book had I realized it was a collection, but it grabbed me with the first sentence and never let go. Each story covers a different aspect of the Iraq War, with each voice very distinct. Each story is a work of art. The writing is beautiful and flawless. This "fiction" is very real.
The more I write, the more I realize that I cannot properly review this book having just finished it. My nerves are still jangled, my emotions twisted, my heart broken. I have tremendous, undying daily respect for every member of our military. This book is a brutally honest look at war that would be a difficult read for many, but it is an important work that I wish everyone would read. Outstanding.
The more I write, the more I realize that I cannot properly review this book having just finished it. My nerves are still jangled, my emotions twisted, my heart broken. I have tremendous, undying daily respect for every member of our military. This book is a brutally honest look at war that would be a difficult read for many, but it is an important work that I wish everyone would read. Outstanding.
March 12, 2014
In these dozen stories, Klay draws from his own experience as a U.S. Marine captain to give us one of the most compelling depictions to date of the Iraq war, and especially of the psychic toll it continues to exact on those who fought in it. In this regard, “Redeployment� will inevitably draw comparisons to “The Things They Carried� (1990), Tim O’Brien’s masterful evocation of the Vietnam War. Somewhat remarkably, given Klay’s age (he’s only 30) and his admittedly mild deployment in Iraq (one defined mostly, he has written, by “long hours at a cheap plywood desk in a cheap plywood hut�), the comparison is apt. Have you been seeking the Tim O’Brien or the Joseph Heller or the Erich Maria Remarque for our foray into Iraq? Mission accomplished.
Read our full review of this extraordinarily powerful debut:
Read our full review of this extraordinarily powerful debut:
December 12, 2014
“Believing war is beyond words is an abrogation of responsibility � it lets civilians off the hook from trying to understand, and veterans off the hook from needing to explain. You don’t honor someone by telling them, “I can never imagine what you’ve been through.� Instead, listen to their story and try to imagine being in it, no matter how hard or uncomfortable that feels. If the past 10 years have taught us anything, it’s that in the age of an all-volunteer military, it is far too easy for Americans to send soldiers on deployment after deployment without making a serious effort to imagine what that means. We can do better.�
, By PHIL KLAY New York Times Sunday Review FEB. 8, 2014
In his searing collection, Redeployment, winner of the 2014 National Book Award, Phil Klay strips the wartime experience of everything that makes us congratulate ourselves for our nation’s bravery, dispels any romantic notion we have of soldiers in combat, and empties our hearts of hope that we have not done grave, even irreparable, damage to the bodies and minds of these young men and women.
“We shot dogs. Not by accident. We did it on purpose, and we called it Operation Scooby. I’m a dog person, so I thought about that a lot.�
And so opens Redeployment, with its eponymous story. The collection offers voices of men, nearly all Marines, some speaking from home, others still in Iraq—each offering a distinct and visceral reflection of his war experience.
There is the adrenaline rush of combat, rife with acronyms and Oo-rahs, fuck and blood in Frago, Ten Kliks South, and After Action Report. The latter shows how missions can be twisted and misremembered, as one soldier claims responsibility for something he did not do to spare a buddy the consequences of truth.
But the consequences of war do not spare any of the soldiers. The stories of veterans returned home affected me the most, for it is here that our failure of these volunteers is the starkest. The training for war is planned and executed with precision; the plan for the soldiers once they no longer have a leader and a mission is almost non-existent and their emotional wounds are left to fester. The young man in Bodies collected the bodies of the dead; not only was he an outcast in war, the lowest member of the military caste system, but he returns home to a girlfriend who rejects him for having enlisted in the first place. He belongs nowhere, and his loneliness is crushing. The black humor between two friends in War Stories is painful and tender: one young man is so disfigured from his burn wounds, he and his buddy both know he won’t win even a pity fuck from the ugly girls in the bar.
Money as a Weapons System is a window into the surreal “Who’s on first?� world of government bureaucracy, as told by a baffled Foreign Service Officer. Prayer in the Furnace is the author at his most tender and philosophical, writing in the voice of a chaplain who believes he has knowledge of war crimes. His attempts to bring the transgressions to the attention of those in authority and his attempts to bring God to the attention of the soldiers force the reader to reconsider morality and judgment.
“There’s a perversity in me that, when I talk to conservatives, makes me want to bash the war and, when I talk to liberals, defend it.� That’s how an Iraq veteran, now student at Amherst, explains his ambivalence about his service. His story takes a twist: he’s a Copt—an Egyptian Christian—who grew up in the shadow of 9/11. As America deepened its mistrust of anyone who looks Middle Eastern—the underlying assumption being that Middle Eastern = Muslim = Enemy—his father became a gung-ho Fox News conservative to deal with the prejudice. His son joined the military in a perverse need to both please and hurt his father.
What elevates these stories above voyeurism and shock value is Phil Klay’s pitch perfect writing. His ear for dialogue, his eye for detail—offering just enough poetry in his prose to seduce, but not to saturate—and the immediacy and emotion of his characters� voices reveal the power this young writer wields in his pen. These are masterfully crafted stories of war, walking in the same footsteps as Tim O’Brien, Ernest Hemingway, and Wilfred Owen before him, but with a vision all his own.
As I write this review, the Senate Intelligence Committee is at long last issuing a report on the Central Intelligence Agency’s program to detain and interrogate terrorism suspects in the years after the Sept. 11 attacks. The report is a damning indictment on the techniques used by the C.I.A.—techniques the report identifies as torture. Former Vice President Dick Cheney is already spinning away, calling these “enhanced interrogation techniques� lawful and justified. After all, these were members of the Axis of Evil, determined to undermine peace, justice, and the ‘merricun way.
I wonder if any of the men and women who made the decision to lead our country into war with Iraq has the courage to read Phil Klay’s Redeployment. I wonder if any of these politicians has the courage to understand what their war has done to the soldiers who volunteered to serve in their name.
“If the past 10 years have taught us anything, it’s that in the age of an all-volunteer military, it is far too easy for Americans to send soldiers on deployment after deployment without making a serious effort to imagine what that means. We can do better.� Phil Klay
July 4, 2018
Horrible stories full of muscular acronyms and bitter anguish, some from inside the killing zone that was Fallujah, some from the deeply uncomfortable phantom zone of attempted reintegration into civilian life. The author does not pull any punches about military life � all its profound ugliness is displayed here.
Phil Klay has a tough but tender style and this is all good stuff and I recommend this book but alas, I have to make a complaint. As usual with fiction or documentary from the soldier’s ground-level-view there is no context. Questions about what are we doing here, what is the objective, what are our war aims, is this the wrong war � these are never addressed, or only alluded to in an eye-rolling way, if some dippy civilian mentions politics. In this book the Marines have become kind of holy to the rest of America, like saints. They don’t ask why, they love their fellow Marines and they follow orders and there’s no perspective, they have neither the time or the inclination. These Marines suffer and die & this suffering and dying makes their actions unimpeachable, and this makes the thoughtful surviving Marines like our author even more disturbed by their terrible experiences.
It’s a kind of claustrophobia. The Marines don't question the war and no American would dream of questioning the Marines and so the suffering of the Marines throws up an invisible protective screen round the politicians.
They were told (we were told) that they, the American soldiers, were fighting for “freedom� � the war was officially named Operation Iraqi Freedom. But � to quote from another of my own reviews - if your country has been invaded and occupied by a foreign army, then maybe, fighting to get rid of the foreign army is, for you, fighting for freedom. In the case of Iraq, if you thought that, you would be wrong and the American soldiers were going to shoot you if you thought that. But maybe, for an uneducated population, that was an easy mistake to make.
I would like to read a collection of fictions from the Iraqi point of view, but I doubt if one exists (let me know if I’m wrong).
Phil Klay has a tough but tender style and this is all good stuff and I recommend this book but alas, I have to make a complaint. As usual with fiction or documentary from the soldier’s ground-level-view there is no context. Questions about what are we doing here, what is the objective, what are our war aims, is this the wrong war � these are never addressed, or only alluded to in an eye-rolling way, if some dippy civilian mentions politics. In this book the Marines have become kind of holy to the rest of America, like saints. They don’t ask why, they love their fellow Marines and they follow orders and there’s no perspective, they have neither the time or the inclination. These Marines suffer and die & this suffering and dying makes their actions unimpeachable, and this makes the thoughtful surviving Marines like our author even more disturbed by their terrible experiences.
It’s a kind of claustrophobia. The Marines don't question the war and no American would dream of questioning the Marines and so the suffering of the Marines throws up an invisible protective screen round the politicians.
They were told (we were told) that they, the American soldiers, were fighting for “freedom� � the war was officially named Operation Iraqi Freedom. But � to quote from another of my own reviews - if your country has been invaded and occupied by a foreign army, then maybe, fighting to get rid of the foreign army is, for you, fighting for freedom. In the case of Iraq, if you thought that, you would be wrong and the American soldiers were going to shoot you if you thought that. But maybe, for an uneducated population, that was an easy mistake to make.
I would like to read a collection of fictions from the Iraqi point of view, but I doubt if one exists (let me know if I’m wrong).
March 5, 2014
I defy any readers of Phil Klay’s stunning Redeployment to a) put it down and b) limit the number of “wows� they utter while reading it. These twelve stories, are all about the Iraq War or its aftermath; they are so direct, so frank, they will impress readers who have read all they care to about the war as well as those who thought they couldn’t stand to read about it at all. The strength of Klay’s stories lies in his unflinching, un-PC point of view, even for the soldiers he so clearly identifies with and admires. For example, one veteran tells a guy in a bar about a particularly harrowing war experience. When the stranger, moved, declares his respect for our troops, the soldier responds, “I don’t want you to respect what I’ve been through. I want you to be disgusted.� Klay is fearless; he eviscerates platitude and knee-jerk politics every chance he gets. “[A fellow soldier] was the one guy in the squad who thought the country wouldn’t be better off if we just nuked it until the desert turned into a flat plane of grass,� he writes. These stories are at least partly autobiographical, and yet, for all their verisimilitude, they’re also shaped by an undefinable thing called art. Phil Klay is a writer to watch. --Sara Nelson
March 31, 2016
For those of you keeping score -
"American Sniper" - 1 star
"Redeployment" - 5 stars
"Redeployment" is everything you want in a war book, an unflinching look at the disconnect between the people fighting and the country sending them to fight. It's smart in every way that "American Sniper" is over-simplistic, showcasing the ins-and-outs of war with sensitivity and nuance whereas "American Sniper" practically screams "F*** yeah! Let's kill more savages in the name of freedom!"
While fiction, the voices resonate with more truth than the autobiography of "our most lethal sniper;" this is the Iraq war told through many different lenses forming a more comprehensive picture of the war experience.
"American Sniper" - 1 star
"Redeployment" - 5 stars
"Redeployment" is everything you want in a war book, an unflinching look at the disconnect between the people fighting and the country sending them to fight. It's smart in every way that "American Sniper" is over-simplistic, showcasing the ins-and-outs of war with sensitivity and nuance whereas "American Sniper" practically screams "F*** yeah! Let's kill more savages in the name of freedom!"
While fiction, the voices resonate with more truth than the autobiography of "our most lethal sniper;" this is the Iraq war told through many different lenses forming a more comprehensive picture of the war experience.
April 1, 2014
Maybe the best way to get at the truth about war is to read fiction. Klay’s collection of stories shows us just how that might be true, for he comes at aspects of the Iraq war from unique angles: PsyOps, Chaplain, corpse corps, infantry, artillery. He must fuse the experience of many into these snapshots, giving us both an unreal picture, but one that is strangely more real than any other. What cannot be clearer is that we have to be very sure of our motives when we place men and women in harm’s way. Otherwise the bargain—one life for the many—is off.
Klay has a remarkable gift. I felt completely in his hands and he turned me this way and that, one moment laughing, the next cringing. My opportunity scanner for critical comment felt disabled.
I don’t really know why I read so much about war. Perhaps because it is the thing that tears away all coverings and reveals us as we really are. Lots of people experience war but not that many can convey that moment when it changes one. Klay is able to capture those moments. Those moments are mined, for they are deeply stored and not often held to the light. Most folks can’t even find those moments, let alone articulate them. So Klay’s got a bit of PsyOps happening there. I’m not sure I envy him that skill, that knowledge.
It is difficult to pick a favorite story but the relief I got from the funny one in the middle, “Money As a Weapons System,� makes me choose that one. In it, our narrator is a Foreign Service officer in charge of reconstruction. He confronts the absurd both in the abstract and in the flesh: a strange collection of folks have been assembled to fulfill head office policy directives and they are doing it…to the letter. The policies sounded good, but when confronted with the realities on the ground, they maybe don’t work so well.
In “OIF,� the economy of abbreviations gives a racing, manic, wild feel to the story…and we are running headlong off a cliff. For a mere seven pages we are not just reading, but immersed in the hyper atmosphere and not-completely-clear thinking of folks who get shot at every day.
In the very first story, "Redeployment," is a quote that had me gulping in recognition: "And glad as I was to be in the States, and even though I hated the past seven months and the only thing that kept me going was the Marines I served with and the thought of coming come, I started feeling like I wanted to go back. Because fuck all this." To tell the truth, this isn't war-talk. This is leaving-home-talk. It's real and it cinches our connection with the author. He's got the goods, tells the truth, and we understand that.
In “Bodies,� Klay writes “there are two ways to tell the story. Funny or sad. Guys like it funny, with lots of gore and a grin on your face when you get to the end. Girls like it sad, with a thousand-yard stare out to the distance as you gaze upon the horrors of war they can’t quite see. Either way, it’s the same story.� Klay gives us both in this collection, sometimes both in the same story. Our nineteen-year-old narrator comes home and visits his girlfriend still living in her parent’s basement. The inchoate longing for connection is physically painful.
Klay has the talent to write about anything at all. In one of his stories, “Unless It’s a Sucking Chest Wound,� when he writes about school and banking and law in NYC, we believe him. We believe in him. I am curious what he will do next.
Klay has a remarkable gift. I felt completely in his hands and he turned me this way and that, one moment laughing, the next cringing. My opportunity scanner for critical comment felt disabled.
I don’t really know why I read so much about war. Perhaps because it is the thing that tears away all coverings and reveals us as we really are. Lots of people experience war but not that many can convey that moment when it changes one. Klay is able to capture those moments. Those moments are mined, for they are deeply stored and not often held to the light. Most folks can’t even find those moments, let alone articulate them. So Klay’s got a bit of PsyOps happening there. I’m not sure I envy him that skill, that knowledge.
It is difficult to pick a favorite story but the relief I got from the funny one in the middle, “Money As a Weapons System,� makes me choose that one. In it, our narrator is a Foreign Service officer in charge of reconstruction. He confronts the absurd both in the abstract and in the flesh: a strange collection of folks have been assembled to fulfill head office policy directives and they are doing it…to the letter. The policies sounded good, but when confronted with the realities on the ground, they maybe don’t work so well.
In “OIF,� the economy of abbreviations gives a racing, manic, wild feel to the story…and we are running headlong off a cliff. For a mere seven pages we are not just reading, but immersed in the hyper atmosphere and not-completely-clear thinking of folks who get shot at every day.
In the very first story, "Redeployment," is a quote that had me gulping in recognition: "And glad as I was to be in the States, and even though I hated the past seven months and the only thing that kept me going was the Marines I served with and the thought of coming come, I started feeling like I wanted to go back. Because fuck all this." To tell the truth, this isn't war-talk. This is leaving-home-talk. It's real and it cinches our connection with the author. He's got the goods, tells the truth, and we understand that.
In “Bodies,� Klay writes “there are two ways to tell the story. Funny or sad. Guys like it funny, with lots of gore and a grin on your face when you get to the end. Girls like it sad, with a thousand-yard stare out to the distance as you gaze upon the horrors of war they can’t quite see. Either way, it’s the same story.� Klay gives us both in this collection, sometimes both in the same story. Our nineteen-year-old narrator comes home and visits his girlfriend still living in her parent’s basement. The inchoate longing for connection is physically painful.
Klay has the talent to write about anything at all. In one of his stories, “Unless It’s a Sucking Chest Wound,� when he writes about school and banking and law in NYC, we believe him. We believe in him. I am curious what he will do next.
December 4, 2022
Around Veteran's Day, I usually pick up a book about the military. This year it was the award winning Redeployment. An anthology about primarily the second Iraq War with flexes towards Afghanistan. This one was very reminiscent of . Multiple stories about combat and its affects on soldiers both during and after being deployed. The titular stories in both collections were the first story and the best stories in my view.
As an Air Force veteran, I feel like I always want to try to stay connected to what the military is being called to do. Make sure I understand the impacts upon the humans that we are sending off to battle. Of course the experience in both and Redeployment are of Army soldiers and Marines. These folks are much more up close and personal than most of the people I served with. The impacts of war much more overwhelming. was more or less about the same-ish Army soldier in a variety of situations and mind space. Redeployment went a slightly different route examining the impact of the war from far broader and varied points of view, from the rank and file marine, to an interpreter, to an administrative soldier, to a disfigured soldier, to a psyops marine, to an officer commanding in combat etc. It's also the stories of a much more current war which means it may resonate with the current generations.
Neither book was a pleasure to read. Both deal with the effects of war, primarily psychological. In the military these days, the psychological effect of serving wartime or not is dismaying. All volunteer force means those who serve deploy to hostile territories multiple times during their enlistment. It also means fewer people serve in the military or even know people who served. Americans in general have less and less skin in the game. It allows the politicians to commit to wars without much fear of reprisal. There has been a highly visible campaign for military suicide prevention because of the pressures put on soldiers especially after returning home and trying adjust. At least one veteran commits suicide every single day. With all the movies it's easy to forget that most of these soldiers are under 25 years old. That's quite a burden to put on these very young people. I think Klay captured the feelings of these young men very well. Most of the stories were very well done with a couple of soap opera-ish entries. The most affecting was the titular Redeployment. It was also the first story, so it set a pretty high bar. The rest of the stories were mostly good. Klay's portraits are about men. There are no women soldiers in these tales. While that is not a criticism, I would say it is a huge gaping hole when trying to convey the stories of the Iraq/Afghanistan war experience. On the whole a good portrayal of soldiers and some of the issues that they live with.
4 Stars
Read on kindle
As an Air Force veteran, I feel like I always want to try to stay connected to what the military is being called to do. Make sure I understand the impacts upon the humans that we are sending off to battle. Of course the experience in both and Redeployment are of Army soldiers and Marines. These folks are much more up close and personal than most of the people I served with. The impacts of war much more overwhelming. was more or less about the same-ish Army soldier in a variety of situations and mind space. Redeployment went a slightly different route examining the impact of the war from far broader and varied points of view, from the rank and file marine, to an interpreter, to an administrative soldier, to a disfigured soldier, to a psyops marine, to an officer commanding in combat etc. It's also the stories of a much more current war which means it may resonate with the current generations.
Neither book was a pleasure to read. Both deal with the effects of war, primarily psychological. In the military these days, the psychological effect of serving wartime or not is dismaying. All volunteer force means those who serve deploy to hostile territories multiple times during their enlistment. It also means fewer people serve in the military or even know people who served. Americans in general have less and less skin in the game. It allows the politicians to commit to wars without much fear of reprisal. There has been a highly visible campaign for military suicide prevention because of the pressures put on soldiers especially after returning home and trying adjust. At least one veteran commits suicide every single day. With all the movies it's easy to forget that most of these soldiers are under 25 years old. That's quite a burden to put on these very young people. I think Klay captured the feelings of these young men very well. Most of the stories were very well done with a couple of soap opera-ish entries. The most affecting was the titular Redeployment. It was also the first story, so it set a pretty high bar. The rest of the stories were mostly good. Klay's portraits are about men. There are no women soldiers in these tales. While that is not a criticism, I would say it is a huge gaping hole when trying to convey the stories of the Iraq/Afghanistan war experience. On the whole a good portrayal of soldiers and some of the issues that they live with.
4 Stars
Read on kindle
June 10, 2023
Schonungslos offen berichtet der Autor
über den Krieg im Irak.
über den Krieg im Irak.
January 10, 2015
"These stories demand and deserve our attention."
Although I didn't find this enjoyable (How could I?), I do agree with the writer Karen Russell, "Redeployment is a stunning, upsetting, urgently necessary book about the impact of the Iraq war on both soldiers and civilians."
They say you're not supposed to judge a book by its cover, but I always wonder, why not? The stark photo of a solitary solider waiting to deploy is one of the most iconic book covers of 2014. Before winning critical acclaim, I was instantly drawn to it on the shelves. I skimmed the first few sentences, and I knew I was going to read it at some point in the year.
Redeployment will be remembered as one of the canonical works of our modern wars, but it is tough to read. It's sad, existentially bleak, and you get the sense that there was no purpose to the conflict. Unfortunately, I get this same sense with almost everything I read about the current Middle East conflicts. I don't want to believe it was all for naught, but we have to trust the veterans that were there. And if they all felt this way, it must be true.
I really wanted some hope in this, and it just wasn't there. And that's ok, because where there wasn't hope, there was at least truth.
Although I didn't find this enjoyable (How could I?), I do agree with the writer Karen Russell, "Redeployment is a stunning, upsetting, urgently necessary book about the impact of the Iraq war on both soldiers and civilians."
They say you're not supposed to judge a book by its cover, but I always wonder, why not? The stark photo of a solitary solider waiting to deploy is one of the most iconic book covers of 2014. Before winning critical acclaim, I was instantly drawn to it on the shelves. I skimmed the first few sentences, and I knew I was going to read it at some point in the year.
Redeployment will be remembered as one of the canonical works of our modern wars, but it is tough to read. It's sad, existentially bleak, and you get the sense that there was no purpose to the conflict. Unfortunately, I get this same sense with almost everything I read about the current Middle East conflicts. I don't want to believe it was all for naught, but we have to trust the veterans that were there. And if they all felt this way, it must be true.
I really wanted some hope in this, and it just wasn't there. And that's ok, because where there wasn't hope, there was at least truth.
September 13, 2015
Phil Klay's Redeployment won the 2014 National Book Award for Fiction, which is second only to the Pulitzer when it comes to American literary prizes. This is quite an achievement, considering that this is not only the author's debut but also a collection of short stories, which routinely get shunned when it comes to winning big prizes.
Redeployment contains twelve stories, each a self-contained experience of soldiers and civilians who are or were at one time deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan, the two biggest conflicts of the early 21st century - the author himself is a graduate of marine school who was deployed to Iraq between 2007 and 2008.
Writing and talking about Afghanistan and Iraq divides and polarizes people; calling these wars failures is almost a cliche now. The author does a remarkably good job with omitting any political discussion and presenting a purely personal and human approach to both wars; in these twelve stories, he created twelve different characters who present twelve different reactions to the war and its aftermath. Although all characters are American men, Phil Klay manages to give them a variety of voices - the eponymous opening story is narrated by a Marine who returns home from Iraq and tries to return to normal life; in another a senior officer takes a grunt to a brothel, another has a soldier divided on what post-war career he should go for: a lawyer or a banker? What can one do after being in war? My two picks from the volume are Psychological Operations, which features an Arab-American and Coptic Christian soldier talking about the war, military and religion with his classmate who has recently converted to Islam; the other, Money as a Weapons System is a narrated by a good-willed government official who tries to secure funding into improving an Iraqi village, but encounters a wall of bureaucracy, misunderstanding and cultural differences.
A complaint which can be made against Redeployment is that many of its protagonists blend together, and lose their individuality; their experiences mix with one another, their voices blend into one. I think that the collection can be at least partially defended by its theme - the military and its impact on lives of its recruits; people join the military out of a sense of duty and obligation towards their country, as well as a sense of commitment towards a greater good - saving innocent people. The armed forces are strong because they are more than one individual person, and the soldiers operate as a collective - being regarded by their rank and specialty and usefulness in combat, important elements of an even more important bigger machine. A complaints that I have against Redeployment is the extensive use of military acronyms - one story is centered almost entirely around such acronyms, which can make it hard to understand for non-military readers. These terms are left unexplained, which can leave many readers not only frustrated but feeling that the author treats them with slight contempt and condescension - I know something that you don't, and don't owe you any explanation since you weren't there.
That being said, Redeployment is a good collection and I'm glad that it won the NBA, especially since the two other contenders were the average All the Light We Cannot See and the ultimately disappointing Station Eleven. Even though Phil Klay served as a Public Affairs Officer, his experience allowed him to create convincing portrayals of different people who were deployed to Iraq and their experience of it. Hopefully, it will also resurrect public interests in the welfare of often forgotten veterans and ordinary civilians who continue to be affected by it across the ocean - that war might be over, but it left behind many lingering ghosts.
Redeployment contains twelve stories, each a self-contained experience of soldiers and civilians who are or were at one time deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan, the two biggest conflicts of the early 21st century - the author himself is a graduate of marine school who was deployed to Iraq between 2007 and 2008.
Writing and talking about Afghanistan and Iraq divides and polarizes people; calling these wars failures is almost a cliche now. The author does a remarkably good job with omitting any political discussion and presenting a purely personal and human approach to both wars; in these twelve stories, he created twelve different characters who present twelve different reactions to the war and its aftermath. Although all characters are American men, Phil Klay manages to give them a variety of voices - the eponymous opening story is narrated by a Marine who returns home from Iraq and tries to return to normal life; in another a senior officer takes a grunt to a brothel, another has a soldier divided on what post-war career he should go for: a lawyer or a banker? What can one do after being in war? My two picks from the volume are Psychological Operations, which features an Arab-American and Coptic Christian soldier talking about the war, military and religion with his classmate who has recently converted to Islam; the other, Money as a Weapons System is a narrated by a good-willed government official who tries to secure funding into improving an Iraqi village, but encounters a wall of bureaucracy, misunderstanding and cultural differences.
A complaint which can be made against Redeployment is that many of its protagonists blend together, and lose their individuality; their experiences mix with one another, their voices blend into one. I think that the collection can be at least partially defended by its theme - the military and its impact on lives of its recruits; people join the military out of a sense of duty and obligation towards their country, as well as a sense of commitment towards a greater good - saving innocent people. The armed forces are strong because they are more than one individual person, and the soldiers operate as a collective - being regarded by their rank and specialty and usefulness in combat, important elements of an even more important bigger machine. A complaints that I have against Redeployment is the extensive use of military acronyms - one story is centered almost entirely around such acronyms, which can make it hard to understand for non-military readers. These terms are left unexplained, which can leave many readers not only frustrated but feeling that the author treats them with slight contempt and condescension - I know something that you don't, and don't owe you any explanation since you weren't there.
That being said, Redeployment is a good collection and I'm glad that it won the NBA, especially since the two other contenders were the average All the Light We Cannot See and the ultimately disappointing Station Eleven. Even though Phil Klay served as a Public Affairs Officer, his experience allowed him to create convincing portrayals of different people who were deployed to Iraq and their experience of it. Hopefully, it will also resurrect public interests in the welfare of often forgotten veterans and ordinary civilians who continue to be affected by it across the ocean - that war might be over, but it left behind many lingering ghosts.
January 29, 2015
"I bet more Marines have joined the Corps because of Full Metal Jacket than because of any f***ing recruiting commercial."
"And that's an anti-war film."
"Nothing's an anti-war film.. there's no such thing."
Except for perhaps the documentary "Restrepo", even the grittiest movies about combat operations, even those that have an anti-war undercurrent (like "The Hurt Locker", "Black Hawk Down", or, yeah, Kubrick's "Full Metal Jacket") still have a patina of Hollywood glamor and video game glory that belie the hellish realities of war. Phil Klay (with the insider cred of an Iraq War Veteran) endeavors to provide a balanced look at the Iraq (and Afghanistan) conflicts with his solid collection of short stories: Redeployment.
No matter your political stance (be you a gung-ho ooo-RAH 'Let's-smoke-some-hajis'! pro-war hawk, or an unapologetic pacifist), this should be required reading, if only to drag us out from our safe vacuums and realize what has transpired over there, and acknowledge both the extreme sacrifices of the men and women who served there, and the toll exacted on non-combatants as well. Klay's stories provide a keen examination of various aspects of the war: from "behind the frontlines", to life after war; from rebuilding soldiers shattered bodies and psyches to the seeming impossibility of restoring any semblance of normalcy in post-war Iraq. All the stories in the collection are good; the two centerpiece stories that (in my mind, anyway) elevate this to National Book Award-worthy status are "Prayer in the Furnace" (about a 'Kill Team' Battalion whose soldiers were getting mowed down thanks to a commanding officer's overzealous refusal to follow established ROE (rules of engagement), and a chaplain's efforts to call attention to the problem); and "Money as a Weapons System" (hilariously discussing the wrongheaded futility of rebuliding Iraq's infrastructure by introducing beekeeping to its widows and endowing baseball uniforms to its children ("Well, it worked for Japan, didn't it?!?"))
I did have a few minor problems with the book though: the stories kinda started sounding all alike after awhile (though unsure if that was Klay's fault or my inherent reluctance to read about the nastiness war wreaks); and there was barely any mention whatsoever of the women who served.over there. Still, a very impressive debut collection, one we should all be familiar with.
"And that's an anti-war film."
"Nothing's an anti-war film.. there's no such thing."
Except for perhaps the documentary "Restrepo", even the grittiest movies about combat operations, even those that have an anti-war undercurrent (like "The Hurt Locker", "Black Hawk Down", or, yeah, Kubrick's "Full Metal Jacket") still have a patina of Hollywood glamor and video game glory that belie the hellish realities of war. Phil Klay (with the insider cred of an Iraq War Veteran) endeavors to provide a balanced look at the Iraq (and Afghanistan) conflicts with his solid collection of short stories: Redeployment.
No matter your political stance (be you a gung-ho ooo-RAH 'Let's-smoke-some-hajis'! pro-war hawk, or an unapologetic pacifist), this should be required reading, if only to drag us out from our safe vacuums and realize what has transpired over there, and acknowledge both the extreme sacrifices of the men and women who served there, and the toll exacted on non-combatants as well. Klay's stories provide a keen examination of various aspects of the war: from "behind the frontlines", to life after war; from rebuilding soldiers shattered bodies and psyches to the seeming impossibility of restoring any semblance of normalcy in post-war Iraq. All the stories in the collection are good; the two centerpiece stories that (in my mind, anyway) elevate this to National Book Award-worthy status are "Prayer in the Furnace" (about a 'Kill Team' Battalion whose soldiers were getting mowed down thanks to a commanding officer's overzealous refusal to follow established ROE (rules of engagement), and a chaplain's efforts to call attention to the problem); and "Money as a Weapons System" (hilariously discussing the wrongheaded futility of rebuliding Iraq's infrastructure by introducing beekeeping to its widows and endowing baseball uniforms to its children ("Well, it worked for Japan, didn't it?!?"))
I did have a few minor problems with the book though: the stories kinda started sounding all alike after awhile (though unsure if that was Klay's fault or my inherent reluctance to read about the nastiness war wreaks); and there was barely any mention whatsoever of the women who served.over there. Still, a very impressive debut collection, one we should all be familiar with.
March 31, 2024
Compulsively readable short stories based on Phil Klay's experiences in Iraq. Though Klay is quick to point out he did not serve in a combat unit, he interviewed dozens of Marines and soldiers who did, and I think his book is the best fiction I have read about Iraq service. That said, I'd like to point out that my own service was many years before Iraq/Afghanistan. But many of the things he describes are universal and timeless: soldiers dealing with the morality of killing during combat, survivor's guilt, how families are impacted, and the consequences for the wounded. Many of the things he described were familiar; the inability to successfully describe military service to civilians, the tragedy of suicides among the combat survivors, and the feeling of loss a veteran feels when he is no longer part of the military, the loss of a sense of urgency, of purpose, and of comradeship, to use an old-fashioned word.
I was moved by Klay's story about a chaplain trying to get command attention on what can be frankly called war crimes, while also trying to help a Marine afflicted by guilt for his actions. His story about the horribly wounded Jenks made me remember the award ceremony I attended where Purple Hearts were handed out, and one of the recipients was paralyzed from the neck down. I recognized what Klay described as "starting, thirty times a day" when you are back home, and you realize you don't have your weapon, when you've had your rifle either strapped to you or in reach 24/7 for weeks or months. And Googling for the names of the dead, which is a way to bring back the feeling you had when you were with your unit.
I told my wife once that the things that combat soldiers are asked to do is often really more than any society should ask of it's citizens, especially because most infantry soldiers are only a few years past childhood. The only thing that can justify such an ask is that one's society is at risk from destruction by an invader. The problem is that politicians (and most of society) don't feel the pain of sending soldiers to war. Klay explores that dichotomy in his book. This one will stay with me for a while.
I was moved by Klay's story about a chaplain trying to get command attention on what can be frankly called war crimes, while also trying to help a Marine afflicted by guilt for his actions. His story about the horribly wounded Jenks made me remember the award ceremony I attended where Purple Hearts were handed out, and one of the recipients was paralyzed from the neck down. I recognized what Klay described as "starting, thirty times a day" when you are back home, and you realize you don't have your weapon, when you've had your rifle either strapped to you or in reach 24/7 for weeks or months. And Googling for the names of the dead, which is a way to bring back the feeling you had when you were with your unit.
I told my wife once that the things that combat soldiers are asked to do is often really more than any society should ask of it's citizens, especially because most infantry soldiers are only a few years past childhood. The only thing that can justify such an ask is that one's society is at risk from destruction by an invader. The problem is that politicians (and most of society) don't feel the pain of sending soldiers to war. Klay explores that dichotomy in his book. This one will stay with me for a while.
November 11, 2014
The major (heh) issue I had with Redeployment, which may or may not be just my own issue having read The Forever War and Fallen Angels and The Things They Carried and loving all three, is that for the most part the stories don't read as new or original material. I also felt a disconnect from most of them, despite intimate subject matter. Klay has a just the facts style and seems to delight in the use of military jargon -- in fact, the purpose of one very short story seems to be the use of as many acronyms as possible to show that the Marine experience in Iraq is so alien from American civilian experience as to be totally incomprehensible (which...yes). It all lends to the affectless feel of the book.
I will say that I very much enjoyed "Money as a Weapons System," a dry and very funny look at the peculiarities of both US and Iraqi bureaucracy, the naivety of invading a country with different mores and then tossing money at it to help make it "like us" (in completely pointless ways). It reminded me of the failed reconstruction post-toppling of Saddam bits of The Forever War.
I work with police officers, a few of whom are Iraq veterans. One of them is a young guy with a dry wit and a hint of cockiness that led most of our staff to be rubbed the wrong way at first. He has tattoos covering an entire arm: a bald eagle, an American flag. I asked him about it once because I noticed shiny red patches of skin towards the bicep that indicated he had new work. He lifted up his uniform sleeve to show me the symbol of the Fallen Soldier encircled with banners of names of his friends who died in Iraq. It was the first I had heard of his service. He didn't tear up as I caught him off guard at work, as he showed me -- an acquaintance -- the names and explained what it was. It was all very matter of fact. The prevailing word in my mind as I watched him was "duty." He fulfilled what he thought was his duty by going over there and he's keeping his duty to honor his brothers by putting their names on his body. The realization of that hit me deeply. When I think about the war, that's one of the first things I think about.
I also think about the older brother of a family friend who was killed by shrapnel from an IED, and how my friend followed his brother right into the Marines himself. That's love, without saying as much.
I wanted to read this book around Veterans Day, to keep soldier stories on my mind. But honestly, the faces I'm going to see when I think about war will be the faces I see already, the ones I think about often as it is. It is by knowing them that I come to understand a bit more about what it is to have served.
I will say that I very much enjoyed "Money as a Weapons System," a dry and very funny look at the peculiarities of both US and Iraqi bureaucracy, the naivety of invading a country with different mores and then tossing money at it to help make it "like us" (in completely pointless ways). It reminded me of the failed reconstruction post-toppling of Saddam bits of The Forever War.
I work with police officers, a few of whom are Iraq veterans. One of them is a young guy with a dry wit and a hint of cockiness that led most of our staff to be rubbed the wrong way at first. He has tattoos covering an entire arm: a bald eagle, an American flag. I asked him about it once because I noticed shiny red patches of skin towards the bicep that indicated he had new work. He lifted up his uniform sleeve to show me the symbol of the Fallen Soldier encircled with banners of names of his friends who died in Iraq. It was the first I had heard of his service. He didn't tear up as I caught him off guard at work, as he showed me -- an acquaintance -- the names and explained what it was. It was all very matter of fact. The prevailing word in my mind as I watched him was "duty." He fulfilled what he thought was his duty by going over there and he's keeping his duty to honor his brothers by putting their names on his body. The realization of that hit me deeply. When I think about the war, that's one of the first things I think about.
I also think about the older brother of a family friend who was killed by shrapnel from an IED, and how my friend followed his brother right into the Marines himself. That's love, without saying as much.
I wanted to read this book around Veterans Day, to keep soldier stories on my mind. But honestly, the faces I'm going to see when I think about war will be the faces I see already, the ones I think about often as it is. It is by knowing them that I come to understand a bit more about what it is to have served.
December 31, 2014
What a way to end 2014. This collection of short stories is remarkable. I first heard about it when it was nominated for the National Book Award this year, which it ended up winning. And it is definitely deserving of the award.
The stories all center around American men who are serving or have served in Iraq. The author himself is a veteran of the Iraqi war. And the knowledge and experience with being overseas, but also the experiences of coming home to U.S. is definitely evident in reading this collection.
First of all, this book convicted me. It really forced me to stop and think about war, especially the war that the United States is currently a part of. It's so easy to forget or ignore what is going on abroad, with other issues as well, but especially with our military. And reading this gave me a totally new and eye-opening respect and appreciation for the servicemen and women.
Regardless of how you feel about the war in the Middle East (I, for one, know very little about it since it started when I was only about 8 years old), this book focuses much more on the humans involved in the war. It truly humanizes the experiences that come with fighting in the war. I also appreciated that it was written at times from perspectives that weren't necessarily combative. One story was told from the POV of a chaplain serving overseas, which was possibly my favorite story.
In an interview, Phil Klay said something that I think perfectly sums up my own experience in reading these stories.
He said: "One of the very strange things about coming home from the modern wars is you're coming home to a country where such a small percentage of the population is serving. You get a positive reception when people find out that you're a veteran, for the most part, but mostly what people feel very keenly is a kind of apathy: a disconnect from the fact that we're a nation at war. You come home and find out that the American people aren't really paying attention and that is profoundly strange. The ability to bridge that gap is important. Veterans don't want to feel isolated, and in order to do that you need to find some way of getting your memories and relationships to those memories across to someone whose notions of what you've been doing are very vague and defined frequently by a variety of clichés."
As someone who has never even considered joining the military, or even spent the time to try and see things through the eyes of someone serving, I was deeply moved by these stories. The point that I got from it (especially the story "Psychological Operations") isn't that we can, should, or are even able to understand what someone is going through or has gone through in the past, but that we listen to one another as humans going through life on this planet together.
The stories all center around American men who are serving or have served in Iraq. The author himself is a veteran of the Iraqi war. And the knowledge and experience with being overseas, but also the experiences of coming home to U.S. is definitely evident in reading this collection.
First of all, this book convicted me. It really forced me to stop and think about war, especially the war that the United States is currently a part of. It's so easy to forget or ignore what is going on abroad, with other issues as well, but especially with our military. And reading this gave me a totally new and eye-opening respect and appreciation for the servicemen and women.
Regardless of how you feel about the war in the Middle East (I, for one, know very little about it since it started when I was only about 8 years old), this book focuses much more on the humans involved in the war. It truly humanizes the experiences that come with fighting in the war. I also appreciated that it was written at times from perspectives that weren't necessarily combative. One story was told from the POV of a chaplain serving overseas, which was possibly my favorite story.
In an interview, Phil Klay said something that I think perfectly sums up my own experience in reading these stories.
He said: "One of the very strange things about coming home from the modern wars is you're coming home to a country where such a small percentage of the population is serving. You get a positive reception when people find out that you're a veteran, for the most part, but mostly what people feel very keenly is a kind of apathy: a disconnect from the fact that we're a nation at war. You come home and find out that the American people aren't really paying attention and that is profoundly strange. The ability to bridge that gap is important. Veterans don't want to feel isolated, and in order to do that you need to find some way of getting your memories and relationships to those memories across to someone whose notions of what you've been doing are very vague and defined frequently by a variety of clichés."
As someone who has never even considered joining the military, or even spent the time to try and see things through the eyes of someone serving, I was deeply moved by these stories. The point that I got from it (especially the story "Psychological Operations") isn't that we can, should, or are even able to understand what someone is going through or has gone through in the past, but that we listen to one another as humans going through life on this planet together.
June 14, 2022
How often is judgement passed on those who have been to war by those who have never experienced or understood war?
'Redeployment' is one of a few landmark books that should first be read by anyone eager to offer up an uneducated opinion about the U.S. military and the duty of those who serve. Ex-marine Phil Klay presents us with a dozen short stories about soldiers' lives on the battlefield and back home. This book is up there with the likes of 'The Things They Carried' by Tim O'Brien, and 'Matterhorn' by Karl Marlantes. It won the National Book Award for good reason.
The writing is top-notch; tales told with with a sniper's focus and corpsman's unflinching eye. Klay sheds the bullshit and leaves readers with a honest, sometimes brutal, inside look at what it means to be a man fighting a modern war. Nothing is black and white here. Even shades of grey can sometimes undermine the complexities or instincts of human beings in battle, not to mention the aftermath of such.
My only gripe with this book was the lack of a glossary for the deluge of military terms used in these stories. As a guy who is quite familiar with most military language and acronyms, even I found myself occasionally aggravated by the sheer volume of uncommon abbreviations and slang, although I recognize that was the whole point Klay was making; that the military has a language all its own). Having to google some stuff in order to make sense of a story can certainly put a speed bump in your reading experience.
Otherwise, 'Redeployment' is a brilliant book carefully crafted by a talented writer. A highly recommended read. Don't miss this one.
'Redeployment' is one of a few landmark books that should first be read by anyone eager to offer up an uneducated opinion about the U.S. military and the duty of those who serve. Ex-marine Phil Klay presents us with a dozen short stories about soldiers' lives on the battlefield and back home. This book is up there with the likes of 'The Things They Carried' by Tim O'Brien, and 'Matterhorn' by Karl Marlantes. It won the National Book Award for good reason.
The writing is top-notch; tales told with with a sniper's focus and corpsman's unflinching eye. Klay sheds the bullshit and leaves readers with a honest, sometimes brutal, inside look at what it means to be a man fighting a modern war. Nothing is black and white here. Even shades of grey can sometimes undermine the complexities or instincts of human beings in battle, not to mention the aftermath of such.
My only gripe with this book was the lack of a glossary for the deluge of military terms used in these stories. As a guy who is quite familiar with most military language and acronyms, even I found myself occasionally aggravated by the sheer volume of uncommon abbreviations and slang, although I recognize that was the whole point Klay was making; that the military has a language all its own). Having to google some stuff in order to make sense of a story can certainly put a speed bump in your reading experience.
Otherwise, 'Redeployment' is a brilliant book carefully crafted by a talented writer. A highly recommended read. Don't miss this one.
January 16, 2014
To most, the war in Iraq is a finished chapter in history. Not so to the Marines, family members, and State Department employees in Phil Klay's electrifying debut collection, Redeployment. Thanks to these provocative, and haunting stories, the war will also become viscerally real to readers. Phil Klay is a powerful new voice and Redeployment stands tall with the best war writing of this decade.
August 25, 2015
3.5/5 stars.
This is a book about being in war and witnessing death and combats firsthand, and obviously this is a setting that is very hard for the common reader to truly understand. However, I felt like Phil Klay did an excellent job describing things so that it became understandable. I recently read another book about the war in Iraq, and with that one I didn't get the same insight as I got with Phil Klay's.
This is obviously a brutal story because it is so honest and contains raw scenes - but those scenes are necessary, because I'm sure that's what being in war is about. I especially liked a very short chapter where Phil Klay gives us an example of all the abbreviations you encounter as a Marine - that chapter was basically incomprehensible to me, but I appreciated it anyway.
All in all, while this book gave me the rare insight I was searching for, I didn't feel like it impressed me majorly, and so it gets 3.5 stars from me. But I will say that it is worth the read because it is very personal as well as educating.
This is a book about being in war and witnessing death and combats firsthand, and obviously this is a setting that is very hard for the common reader to truly understand. However, I felt like Phil Klay did an excellent job describing things so that it became understandable. I recently read another book about the war in Iraq, and with that one I didn't get the same insight as I got with Phil Klay's.
This is obviously a brutal story because it is so honest and contains raw scenes - but those scenes are necessary, because I'm sure that's what being in war is about. I especially liked a very short chapter where Phil Klay gives us an example of all the abbreviations you encounter as a Marine - that chapter was basically incomprehensible to me, but I appreciated it anyway.
All in all, while this book gave me the rare insight I was searching for, I didn't feel like it impressed me majorly, and so it gets 3.5 stars from me. But I will say that it is worth the read because it is very personal as well as educating.
September 2, 2016
Klay is well-educated (Dartmouth grad) but writes many of these returning-veteran stories in the voice of an unlettered grunt. He has his characters say things like "my legs and arms ... are as pale as pigeon shit" which is a manly, unsophisticated comparison to make, but doesn't really work as a visual since (sorry for the detail) pigeon shit is also dark and lumpy. Because these are short stories, we don't really get to know much about any particular protagonist--they're not all the same guy since they're in different locations and come and go between Iraq and the States in different scenes--with the result that there is something slightly blank or interchangeable about their sheer grunt-ness. The flip side of boyish sweetness that you see in Billy Lynn is missing here, just because we don't stay with any of them long enough to go that deep.
Several of the stories are about figures more like what Klay must be in real life, and these seemed more ambitious and genuine. In one story, a foreign service staffer is trying to do "provincial reconstruction" projects. A mattress magnate stateside sends a batch of baseball uniforms and equipment and the narrator is assigned the task of, if not getting Iraqi kids to actually play baseball, at least staging a plausible photo op of the kids enjoying the bounty of American generosity and the genius of American values. This is an obvious metaphor for the whole Iraqi adventure but the story clicked. Other stories center around a chaplain, and vets who find themselves at elite schools like Amherst and NYU Law, and these, too, felt more nuanced to me than ones about earthier Marines who frequent strip clubs or stick around the base.
Ultimately, I'm not sure I gained much insight from these stories. Some of them are quite good, others are too pat when the final twist is revealed; overall, you'd have to enjoy the short story, as it's currently conceived, to enjoy this. I wouldn't say that the author is "one of the most talented new voices of his generation," as the jacket asserts, and I wouldn't recommend this over Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk (fiction) or The Forever War (nonfiction). Of course, I'm not sure Redeployment wants to be on the shelf next to those books, so it depends on what impulse is making you reach for a book on the Iraq war in the first place.
Review copy received from Edelweiss.
Several of the stories are about figures more like what Klay must be in real life, and these seemed more ambitious and genuine. In one story, a foreign service staffer is trying to do "provincial reconstruction" projects. A mattress magnate stateside sends a batch of baseball uniforms and equipment and the narrator is assigned the task of, if not getting Iraqi kids to actually play baseball, at least staging a plausible photo op of the kids enjoying the bounty of American generosity and the genius of American values. This is an obvious metaphor for the whole Iraqi adventure but the story clicked. Other stories center around a chaplain, and vets who find themselves at elite schools like Amherst and NYU Law, and these, too, felt more nuanced to me than ones about earthier Marines who frequent strip clubs or stick around the base.
Ultimately, I'm not sure I gained much insight from these stories. Some of them are quite good, others are too pat when the final twist is revealed; overall, you'd have to enjoy the short story, as it's currently conceived, to enjoy this. I wouldn't say that the author is "one of the most talented new voices of his generation," as the jacket asserts, and I wouldn't recommend this over Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk (fiction) or The Forever War (nonfiction). Of course, I'm not sure Redeployment wants to be on the shelf next to those books, so it depends on what impulse is making you reach for a book on the Iraq war in the first place.
Review copy received from Edelweiss.
December 11, 2015
How desperately little do I know about wars we are engaged in and sacrifices made in the name of freedom. Thank you soldiers for the battles fought overseas and struggles you face when you come back home.
July 9, 2015
Hopefully filming and getting up a review of this today!
February 8, 2017
people have favorite stories in this amazing collection, but i listened to the audiobook without knowing ahead of time that it wasn't a novel, and it took me a couple of stories to realize that it was indeed a collection of short stories. it's not that this fact is not clear -- the stories have titles and the first person narrator (consistently employed all the way through) has different roles in each story -- but the tone, the substance of the book remains the same. these are stories about people being people in war, mostly young white men, but in one occasion an older white man and in another a young man of color. and i can't really say that this is an antiwar series of stories, because some of the guys are pretty committed to what they do, and are definitely proud of it, but insofar as you realize that these troops and the people they interact with are human beings, well, it makes you think twice about everything you know about war, all the beliefs you hold, the antiwar and (i imagine) the pro-war. as
trish
brilliantly and cogently says in their review, "What cannot be clearer is that we have to be very sure of our motives when we place men and women in harm’s way. Otherwise the bargain—one life for the many—is off."
the thing with audiobooks is that you have the same reader throughout, and if the stories are in the first person the characters pretty much blend into each other. but i'm not really sure that wouldn't happen if i had read the book. klay doesn't seem interested in making each narrator unique. as i said, they are all young men, mostly in their late teens, and they all experience war with the same feelings of pride, anxiety, qualms, questions, fear, and valor. so what stayed with me at the end was the composite, the sense of the marine (they are all marines) as someone who is intensely and seriously prepared, who has a conscience (antiwar texts, visual and written, often portray military personnel so traumatized that they are morally broken; not this one), who enjoys killing because that's what he has been trained to do, who feels terrible after he has killed because desensitization goes only so far. who has a pretty loose sense of the general reason why he is in the battlefield but a pretty good idea of what is going on in the place where he's deployed. who approaches his job with seriousness, precision and expertise. who tries to save civilians if at all possible. who wastes civilians if he has to. who perceives the enemy as amorphous haji because that's what war is. who has his stomach turned inside out by brutality against kids and animals. who loves his fellow soldiers. who has a complicated relationship to women, included the one he's married to or seeing. who is fundamentally decent.
so, this seems to me significantly different from all the war texts that depict military personnel as drug-addicted, psychologically in pieces, suicidal, unable to cope, brutalized, and loose like a garment that's kept together only by worn threads. the guys in Redeployment think with their own heads, examine their feelings, do their job seriously, and are pretty much together.
if this is an indictment of war at all, it is so in the sense that the humanity of these young men comes through very, very forcefully, probably because we are so used to the trope of the broken soldier that seeing the unbroken soldier forces us to look more closely. what also comes through very forcefully is how young these guys are, and how old at the same time. if you, like me, are in contact with people exactly this age on a daily basis, you realize that tweens are just as young as the circumstances they are put in. but if you, like me, are in contact with them on a daily basis, you also know how malleable, how inchoate they still are, and wonder what unimaginable damage war cannot but do to them, and how impossible it may be to backpedal it once they get home.
the thing with audiobooks is that you have the same reader throughout, and if the stories are in the first person the characters pretty much blend into each other. but i'm not really sure that wouldn't happen if i had read the book. klay doesn't seem interested in making each narrator unique. as i said, they are all young men, mostly in their late teens, and they all experience war with the same feelings of pride, anxiety, qualms, questions, fear, and valor. so what stayed with me at the end was the composite, the sense of the marine (they are all marines) as someone who is intensely and seriously prepared, who has a conscience (antiwar texts, visual and written, often portray military personnel so traumatized that they are morally broken; not this one), who enjoys killing because that's what he has been trained to do, who feels terrible after he has killed because desensitization goes only so far. who has a pretty loose sense of the general reason why he is in the battlefield but a pretty good idea of what is going on in the place where he's deployed. who approaches his job with seriousness, precision and expertise. who tries to save civilians if at all possible. who wastes civilians if he has to. who perceives the enemy as amorphous haji because that's what war is. who has his stomach turned inside out by brutality against kids and animals. who loves his fellow soldiers. who has a complicated relationship to women, included the one he's married to or seeing. who is fundamentally decent.
so, this seems to me significantly different from all the war texts that depict military personnel as drug-addicted, psychologically in pieces, suicidal, unable to cope, brutalized, and loose like a garment that's kept together only by worn threads. the guys in Redeployment think with their own heads, examine their feelings, do their job seriously, and are pretty much together.
if this is an indictment of war at all, it is so in the sense that the humanity of these young men comes through very, very forcefully, probably because we are so used to the trope of the broken soldier that seeing the unbroken soldier forces us to look more closely. what also comes through very forcefully is how young these guys are, and how old at the same time. if you, like me, are in contact with people exactly this age on a daily basis, you realize that tweens are just as young as the circumstances they are put in. but if you, like me, are in contact with them on a daily basis, you also know how malleable, how inchoate they still are, and wonder what unimaginable damage war cannot but do to them, and how impossible it may be to backpedal it once they get home.
December 12, 2021
This is a set of short stories about U.S. soldiers experiences during and after the Iraq War that was so immersive I repeatedly felt while reading it that I was being immersed into the experiences that the author described. The short stories about the life of a military chaplain in an area where morality had broken down, the shooting of a young Iraqi boy by an unhappy soldier, and the psychological experience of a Coptic Egyptian in the army were unforgettable to me. There is an intensity to every story that is palpable. I can imagine that it was written for other combat veterans as a way of memorializing a shared experience, good, bad, and ugly, that the rest of their society was totally aloof from. Klay is himself a veteran of the Iraq War and he draws upon his experiences with other soldiers to create the characters depicted here. I read the entire book during one portion of a day, which tells you how good it was.
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