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Phil Klay

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Redeployment: National Book Award Winner Kindle Edition

by Phil Klay (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

4.2 4,540 ratings

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Winner of the National Book Award for Fiction

"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

Selected as one of the best books of the year by The New York Times Book Review, Time, Newsweek, The Washington Post Book World, Amazon, and more

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 has 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.

Print length

305 pages
Language

English
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Penguin Books
Publication date

March 4 2014
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18 years and up
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2161 KB
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Product description

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

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.

First time was instinct. I hear O’Leary go, “Jesus,” and there’s a skinny brown dog lapping up blood the same way he’d lap up water from a bowl. It wasn’t American blood, but still, there’s that dog, lapping it up. And that’s the last straw, I guess, and then it’s open season on dogs.

At the time you don’t think about it. You’re thinking about who’s in that house, what’s he armed with, how’s he gonna kill you, your buddies. You’re going block by block, fighting with rifles good to 550 meters and you’re killing people at five in a concrete box.

The thinking comes later, when they give you the time. See, it’s not a straight shot back, from war to the Jacksonville mall. When our deployment was up, they put us on TQ, this logistics base out in the desert, let us decompress a bit. I’m not sure what they meant by that. Decompress. We took it to mean jerk off a lot in the showers. Smoke a lot of cigarettes and play a lot of cards. And then they took us to Kuwait and put us on a commercial airliner to go home.

So there you are. You’ve been in a no-shit war zone and then you’re sitting in a plush chair looking up at a little nozzle shooting air conditioning, thinking, what the fuck? You’ve got a rifle between your knees, and so does everyone else. Some Marines got M9 pistols, but they take away your bayonets because you aren’t allowed to have knives on an airplane. Even though you’ve showered, you all look grimy and lean. Everybody’s hollow eyed and their cammies are beat to shit. And you sit there, and close your eyes, and think.

The problem is, your thoughts don’t come out in any kind of straight order. You don’t think, oh, I did A, then B, then C, then D. You try to think about home, then you’re in the torture house. You see the body parts in the locker and the retarded guy in the cage. He squawked like a chicken. His head was shrunk down to a coconut. It takes you awhile to remember Doc saying they’d shot mercury into his skull, and then it still doesn’t make any sense. --This text refers to the paperback edition.

Review

“[Klay captures] 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 of 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

“In Redeployment, his searing debut collection of short stories, Phil Klay—a veteran of the United States Marine Corps, who served in Iraq during the surge—gives the civilian reader a visceral feeling for what it is like to be a soldier in a combat zone, and what it is like to return home, still reeling from the dislocations of war. Gritty, unsparing and fiercely observed, these stories leave us with a harrowing sense of the war in Iraq as it was experienced, day by day, by individual soldiers.” —Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

“An excellent, upsetting debut collection of short stories. Klay’s own view is everywhere, existential and practical, at home and abroad, distributed with wonderful clarity of voice and harrowing specificity of experience among Army chaplains, enlisted men, Foreign Service officers, members of Mortuary Affair, and more.” —Kathryn Schulz, New York Magazine

“The influences behind Mr. Klay’s writing go far beyond Iraq. At times Redeployment recapitulates the remarkably tender, self-conscious style that Tim O’Brien forged from his experiences in Vietnam . . . Mr. Klay is able to surprise and provoke. . . . Mr. Klay gives a deeply disquieting view of a generation of soldiers reared on war’s most terrible contradictions.” —Wall Street Journal

“Klay—a Marine who served during the surge—has an eye and an ear for a single searing line of dialogue or a scene of maddening dissonance that can pierce your soul. . . . Klay brilliantly manages to wring some sense out of the nonsensical—resulting in an extraordinary, if unnerving, literary feat.” —Entertainment Weekly

“One of the best debuts of the year.” —Portland Oregonian

“In a book that's drawing comparisons to classic war literature like Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried, Klay examines the deep conflict, in all of us, between wanting to tell our stories and wanting to protect them from being diminished or misunderstood.” —Men’s Journal

“Phil Klay has written brilliant, true, and winning fiction on the Iraq War.” —The Daily Beast

“Klay grasps both tough-guy characterization and life spent in the field, yet he also mines the struggle of soldiers to be emotionally freed from the images they can’t stop seeing. It’s clear that Klay, himself a veteran of the U.S. Marine Corps who served in Iraq, has parlayed his insider’s knowledge of soldier-bonding and emotional scarring into a collection that proves a powerful statement on the nature of war, violence, and the nuances of human nature.” —Publishers Weekly (starred)

“A sharp set of stories. . . . Klay’s grasp of bureaucracy and bitter irony here rivals Joseph Heller and George Orwell. . . . A no-nonsense and informed reckoning with combat.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred)

“Important reading; pay attention.” —Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal

“Harrowing at times and blackly comic at others, the author’s first collection could become for the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts what Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried is for the Vietnam War.” —Lawrence Rungren, Library Journal

“If you want to know the real cost of war for those who do the fighting, read Redeployment. These stories say it all, with an eloquence and rare humanity that will simultaneously break your heart and give you reasons to hope.” —Ben Fountain, author of Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk

“As we try to understand the human costs of yet another foreign conflict, Phil Klay brings us the stories of the American combatants, told in a distinct, new, and powerful voice.” —Nathan Englander, author of What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank

“Redeployment is a stunning, upsetting, urgently necessary book about the impact of the Iraq war on both soldiers and civilians. Klay's writing is searing and powerful, unsparing of its characters and its readers, art made from a soldier's fearless commitment to confront those losses that can't be tallied in statistics. 'Be honest with me,' a college student asks a returning veteran in one story, and Phil Klay's answer is a challenge of its own: these stories demand and deserve our attention.” —Karen Russell, author of Swamplandia!

“Phil Klay's stories are tightly wound psychological thrillers. The global wars of our last decade weave in and out of these affecting tales about characters who sound and feel like your neighbors. Klay comes to us through Leo Tolstoy, Ray Carver, and Ann Beattie. It's a thrill to read a young writer so brilliantly parsing the complexities and vagaries of war. That he does so with surgical precision and artful zest makes this a must-read.” —Anthony Swofford, author of Jarhead

“When the history of these times are finally shaken out, and the shredders have all been turned off, we will turn to writers like Phil Klay to finally understand the true nature of who we were, and where we have been, and where we are still going. He slips himself in under the skin of the war with a muscular language and an agile heart and a fair amount of complicated doubt. Redeployment will be one of the great story collections of recent times. Phil Klay is a writer of our times. I can't wait to see what he does next.” —Colum McCann, author of Let the Great World Spin

“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. hanks 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.” —Siobhan Fallon, author of You Know When the Men Are Gone

“Redeployment is fiction of a very high order. These are war stories, written with passion and urgency and consummate writerly skill. There's a clarity here that's lacerating in its precision and exhiliration in its effect.” —Patrick McGrath, author of Trauma

“These stories are surgically precise strikes to the heart; you can't read them without recalling other classic takes on war and loss—Conrad, Herr, Hemingway. Klay maps the cast of our recent Middle East conflicts and illuminates its literal, and philosophical center: human casualty.” —Lea Carpenter, author of Eleven Days

“These are gorgeous stories—fierce, intelligent and heartbreaking. Phil Klay, a former Marine, brings us both the news from Iraq and the news from back home. His writing is bold and sure, and full of all sorts of authority—literary, military and just plain human. This is news we need to hear, from a new writer we need to know about.” —Roxana Robinson, author of Sparta

--This text refers to the paperback edition.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B00DMCW14G
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Penguin Books; 1st edition (March 4 2014)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 2161 KB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
Print length ‏ : ‎ 305 pages

Best Sellers Rank: #453,961 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #289 in Iraq War
- #3,025 in Military Historical Fiction
- #3,726 in War Fiction (Kindle Store)

Customer Reviews:
4.2 4,540 ratings

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ChiliPalmer

Authentic, blunt, simply real...

Reviewed in Canada on April 5, 2023

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I am only half way through the book and would already like to write a review. I bought this book to let it inspire me as a writer who's writing about the Marines during the war in Iraq. The short stories give a wonderful insight into the lives of the Marines during that time and the challenges they were facing. At times, I am laughing out loud because of the blunt honesty in how the characters speak, what they think, or, occasionally the odd things that happen to them along the way, which don't seem far fetched at all. I have never been in the military, so I need to look up a lot of the acronyms, which some people may find annoying who just want to read and not research, but I don't, because it teaches me what I need to know to write a more authentic story myself. Thank you, Phil Klay, for this phenomenal book from a female reader in Canada.

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Dr Andrew M Morris

excellent book portraying variety of feeling surrounding US Iraq field service

Reviewed in Canada on March 21, 2015

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A well-written series of vignettes exploring different perspectives of serving as a marine in the war in Iraq. Klay gives voice to those low-down in the war effort, from those who make it partially scathed to those who are fully scathed. Nobody is untouched, but each are touched in different ways. He explores the various motivations for serving, often using insect behaviour as metaphor to human behaviour.

Only challenge: all the acronyms!

Reviewed in Canada on November 14, 2020

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positive read, some familiarity with military acronyms could be of use . some points of ironic amusement , and some stuff that's just sad . worth the time . cheers

Reviewed in Canada on July 29, 2015

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Good read. The acronyms are a bit nuts in this book: 'The MLG awarded me a NAM with a V. Don’t see too many 3400s got a NAM with a V.' What does that mean? I have no idea what that means.

Also, the tone can be a bit too casual: 'I was like she was like but like I was like...'

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Michael Dorland

Excellent stories about the soldier's experience of the Iraq war

Reviewed in Canada on June 17, 2014

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Each war has its own type of fictional writing. Iraq was very different from say Vietnam as character remarks. In Iraq, troops seem to have been totally isolated from their surroundings except to go out on killing raids.

One person found this helpful

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mjc1436

intense.

Reviewed in Canada on December 11, 2014

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In the tradition of great War literature, James Jones, Mailer,Tim O'Brien and others.The Book is at times disturbing , by necessity, as the subject matter,
people at war, death and pain is disturbing.

Reviewed in Canada on March 1, 2015

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I was not especially impressed with the stories featured in this book.

Reviewed in Canada on December 22, 2015

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Read, and then shelve beside "The things they carried" and "All quiet on the Western front"

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Top reviews from other countries

Rae A. Francoeur

Bringing the War Home

Reviewed in the United States on May 19, 2014

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Bringing the war home

Redeployment
By Phil Klay. The Penguin Press, New York, 2014. 291 pages. $26.95

There is, at first, a deceptive sameness to the voices telling the war stories in Phil Klay’s fiction collection, “Redeployment.” First person, intelligent, observant, clever — the narrators’ rational tone and tight control steadily slide us deeper and deeper into the heads of soldiers who served in Iraq. By the time the excruciating detail, including each soldier’s safeguarded vulnerabilities, bloom into the story’s own unique shape and momentum, we are hooked, uneasy and necessary witnesses. Every war demands its witnesses and Phil Klay’s own service in Iraq is bested by his service to his readers.

Klay, a Marine during the surge in Iraq, attended NYU’s Veterans Writing Workshop that was created by the university and Ambassador Jean Kennedy Smith. His story “Redeployment” was originally published in Granta and is included in “Fire and Forget: Short Stories from the Long War,” a collection reviewed here last year.

This collection should be required reading for anyone who says, “Thank you for your service,” not because you shouldn’t say that but because you should understand the many meanings of “service” and how that service remakes soldiers, their families, their country and the world.

What happens when an IED explodes and you receive horrific burns and shrapnel injuries? Jenks tries to articulate this, again and again, in “War Stories.” His burns are so disfiguring that dating, even conversation with his best friend, become strained if not impossible. We see him come to terms with his new life in part through the eyes of his best friend, who accompanies him on an interview with a woman writing a play based on interviews with US soldiers who served in Iraq. The beautiful Sarah, the antithesis of Jenks in almost every way, only wants the most salacious of the details while Jenks explains, to her growing impatience, why he must decide on a perspective rooted in gratitude. His friend Wilson serves as a counterpoint to Jenks’ transformation and Sarah’s greedy search for the bloody details. “To be perfectly honest, “[Jenks] was a worthless piece of s***. No subject for a play, that’s for sure.” I smile. “Good thing he caught on fire, right?”

An artillery soldier whose powerful gun — operated by a total of nine Marines — twice blasts a wide area six miles away finds himself wondering what happened. Were there survivors? Who collects the dead? How many died? In “Ten Kliks South,” the soldier goes to the mortuary where one of the morticians asks him to put his wedding ring on the same chain as his dog tags because taking a ring off a dead man, should he be killed, is hard to do. He later watches four Corpsmen carry the body of one fallen America soldier on a stretcher down a road in utter silence. This silent transport continues from plane to truck, from place to place, until the body “traveled to the family of the fallen, where the silence, the stillness, would end.”

“Psychological Operations,” one of my favorites in the collection, most effectively tackles the tremendous ambivalence associated with the war in Iraq. Klay uses a number of characters, including the relationship between two students at Amherst — a newly converted Muslim woman, Zara, and a Marine, an Arab who is Coptic Christian and who had served 13 months in Iraq in PsyOps — to explore some of the issues. Their discussion, which leads at one point to Waguih’s close call with the college administrators over a possible death threat Zara perceives, is fraught with suspense, change and emotion. Their discussion leads to Waguih’s surprising revelation and a true but sadly frustrating lack of closure.

Another story that marks great change and revelation among its characters is “Money as a Weapons System.” “Success,” says the narrator, “was a matter of perspective.” And the rest of the story explains why this is so, especially in Iraq where everything seems especially hard and goals must be set with an realistic eye for what’s truly possible. Our narrator is a fair, earnest Foreign Service Officer in charge of an embedded Provincial Reconstruction Team in Iraq. He has no project management experience that will help him deal with his goal to get a water treatment plant up and running — especially in Iraq where he must deal with ages-old conflicts between Sunni and Shi’a interests. Here is here we learn how things get down, how goals are downsized and how successes can be dismantled by politics.

Each soldier had his or her own response to this war. But the effects are life altering and the experience, while often as short as seven months, is as compact as it is crammed with fissionable emotion. For most soldiers there is no parallel back home. Books like “Redeployment” bring the war home. Besides being a fine work of literature, it is a touchstone for everyone who wants to be open to deeper understanding.

3 people found this helpful

The Steadfast Reader

Whoa.

Reviewed in the United States on February 11, 2015

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Whoa. This book takes on some of the hard truths that soldiers and Marines returning from (and participating in) the longest two wars in American history have to face. As a veteran this was a difficult read for me. When I started the book I didn't realize it was a collection of short stories. At first I was disappointed because the first story is so raw and powerful. It's about how a man returning home from Iraq struggles to reintegrate back into everyday life with his wife and dog. I wanted to know more of that character's struggles. In the end though it turned out to be a good thing that this was short stories because I found that I could only read it in short bursts, so harrowing are the narratives at times. Perhaps this is the reason I don't read a lot of war fiction (or war non-fiction, for that matter).

In a time where less than one percent of the American population is in the military - it's so easy for some to forget the experience that Iraq and Afghanistan veterans have been through. There are many people who don't know anyone in the military. This book is important if not for that reason alone.

A line in the first story 'Redeployment' struck me so hard because it's the honest to god's truth.
"We took my combat pay and did a lot of shopping. Which is how America fights back against the terrorists."

What else is there to do after you're haunted by a war that makes little to no sense to you or the rest of the country? Another line that I ran across hit me hard because as a veteran I've always had a hard time with the "Thank you for your service" type gratitude actions that I would get. It's an awkward feeling that many veterans don't know what to do with (I'm not saying don't do it when you see a man or woman in uniform - just that it's a weird feeling - at least for me).
"I was angry. I'd gotten a lot of Thank You for Your Service handshakes, but nobody really knew what that service meant..."
I worked as a Unit Deployment Manager for the Air Force, it was my job to tend to all the airmen that would be deployed, ensuring they had all their training, paperwork, and equipment. While because of my rank I was not the one making personal selections on who would go and who would stay at home (unlike the Army, the Air Force does not deploy entire units at one time, instead it's a piecemeal selection of individuals based on job functions that are needed down-range). Despite that I still fielded phone-calls from angry spouses and sent men and women away from their families to miss anniversaries, Christmases, and even the birth of their children.

The stories in Redeployment focus exclusively on the Army and the Marine Corps and I'm okay with that. The problem that I had with this collection is that there were no stories told from the point of view of female characters. Women, despite not technically being allowed in combat, are in combat. I felt that Klay might have strengthened his book if he could have told at least one story from the perspective of a woman.

The other thing that will probably drive civilian readers crazy are the excessive acronyms. It didn't bother me because I knew what most of them meant, but I can definitely see this as being an impediment for a reader with little to no knowledge of military jargon.

Like I said, this was a difficult read for me but I do think that it's an incredibly important and well written book. It's not really about the wars themselves, it's a portrait of the people who fight those wars at the lowest level. I have to highly recommend it to everyone.

41 people found this helpful

Samuel Abney

"I've never liked telling war stories..."

Reviewed in the United States on December 26, 2014

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Given one of Phil Klay's many narrators has a strong aversion to telling war stories, it is wonderfully ironic that Klay's short story collection, Redeployment is filled to the brim with amazing and thoughtful about war. Focusing predominantly on the Iraq war (with some of Afghanistan sprinkled in some of the later stories), Klay follows a dozen different Marines both at home and abroad as they deal with the numerous effects of war. Some soldiers are still deployed, some are just learning how to adjust to being back in America, some have been home for quite some time, and some are trapped between two or more of these worlds. No matter their situation, each narrator is interesting to read.

Klay's war stories don't read as war stories. Sure, one of them ("OIF") uses so many military abbreviations that one needs a military dictionary nearby just to make it through the first paragraph, but most of the stories are far more focused on the people than the events around them. When one thinks of war stories, it is mostly thought of as being politicized, there is clearly a slant as to whether the war effort is good or bad. Klay, as a former vet himself, walks the fine line between approval and not incredibly well. Some of his narrators are die hard marines who will stop at nothing to make sure the war effort is successful. But these hardcore followers are balanced out by the younger members of the marine corps, who occasionally question not only their mortality but the overall worth of the American war effort abroad.

Perhaps the collection's biggest downfall is the fact that all of the stories are written from a similar point of view insofar as all of the soldiers are the newest generations of marines. This is not to say I do not enjoy the fact that they are all marines rather than a variety of service officers. In fact, focusing solely on one segment of the armed forces made me (someone with little knowledge of the workings of war) feel like I was much more informed about the inner workings of this specific branch by the collection's end. Instead, it seems a little disappointing that all of the voices are so youthful. At their oldest, I never placed any of the narrators above the age of 35. There very well could have been ones, but Klay never goes into the greatest detail about who each narrator is--instead focusing on the people and events around them. I very much appreciated that decision, particularly in the short story "War Stories" where the narrator's friends are far more interesting to focus on than the narrator himself.

There are numerous voices to be heard in Klay's powerful work. Not only does it make me eagerly anticipate the next book from Mr. Klay, but it also makes me believe that I could enjoy war fiction as a genre much more than I previously imagined. Redeployment teems with humanity, and is a book that not only needs to be read, but needs to be read NOW. Given our precarious foreign policy situations worldwide, any American would be remiss not to read up on the effects of these efforts on the members of our armed forces.

Favorite Stories: "Redeployment," "Prayer in the Furnace," and "Unless it's a Sucking Chest Wound"

Favorite Quotation: "With the Internet you can do nothing but watch war all day if you want. Footage of firefights, mortar attacks, IEDs, it's all there."

One person found this helpful

MoseyOn

War From the Inside

Reviewed in the United States on August 22, 2015

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There are probably some experiences that will always escape the imaginative powers of even the most skilled writer. War must be near the top of that list. Certainly a good writer, whether or not he/she has been to war, can create for the reader some sense of the experience, and definitely can recreate the ambience of a nation during wartime. But the immediacy of war—the adrenaline, the fear, the camaraderie, the sights, sounds, and smells, as well as the ambivalence of coming home—this can best be delivered by someone who has experienced it directly. If that person happens to be a talented writer, then you just might get a book of stories like the National Book Award-winning Redeployment.

Phil Klay learned about war firsthand in Iraq as a Marine, and then honed his writing skills with an MFA degree from Hunter College. I don’t know exactly what being a Public Affairs Officer involves, but even assuming it didn’t put Klay on the front line of battle day in and day out, it did put him a lot closer than most of us will get, and this comes through in the emotional impact of his stories as much as in the plots themselves. Those of us who have not been there are distant observers, and we must be willing to trust those who were there to tell the truth—or at least their truth—about what it was like. This has nothing to do with the politics of a particular war, about which we are all entitled to our opinions, but only with the experience of those who respond to whatever it is they respond to that puts them there.

All the stories are first-person, but they come from many different perspectives: a solider out on patrol, a soldier home after his first deployment, a chaplain, a civilian director of a reconstruction project, an Egyptian-American Coptic war veteran, and so on. Some of the stories are more emotionally complex than others, of course, and each one can do no more than offer the beginnings of insight into the innumerable ways in which war affects its participants.

I thought of Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried as I read Klay’s book. Both books reminded me that, at least if these authors are to be believed, issues of ideology or grand strategy have little to do with what goes on in the midst of battle. What there is, unmistakably, is the soldier next to you, and the others you’re fighting with. And outside the field of battle, there is a whole range of issues to deal with, few of them geopolitical—another vast gulf in perceptions of war.

Klay’s book is raw, visceral, complex. Some of the stories are emotionally quite intricate, though none of them are completely interior. Particularly given the enormity of the US involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan in American consciousness, culture, and politics, and the number of soldiers and civilians who spent time there, this is a collection worthy of attention.

2 people found this helpful

MisterHobgoblin

How dare they buy our products and still they don't respect us?

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on April 13, 2015

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Redeployment sells itself on the cover as being the real deal. I think that’s a fair enough assessment.

This is a collection of short narratives – some running to a dozen pages or more; others just a page or two. Each tells a story of American involvement in Iraq from a different perspective. Understandably, most are voices from the military, although there is the occasional voice from the civilian involvement.

Phil Klay avoids the temptation to create heroes or play politics. Naturally some of the narratives involve doing heroic things, but these are outweighed by the stories of medics, body collection, office jockeys and logistics. The narratives feel authentic and don’t waste time with background information or explanations. One (mercifully short) story is told almost entirely in indecipherable acronyms.

Despite the variety of narratives and voices, the striking point is that the participants’ motivations are almost always personal, and often venal. There is no hint of creating a stronger community; of ridding the world of weapons of mass destruction; of promoting democracy; or protecting the Kurds. Even when coming under direct fire, the motivation is purely on protecting colleagues, winning medals or impressing girlfriends.

Some of the narrators are more likeable than others; and a couple are completely repellent. But they are never less than totally engaging. Despite the commonality between the narratives, they never feel repetitive; never feel too longwinded; yet always feel complete. The language seems spot on and it can be difficult to believe these are not direct transcripts of interviews given to camera.

The result is a multi-faceted picture of the US engagement; of the challenges faced by those involved in the operations; and the struggles they face in readapting to a normal life when they return home. Of course, one can always point to missing perspectives but for all that, it is worth celebrating the many perspectives that are included. It is the most complete fictional portrayal I have found of the current US engagement in Iraq and, Richard House’s The Kills apart, the most credible.

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