Redeployment
by Phil Klay
Summary
Twelve stories from the Iraq war and its long American afterward, each in a different first person voice, and the range of the voices is the book's argument: infantry grunts and staff officers, a chaplain, a mortuary affairs Marine who processes the dead, an artilleryman who killed at such distance the war never quite happened to him, a Foreign Service officer ordered to teach Iraqis baseball as democracy promotion, a veteran working a college campus where his war is a conversation piece.
The title story opens the collection with one of the era's most famous first sentences, We shot dogs, and follows Sergeant Price home through the fluorescent decompression of return, the wife, the mall, the elderly dog whose ending he owes it to do himself. Money as a Weapons System plays the reconstruction as bleak farce, beekeeping and baseball uniforms invoiced against chaos. Prayer in the Furnace gives the book's deepest chapter to a chaplain ministering to a unit whose casualties are being manufactured by its own aggression, a man arguing with God and the chain of command in the same breath. And one story is told almost entirely in the military's acronyms, the language itself deployed as armour.
Klay's method is restraint: no story editorializes, every narrator is granted his own blindness, and the war accumulates by triangulation.
Around two hundred and ninety pages.
Best for readers who want the Iraq war's defining fiction, moral seriousness with a reporter's ear, and proof the story collection can carry a whole conflict.
Historical Context & Significance
Redeployment won the National Book Award for Fiction in 2014, a debut collection beating the year's novels, and it was received almost immediately as the standard against which Iraq war fiction would be measured, the position The Things They Carried holds for Vietnam; reviewers made that comparison at once and it stuck.
Phil Klay served as a Marine public affairs officer in Anbar Province during the surge, and the collection's authority comes as much from its range as its combat: he wrote the war as an institutional experience, chaplains, lawyers, bureaucrats and gunners each holding one piece, no narrator resembling the author too closely.
Klay has since written the novel Missionaries, extending the study of American violence outsourced and administered, and essays collected in Uncertain Ground; he teaches at Fairfield.