". . . creating a space for thoughtful moral response"

This is an appreciation rather than a review or critique of Phil Klay’s collection of short stories because (a) I think Redeployment is tour de force and (b) it’s already won 2014 National Book Award. It’s right up there with Dispatches, The Things They Carried, and The Last Parallel.

Klay, born in 1983, grew up in Westchester, New York. He studied creative writing and literature at Dartmouth College and during the summer of 2004, he attended Officer Candidate School in Quantico, Virginia. He graduated from Dartmouth in 2005 and joined the U.S. Marines, where he was commissioned as a second lieutenant. In 2007 was deployed to Iraq during the troop surge. He served as a public affairs officer out of Camp Taqaddum in Anbar Province until February 2008. After leaving the Corps in 2009, he completed an MFA in fiction at Hunter College. Redeployment contains a dozen stories of varying lengths. Most are set in Iraq, a few in the U.S. as Marines return home to adjust (or not) to civilian life. They are all told in the first person, but remarkably and interestingly the narrators are all different: enlisted men and officers, infantry grunt and artilleryman, a chaplain and PsyOp specialist. Even a Marine combat engineer who spent his deployment filling potholes in Iraq’s roads and a State Department Special Assistant who is charged with bringing democracy and American values to the country in “Money as a Weapons System.” That’s actually a funny story if you find cultural incomprehension and head-throbbing waste funny.

Klay personally never saw combat, and he’s written, “Though I continue to tell stories about Iraq, I sometimes fear this makes me a fraud. I feel guilty about the sorrow I feel because I know it is manufactured, and I feel guilty about the sorrow I do not feel because it is owed, it is the barest beginnings of what is owed to the fallen.”

These stories are not entertainment. They are serious attempts to covey what it was like to be in that place at that time—Iraq in 2007-08. As sharp and brilliant and powerful as they are (and they are), they must fail in some sense because if you were not there, you cannot know what it was like. That of course is true of fiction generally; the difference here is that the experiences being described are so alien to most people. The most these stories can do, I think, is to describe to safe, comfortable readers the fear, the human waste, the folly, the physical and mental wounds of war.

The Navy medics are there to treat the physical wounds, the chaplain to treat(?), relieve(?), ease(?) the wounds to the soul(?), the spirit(?), or the psyche(?). “Prayer in the Furnace,” a long story in the center of the collection, is told by a Catholic chaplain who reads from Second Timothy at the memorial service of a dead Marine, the battalion’s twelfth KIA in four months: “I have fought the good fight. I have finished the race. I have kept the faith.”

The chaplain talks to Rodriguez, a Marine who was with the dead man when he was shot by a sniper. You sense that Rodriguez is trying to make sense of the senseless, and possibly report a war crime, and that the narrator can offer only what the Church has ever offered, trust in God’s mercy. 

But is that enough? During training for deployment in the California desert, a trainer told the unit, “I’m very concerned that this battalion is overly focused on killing people.” The chaplain hears a company commander stage-whisper to his first sergeant, “I guess that pogue think he joined the fucking Peace Corps.”

And in Iraq, after two more Marine deaths, the narrator prays: “I asked God to protect the battalion from further harm. I knew He would not. I asked Him to bring abuses to light. I knew He would not. I asked Him, finally, for grace.” 

An interviewer in Image magazine asked Klay about this story which seems “to burrow down toward a single, absolute, dramatic point, but then end on complex, natural, often ambiguous notes. How do you know that a story is finished—in terms of character, story, even morality?”

Klay said that he sends the works out to trusted friends for suggestion. But, “When I end a story I don’t want to close it off or tie it up. What I want is, ideally, to achieve a slight twist, to shift the ground a little in a way that offers the reader an altered perspective on what they’ve just read . . . As far as how I know a story is done in terms of morality, I think that’s a question of whether I’ve been true to the characters, and to the moral stakes for the characters. You’re not just trying to tell the reader what war was like; you’re trying to guide the reader toward the kind of collision of values that happens for people in war and after. The morality, I suppose, lies in creating the space for thoughtful moral response from the reader.”

How can Bo Bo in Burma, only 12, help his parents?

The Heart Remembers is the third novel in a series set in Burma (now Myanmar), written in German by Jan-Philipp Sendker. The first two novels in the series are The Art of Hearing Heartbeats (2012) and A Well-Tempered Heart (2014) While it is not necessary to have read these two to enjoy The Heart Remembers, I suspect the new book will send readers to them to live a while longer with these interesting characters.

Sendker, who was born in Hamburg in 1960, traveled first to Burma in 1995 as a journalist and several times later as a novelist. He was Stern’s American correspondent from 1990 to 1995 and its Asian correspondent from 1995 to 1999. His books have been translated into Burmese even though they criticized the military. For example, the military is said to have kidnapped young men and sent them into minefields as human mine detectors. “My translator at the time said that as a foreigner I had a kind of fool’s license,” says Sendker. “A local writer probably would not have been able to express himself in that way.”

While there is nothing so horrific in The Heart Remembers, the Army does confiscate a piece of land a character owns and will not sell. And it is clear that the military is a force to avoid if possible.

We follow four main characters, 12-year-old Ko Bo Bo; his uncle U Ba, who is Bo Bo’s caretaker; Bo Bo’s mother Julia Win, who is U Ba’s sister, a Burmese-American lawyer; and Bo Bo’s father Thar Thar, who is a Buddhist monk and former soldier. Bo Bo tells his part of the story in the first person; Julia’s and Thar Thar’s stories are told in the third. Bo Bo has not seen his mother in seven years; he sees his father for only a week or so once a year because Thar Thar cannot leave Julia alone for long in Yangon.

The action takes place in  Kalaw, a village in central Burma interesting enough to attract foreign tourists; in New York City, where Julia has been a high-powered lawyer; and in Yangon, a large city to the south at the confluence of the Yangon and Bago Rivers (formerly Rangoon). One of the many pleasures of The Heart Remembers is the tension Thar Thar feels moving about New York City and the stress Julia feels in unsettled Burma, where she had never lived. 

The book is set in the current day and twelve years earlier when the military junta was officially dissolved following a 2010 general election, and a nominally civilian government was installed. This, along with the release of Aung San Suu Kyi and political prisoners, improved the country's human rights record and foreign relations.

The narrative is set in action when Bo Bo discovers letters his uncle U Ba has written about his parents’ love story. He presses U Ba to tell him about Julia’s courtship with Thar Thar, a romance that unfolds against the uncertain backdrop of the Saffron Revolution, a series of mass protests in 2007, spurred by increases in fuel prices and a long history of military government rule. At the time, Thar Thar is in New York with Julia but feels he must return to Burma to participate in the revolution.

Back in the present day, Bo Bo hatches a plan to help his family by employing his acute emotional perception. He tells us, “I can tell that a person is sad even when they’re laughing. I can tell that someone is getting angry, even if they pretend that everything is fine. I can tell when rage is a mask for fear. I can sense the uneasiness behind a friendly voice. Your eyes will give you away. They can’t pretend. They can’t lie, even when they want to.” Believing he can cure his mother, Bo Bo sets off to find his parents and bring his family back together.

The Heart Remembers is smoothly translated by Kevin Wiliarty. It is an absorbing and persuasive evocation of a place and situation about which few readers will know much more than what television news has reported. In other words, almost nothing.