". . . 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.”