Redeployment Hardcover – March 4, 2014

Bought this for my Marine grand son. Very interesting and heartfelt. Some parts were, of course, difficult to read.

Bringing the war homeRedeploymentBy Phil Klay. The Penguin Press, New York, 2014. 291 pages. $26.95There 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.

Redeployment is a collection of 12 short stories that detail the experiences of a number of military servicemen, an FSO, and a Chaplin who have encountered Iraq. Told in first person, each story grapples with the complex feelings of these individuals, from those who saw combat to those who operated in support positions. Klay captures a sense of alienation in each story, the feeling of "otherness" participants in war have on returning home, but is cautious to prevent portraying these multifaceted emotions in such a way as to invoke pity. The raw emotion and artful prose presented in this work make it easy to see why this book won the 2014 National Book Award for Fiction.I am always hesitant to read war stories and even more hesitant to see war movies. Too often I feel that such books and films glamorize an unglamorous thing,and in the process destroy the more important truths of what war is like, both for those who served on the front lines and for those who were involved but in far less dangerous roles. In other words, we get preached at through maudlin tales that make big statements on the legitimacy of war. Klay, however, explores the human cost -- psychological and otherwise -- as it is, without the embellishment of Hollywood glamor.In every story in Redeployment, we see veterans as they really are: human beings, striving to do good, willing to sacrifice, given to confabulation, falsehood, psychic breaks, telling tall tales just to get laid. We see the dual alienation pressed upon them not only from the horrors of combat but from the burden of societal expectation, the crowd that will thank you for yours service without knowing what that service was. In "Unless It's a Sucking Chest Would" we see the pressures of the self, individuals who feel they have failed to live up to the idea of what a soldier in a war should be, who feel they have sacrificed nothing. And in "Prayer in the Furnace" we see the struggle to justify survival, the uselessness of absolution, the inability of men to stop bad things from happening. In fact, that story has my favorite line in the entire book: "Geared up, Marines are terrifying warriors In grief, they look like children."In "Psychological Operations," Klay even explores the trappings of hero-worship and the detrimental effects of it when truths are told, and the profound uselessness of generalizing the experience of any one soldier, officer, chaplain, FSO, anyone. Sometimes bleak, sometimes funny, all the time raw, Klay has opened a window on the Iraq war in a unique, compelling way.

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.

Por mais dramático que seja o tema de fundo, esse livro é uma sucessão de clichês. Cansativo e desinteressante. Creio que nem mesmo o mais aficcionado leitor com interesse militar encontrará aqui algo que o encante.

とにかく一気に読んだ。面白い。著者は元海兵隊員。イラク戦争を描いて全米図書賞を獲得した。これは単なる経験談ではない。優れた戦争文学である。本書は１２編からなる短編集。すべて兵士が語る一人称小説である。fuck,shit,assholeが頻発され、見慣れぬ軍用略語にてこずる。しかしそれは兵士の言葉で、著者の好みの問題ではない。中には略語ばかりの４ページに満たない短編もある。これも単に奇をてらった実験的手法ではないことは、読み終わればわかる。著者は緻密な構成と計算づくの語彙で、若い兵士の戸惑いを巧みに描き、抑制のきいたカラッとした結末を生み出すことに成功している。決着のつかない世の矛盾を、暴力によって最終決着する場が戦場である、なんてことを著者は書かない。戦争は残酷だ、人間の尊厳を無にする、などとも書かない。この本には、抽象的な文言や戦争の常套句は一切ない。著者が描くのは、ただ兵士の身辺に起きた出来事である。例えば、兵士は犬を撃つ。犬が死体の血を飲むからだ。結婚指輪をはずして認識章と一緒にネックレスにぶらさげろと、兵士は命令される。死体からは、指輪が抜けなくなるからだ。爆弾が破裂し顔の半分を失くした兵士は、そのとき肉の焼ける匂いをかぐ。遺体処理兵が、遺体収容袋が破れて中の液体をかぶる。暑さで遺体が融けたのだ。パトロール中、自分が撃ったイラク兵に、思わず自分の救命具を差し出す兵士。これらは兵士の任務の一端だ。彼らは戦争反対を口にしない。志願して入った兵士であるから。しかし戦場の高揚感はすぐに恐怖に変わる。殺される恐怖と殺す恐怖。彼らは何とかそれを忘れる算段をするしかない。しかしこの小説の本当のテーマは、戦場の恐怖や矛盾を描くことではない。それはこの作品の目的の半分に過ぎない。なぜなら兵士の本当に厄介な問題は、アメリカ帰還後に始まるからである。海兵隊員の苦しみ？PTSD？今さらそんなこと言っても、自分の意思で海兵隊に入ったのだろう？私たちのそんな批判を著者は十分わきまえている。だからこそ著者は、兵士の思いを代弁してこの作品を書いたのである。「同情も勲章もいらない。ただ戦争の現実を知って欲しいのです」と。

Redeployment claims to be the real deal, and by and large, Phil Klay's collection of short stories manages to deliver. What sets it apart from many of its genre peers is its exploration of the lesser-known (or, at least: less commonly written about) aspects of the Long War: while the infantry is given its due part, Klay's cast of narrators is fairly diverse and includes, among others, a chaplain, a mortuary affairs specialist, and a civilian functionary of the United States Foreign Service. “Money as a Weapons System” in particular stand out in its refreshingly accurate depiction of the socio-political environment framing the efforts and lives of everybody who is involved with or exposed to the war effort.What's also notable is Klay's respect for his audience: he is upfront about his own, real-life experience having been one on the sidelines, the tone of his stories never becomes patronizing, and he neither lionizes nor deprecates the motivations and actions of his characters. Redeployment both contrasts and complements Evan Wright's  Generation Kill  (and its famous miniseries), and together, they offer a great opportunity to learn what it's actually like being boots on the ground in Iraq. Generation Kill

Excellent, même s'il faut s'accrocher en anglais, car le langage des troufions américains là-bas sur le terrain de la guerre est franchement basique ce qui en dit long sur le recrutement de la chair à canon dont les plus jeunes peuvent avoir moins de 20 ans.Et puis tous ces acronymes posés ici et là dans le texte, comme des mines pour piéger le lecteur et le plonger direct dans un univers impersonnel où il n'y a plus d'humains mais des KIA (=Killed In Action/Mort au combat), des DI (=Drill Instructor/Sergent instructeur), des SOB (=Son Of a bitch), XO (= Executive Officer/Commandant en second), des PFC (=Private First Class/Caporal), des CO (=Commanding Officer/Commandant), . Les armes de mort s'appellent IED (=Explosif), des UXO (=Unexploded Ordnance/pièce d'artillerie). Même la bouffe n'a pas de nom: MRE (=Meat Ready to eat/Viande toute prête).Les mots de Phil Klay sont des armes puissantes.