Redeployment

Description

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.“[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

Phil Klay is a veteran of the US Marine Corps and the author of Redeployment, which won the 2014 National Book Award for Fiction, and Missionaries, which was named one of the Ten Best Books of 2020 by the Wall Street Journal. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, and elsewhere. He currently teaches fiction at Fairfield University, and is a Board member for Arts in the Armed Forces.

1. What does the title, “Redeployment,” mean in the context of the first story in the collection?

2. Have you or anyone close to you ever served in the military? If so, did Klay’s stories resonate with your and/or their experience?

3. In “Unless It’s a Sucking Chest Wound,” the narrator refers to “the idea of Iraq all my civilian friends imagine when they say the word, an Iraq filled with honor and violence” (p. 238). What was your “idea of Iraq” before you read the book? Did the book confirm or change your view?

4. Klay’s book is a moving and satisfying read, but also extremely emotionally challenging. Which parts did you find the most difficult? What was your favorite story?

5. The narrator of “Bodies” tells the story of a Marine who had burned to death clutching a small rock in each hand. He describes it as “the worst burn case we ever had. Worst not in charring or loss of body parts, just worst” (p. 69). Why?

6. If you were to describe Klay’s writing in three words, what would they be?

7. The stories in Redeployment often include military terms that might have been unfamiliar to you prior to reading the book. If so, what effect did this language have on you?

8. In “Psychological Operations,” why does Waguih describe to his father the profanities he used against Laith al-Tawhid (p. 210)? Why does he tell Zara?

9. Reading a collection of short stories is a very different experience than reading a novel. How did you approach the book? What enjoyment do story collections provide that longer works (novels and nonfiction) do not?

10. Look at the last paragraph of the last story in the book. How is this an effective end to the entire collection?

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.US

Additional information

Dimensions	0.7700 × 5.2800 × 7.9500 in
Imprint	Penguin Books
ISBN-13	09780143126829
ISBN-10	0143126822
Author	Phil Klay
Audience	General / adult
BISAC	FIC019000, FIC032000
Subjects	national book award winners, military history, dad gifts, marines, fiction books, popular books, long story short, war books, iraq war, award winning childrens books, war in afghanistan, afghanistan war books, War on Terror, national book award finalists, gifts for veterans, books on war, Fallujah, redeployment, top 10 books, taliban, war, military, fiction, national book award, FIC019000, afghanistan, novels, short stories, Literature, iraq, debut, military books, literary fiction, FIC032000, veterans, african american fiction, military fiction