Redeployment by Phil Klay

The veteran says, "You weren't there. You'll never know." The civilian says, "I can't even imagine what you went through." And thus is the universal divide between those who served and those who didn't. Not just Iraq. Any war.

Phil Klay has made an honest and valiant effort in Redeployment with 12 short stories of the Iraq war. These are not told in some attempt to justify or condemn the morality of the war. As Tim O'Brien said in "How to Tell a True War Story," if a war story seems moral, don't believe it. 

Klay lays bare some truths behind this war that we civilians will never get from movies like the 2013 Lone Survivor. Through unconnected stories, he tells us about the how the war affects those who were going, were there, those who (attempt to) return home, and some civilians. 

If you aren't grabbed by the first sentence ("We shot dogs.") and paragraph, you might as well put it down. Don't kid yourself, you won't be interested. This isn't a pro-war or anti-war book. Klay attempts to pull back the curtain on consequences any normal civilian either wouldn't care about or couldn't be bothered with. 

The dog lover. The PRP unit (personnel retrieval & processing. DoD-speak for the mortuary). The Chaplain. The guy taking the 'blame' for killing a kid so the real shooter can try to wash away his guilt. IED survivors. The foreign service officer in reconstruction whose efforts are stonewalled until he can teach Iraqis baseball, the returnee attending a snooty New England liberal arts college, a soldier's first kill.

Klay explores each in a compact (290 pages) no-nonsense way, making no attempt to validate  or damn any actions or outcomes. He delivers fictionalized reports on what the war did and does to those who served.

No, we never will know. But we certainly should make an attempt. I think, in the end, we will wonder why every returnee doesn't have some level of PTSD.

ECD