Redeployment

One of the by-products of the unfortunate wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is the superlative writing about the conflicts. In some ways it's accounted for a golden age of reporting, and I think the thus-far definitive fiction about Iraq is Phil Klay's short story collection Redeployment, winner of last year's National Book Award.

Klay, who served in Iraq, lets us in on on the downlow of what it was like to be there. He covers the topic from all angles--those who are there, those who have returned, and even one story about a civilian charged with improving life for Iraqis in the face of considerable bureaucracy. That story is called "Money as a Weapons System," and is the heir to Joseph Heller's Catch-22 but in Baghdad, not Rome.

The rest of the stories are about soldiers. The title story is about returning Marines and the problems they face, like this one: "I saw Lance Corporal Curtis's wife back in Jacksonville. She spent all her combat pay before he got back, and she was five months pregnant, which, for a Marine coming back from a seven-month deployment, is not pregnant enough."

"Frago" take us right into action: "I put 3rd Fire Team in reserve, as usual. They're Malrosio's, and he's dumber than Fabio on two bottles of Nyquil. 3rd's had an easy deployment so far I don't give his team anything too complicated. Sometimes it helps to be led by an idiot."

There's a lot of technical jargon and acronyms that fly right over the civilian's head, but it doesn't really matter, as most of it is in context. Klay realizes this and one very short story is called "OIP": "EOD handled the bombs. SSTP treated the wounds. PRP processed the bodies. THe 08s fired DPICM. The MAW provided CAS. The 03s patrolled the MSRs. Me and PFC handled the money."

I keep going over my notes and see that there's something great from every story here. "Prayer in the Furnace" concerns a chaplain who finds that he can't always help; "Psychological Operations" concerns an Arab-American who is also a Christian back from combat attending college and engaging in debate with a young black girl who has just converted to Islam; and "War Stories" finds a horribly-disfigured soldier being interviewed by a young actress working on a play.

It's a tough call, but I think my favorite stories are "In Vietnam They Had Whores," which begins: "My dad only told me about Vietnam when I was going over to Iraq. He sat me down in the den and he took out of a bottle of Jim Beam and few cans of Bud and started drinking. He'd take long pulls of the whiskey and small sips of the beer, and in between sips he'd tell me things. The sweatbox humidity in the summers, the jungle rot in the monsoons, the uselessness of M16 in any season. And then, when he was really drunk, he told me about the whores."

 My other favorite is "Unless It's a Sucking Chest Wound," about an adjutant who never saw combat and the memories of the soldiers he dealt with as he looks back after getting a corporate law job. It's a complex, beautifully wrought story, and, as with all the stories here, shows the vulnerability of the men who come over gung-ho and leave shattered.

I think some of the stories here will rank there with tales of Vietnam like Tim O'Brien's "The Things They Carried," and will be taught in colleges. I don't know if we've had the definitive novel about the Iraq-Afghanistan conflicts, but perhaps Klay will write it.