Redeployment by Phil Klay

[katekintailbc]

Redeployment
by Phil Klay
(Audio)

I first heard about this book a few weeks ago when we did a short news piece on it at work. It has won multiple awards, including the National Book Award and the Chautauqua Prize. Less than a day after I read the article, I found myself face-to-face with it at the library during one of my volunteer shifts. So I immediately grabbed it to listen to as soon as my current book finished.

I didn't realize it was a collection of short stories with completely different characters until I made it to the third story. Then everything started making sense and falling into place. I'm not a huge fan of short stories, so I might not have picked it up if I'd known what it was. But I am so glad that I did.

This was an incredibly powerful collection of stories about characters in the war in Iraq and Afghanistan. Each character showed different sides of things--comedy, tragedy, absurdity, reality, and a whole lot more. I loved the brotherhood and comradery in many of the stories. I loved the characters' senses of themselves in their stories and how they fit into their unit, the military, the war, and the world.

I was worried when dead dogs came up at the very beginning of the first story, which isn't a good sign, but I am glad I kept going. The stories were wonderful. And terrible. But wonderful. One of my favorite bits was an incredible linking of the dozens and dozens of acronyms, another was the story about foreign service officers trying to reinstate the water plant only to be told he must instead get war widows to raise bees or teach children how to play baseball. There were some stories of loss that hit me hard (especially because the focus was on the people they left behind).

There were a number of times I wish that I hadn't been earreading it on audio, because I missed the last sentence in a chapter's impact, thinking there was more and finding that there wasn't. Then I couldn't rewind and reread the sentence without listening to the last 8-11 minutes all over again. That was a case when the physical book would have been better. And it was hard to tell each story was different because the same reader read them all.

But the best thing was that each story had heart and purpose and power. The reader is left to understand and feel and think about it all. I really appreciated that. There are no forced messages, no heavy-handed point pro or against war. There's just emotion and survival, success and guilt, and so many relatable themes that make it kind of impossible to not feel connected to these characters and their struggles.