Redeployment

Starred review from January 6, 2014
Klay’s title story, a moving homage to soldiers of war who must return home to attempt a normal life, made a splash when it was first published in Granta. This debut collection of a dozen stories resonates with themes of battle and images of residual battlefield pain and psychological trauma. This is especially evident in heart-wrenching stories like “Bodies,” in which a soldier buffers his grisly war stories in order not to have to truly share the horror of his tour in Iraq. Alternately, some stories are lighter and offer glimmers of humanity against Klay’s bleak landscape of combat, as in “Money as a Weapons System,” which finds a Foreign Service Officer charged with improving the civil affairs of Iraqi citizens by offering them baseball lessons. 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. Written in clipped sentences capturing the brutality of conflict, the specter of death permeates each story, from the corpse-eating dogs in the title story to Sergeant Deetz in “Ten Kliks South,” who snickers at his troop’s body count of insurgents. 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.

Craig Klein perfectly narrates these stories of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, hitting their exact tone and pacing. The soldier's life in a combat zone is one of boredom, military bureaucracy, violence, fear, exhilaration, and a host of other emotions. Klay, who as an adjutant in the Marines, had the perfect vantage point to see all sides of the warrior's life, splendidly captures the experience of war. Klein's voice is well matched to the text of each story--each told in the first person by a different observer. From the soldier returning home to the contractor with the ridiculous scheme to meet an equally ridiculous State Department goal and the chaplain who endures a crisis of faith, Klein reads each story as though he were the observer himself. M.T.F. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2014, Portland, Maine