Phil Klay (2014) Redeployment

For me the gold standard of war novels remains All Quiet on the Western Front. We are the first generation not to be involved in a World War (if you exclude global warming, a war we’ve already lost). Klay reminds us the job of soldiers, in Iraq and Afghanistan, is to kill people. He gets inside the character’s heads. That everything in Iraq is fucked up is given. That the infantrymen (and is largely working-class men) doing the fucking up are also fucked up is also given. In ‘Prayer In The Furnace’, for example, [Rodriguez] ‘had blood smeared across his face in horizontal and diagonal streaks. His hands and sleeves were stained and he wouldn’t look at me directly, his eyes wild and empty. Violent microexpressions periodically flashed across his face, the snarling contortions of an angry dog’. The narrator is the platoon’s chaplain. Rodriguez wants answers to the big questions of why are we here? Why do I feel like killing every Iraqi, including women and children and razing the place to the ground and why does Captain Boden amp them up even more by demanding more kills and putting up scores between different squads in The Most Contact Board? The chaplain, thank god, has no easy answers. Any of the other senior officers he might raise his doubts to about Rodriguez’s sanity and the war against the unfaced other is he realises futile. They make Mr Kurtz in Heart of Darkness seem like a patsy-assed liberal. IED’s are the biggest worry in Iraq. In ‘Psychological Operations,’ for example, the boy is back. He’s made a clean break. ‘At that time, I tended to play the world-weary vet who’d seen something of life and could look at my fellow student’s idealism with wistful sadness…’ In ‘Unless It’s A Sucking Chest Wound’, not only is he back, he’s enlisted in one of the top law schools. He recalls when Boylan calls him on his cellphone. Bolyan went straight from the infantry in Iraq to Afghanistan and wants to know how much the narrator is going to get paid by his law firm for his first job: ‘One hundred and sixty thousand dollars,’ I say. Plus bonuses.’ The reader is informed that before Boylan has called the narrator is depressed about the job offer. This mirroring effect of the best man being the other man, is perhaps best shown with ‘War Stories’. The narrator tells us: ‘Jenk’s story is pretty obvious [third degree burns to most of his body and a face with no ears after driving over an IED]    and that’s the weird thing because Jenks used to be me, basically. We’re the same height, grew up in the same kind of shitty suburban town, joined the Marine Corps at the same time, and had the same plan to move to New York when we got out.’ The most shocking scene, however, is outside the combat zone. ‘In Vietnam They Had Whores’ begins with a grunt as narrator drinking beer with his dad before he is shipped off to war in Iraq. Dad gets scooped and tells him how they used to go to this place with dancers and a stage. ‘Customers would put a stack of quarters on the bar. Then the girls would squat down on the stack, drop their vag on top of it, and pick up as many quarters are they could.’ He had a friend who took out his lighter and heated the quarters until they were ‘branding hot iron hot’. Then he calls a girl over. It didn’t matter to him which one. Wars a bit like that. Klay has done a wonderful job of picking apart its many aspects and bringing it to the light.