Redeployment

"I guess the Sergeant Major, like most people, needed death to be sensible. A reason for each casualty. I'd seen the same feeble theodicy at funerals in the civilian world. If lung disease, the deceased should be a smoker. If heart disease, a lover of red meat. Some sort of causality, no matter how tenuous, to sanitize it. As if mortality is a game with rules where the universe is rational and the God watching over maneuvers us like chess pieces. His fingers deep into the sides of the world."

Phil Klay

Redeployment

Before I read this book, I didn't know what the term "redeployment" meant. Which is really silly, I think. My country has been in two wars for more than half of my life, there have been roughly three million service tours, and roughly five thousand soldiers have died from 2004-2014. Yet I know so little about the conflict. I was fourteen when we invaded Iraq. I remember some of the political rhetoric, some of the stats. I remember when friends enlisted and deployed. But it's something I don't know much about. It's not something Americans seem to think about on a daily basis as anything more than the amount of money we are spending, and the stereotypes and judgement that surround the area. When I picked up  this book, I though that redeployment meant being sent back over, deployed for a second or third time. It turns out that redeployment is what happens when the soldiers come home. 

Redeployment, by Phil Klay, is a collection of short stories describing what happens to soldiers when they come home and try to resume daily life. They are poignant, sometimes, dark, heart wrenching, and extremely well written.And they deal with things I've never really thought about, things I've never had to deal with. From having to deal with putting down your old dog weeks after returning in the cover story, to the stories of the men preparing the fallen for their own redeployment, each story made me think. 

These are things that I think we really need to think about, or things that are not thought about enough. So much I feel that the war has been swept under a rug, or its put into a box with specific labeling. I'm not really interested in the politics surrounding it. The "do you believe in the war" and all that. I was too young and misinformed to have a well formed opinion when it began, and for a large part of it. I want to take a careful look at the effects, and the effects from both sides. I've known a couple of soldiers who returned from active duty. One resumed his life, got married again, had more kids. Another went back in. And another had a bad time of it, made some mistakes. The culture shock in addition to the traces of what had happened is something that I don't think we can ever fully understand. But I think its something that we need to try to.

 I would love to hear from any vets who have read the book, hear what they thought.  I thought the book was amazing. The writing was phenomenal, there was a distinct voice from the narrator in each story, and the storytelling was brilliant. I think what I loved the most about this book, though, was that it didn't overlook the dead. They still had stories, and their deaths effected others as they went through their own redeployment. These topics are important. And I hope we see them talked about more, and in such an eloquent way, in the future.