Redeployment

Redeployment is a 2014 book of short stories written by veteran Phil Klay. Its grim humor and unflinching look at the brutality and horrors of the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars won Klay the National Book Award for fiction. The twelve stories in the collection examine themes of maddening bureaucracy, camaraderie among Marines, the cost of civilian casualties to Iraqi society and to the soldiers who inflict them, the difficulty of transitioning back into civilian life, and more.

The stories each have a different first-person narrator. Most of the narrators are unnamed. The majority of the stories have overlapping themes, but the subjects and locations are different.

In the title story, a Marine who has returned home reminisces about shooting dogs in Iraq after he saw one lapping up the blood of a corpse. When he returns home, he finds that he and his wife are often uncomfortable around each other. His own dog has fallen sick and needs to be euthanized, but he decides to do it himself instead of allowing a stranger to kill his animal.

The story “Money As a Weapons System” plays almost as satire as it illustrates the bureaucracy a Civil Service engineer faces while trying to get a water plant working in Iraq.