After War, A Failure of the Imagination

Phil Klay published "After War, A Failure of the Imagination" in the New York Times Sunday Review on 8 February 2014, a month before his short-story collection Redeployment (Penguin) appeared in March of the same year. The essay was widely reprinted (a RealClearDefense republication and multiple syllabus appearances) and is the short-form citable version of the argument the stories of Redeployment dramatize. Klay is a Marine Corps Iraq veteran (2007–08 deployment to Anbar) and now teaches at Fairfield University; the New York Times opinion section was at the time aggressively recruiting veteran voices, and Klay's piece is one of that wave.

The essay's argumentative structure is unusual for an op-ed. It is not a complaint about civilian indifference, which the genre would have permitted; it is a more demanding argument that the failure of imagination is itself the problem the moral-injury literature is trying to name. The volunteer military makes it possible for American civilians to participate in multi-year wars without doing the work of imagining what those wars require — and that participation-without-imagination is the condition under which the moral cost is concentrated in the volunteers themselves rather than distributed across the polity. Klay does not use the term moral injury in the essay, but the argument is recognisably an argument about it from the civilian side, and the piece has been cited as such across the academic literature.

The New York Times opinion section's editorial filter is prestigious-newspaper-trade. The piece had the placement and the visibility to reach an audience the academic moral-injury literature does not reach, and is part of why the construct entered educated-civilian conversation in the way it did in the mid-2010s. Klay's 2022 essay collection Uncertain Ground (Penguin) develops the argument at book length and is the place to turn for the longer-form treatment; the Times piece is the short-form anchor.

The stake is literary-political. Klay writes as an Iraq veteran who is also self-consciously a literary writer, and resists both the war-memoir register (the trauma-confession genre) and the journalistic register (the explanation-of-soldiers- to-civilians genre). The argument the essay makes is one its tone also exemplifies — that civilian readers can do, and have not done, the imaginative work the volunteer-military arrangement requires of them.

For the moral-injury corpus this essay sits on the literary side of the genre alongside Boudreau's 2011 Massachusetts Review piece. Read after Redeployment for the connecting tissue between the stories and the explicit argument, or read before the stories as the orientation to what they are doing.