Redeployment

Phil Klay's Redeployment was published by Penguin Press in March 2014 and won the 2014 National Book Award for Fiction in November of the same year — the highest U.S. prize for fiction, and the prize that confirmed Klay's standing as the principal literary voice of the post-9/11 American war writing generation. It also won the National Book Critics Circle's John Leonard Award for best first book; the New York Times Book Review front-page review was admiring; the book remains in print in multiple paperback editions and is on the syllabus of most university courses on contemporary war literature.

The book consists of twelve stories, each narrated by a different voice from the Iraq war's American end — a redeploying infantry Marine, a chaplain, a State Department official running PRT reconstruction, a JAG officer prosecuting a detainee-abuse case, a Foreign Area Officer working with Iraqi interpreters, an artillery officer, a Marine returned to civilian life and trying to date, and others. The collection is structured deliberately to refuse the single-veteran-confession arc and to insist on the multiplicity of moral positions inside a war — a JAG's moral injury looks different from an infantryman's; a State Department officer's looks different from a Marine chaplain's. The polyvocality is the argument: that moral injury in the war was structural and distributed across institutional roles, not a private wound of a small number of frontline soldiers.

The two stories most directly engaged with moral injury as a construct are the title story "Redeployment" — about a returning infantry Marine who has to put down a stray dog at home and discovers he no longer knows how to be a person who does not shoot — and "Prayer in the Furnace," the chaplaincy story, in which a Catholic Marine chaplain tries and fails to find a language of confession adequate to what his Marines are bringing to him. Prayer is the place where Klay does his most direct theological work on the subject and is arguably the single most important short story for the moral-injury literature.

Penguin Press's editorial filter is literary-trade. The book is written for a general literary readership, not for clinicians or theologians; the term moral injury does not appear in it. But the literature has read the book as a moral-injury text — Brock and Lettini cite it; Sherman cites it; the Wood book What Have We Done discusses it — and Klay's own non-fiction (especially the NYT essay) makes the connection explicit.

Klay's stake is literary and ethical. He resists both the war-memoir register and the journalistic register in favour of fiction, partly because the polyvocal structure he needs requires fiction's permissions and partly because the imaginative effort he is arguing civilian readers owe veterans is the kind of effort fiction asks of its readers. The book makes the demand the NYT essay argues for.

For the moral-injury corpus Redeployment is the principal literary text. Read it after the foundational clinical and philosophical literature, so that the stories can do their work of registering inside the construct rather than introducing it. "Prayer in the Furnace" is the entry point if you only read one story.