Hi guys, it’s me again! These past weeks we discussed a couple of texts; Author and Veteran Phil Klay’s book: Redeployment, and Mohsin Hamid’s book The Reluctant Fundamentalist. While I found our discussion today of Hamid’s book to be very intriguing, I haven’t actually finished the novel yet, and so I feel obliged to discuss in greater detail the other, equally interesting text “Redeployment”. At first when starting the excerpt from Klay’s book “Redeployment”, the title didn’t really seem to catch my eye. It is a commonly used military term, and in the context of war does not seem particularly avant garde or enlightening. This, however is changed completely after reading and discussing in class the implications of the text. Klay’s novel centers itself on the theme of incommunicability of experience, through the most commonly used medium: language. Therefore, this one simple word; “Redeployment” is transformed through the focus of the story into representing a multitude of things, illustrating the troubling nature of communication.

The book starts off with showing the reader the problems that arise not just from communicating to others, but understanding your own experiences through your thoughts. Klay shows this by describing the difference of actually doing the things Sgt. Price describes, and thinking about them after: “At the time, you don’t think about it. You’re thinking about who’s in that house, what’s he armed with, how’s he gonna kill you, your buddies.” “The thinking comes later, when they give you the time.” (1). This separation of thought and action shows what the soldiers go though in the physical process of being “redeployed” back home. In the war zone your training, your muscle memory that has been embedded into your very being takes over and you just “do”. However, the problem arises when you are physically transferred back into “regular” society in which you are forced to think for yourself once again. Therefore, this transition of body to mind can be another way to view the title. Not only are the soldiers redeployed back home physically, they are redeployed back into their conscious minds, redeployed into being able to think about their experiences. “It takes you a while to remember Doc saying they’d shot mercury into his skull, and then it still doesn’t make any sense.” (1). This separation of body and mind that Klay makes, sets up this idea of incommunicability already on page one by showing the difficult situation soldiers face in grasping their own experiences.

Throughout the story, this feeling of incommunicability is expanded to other people who have never been to war. With Sgt. Price’s wife for example, he doesn’t really feel that connection at first when they kiss, and when they take it back home to the bedroom he says “She looked a bit scared of me, then. I guess all the wives were probably a little bit scared.” (9). However, I feel as though Klay is not trying to get at the specific incommunicability that exists in the relationships of soldiers to their families and friends, but on a more abstract level to that of the public. Like he says later in the story when he is at the mall “Outside, there’re people walking around by the windows like it’s no big deal. People who have no idea where Fallujah is, where three members of your platoon died. People who’ve spent their whole lives at white.” (12). This idea of the mental level of awareness comes up a lot and is related to this incommunicability of experience. Not only do the soldiers have a hard time grasping their experiences, it is even harder for them to be around people who have no idea what that experience (being at ‘red’ or ‘orange’) entails. The way they think and act is completely different, so how could they ever understand? This, I believe is at the heart of Klay’s point. By portraying the experience of redeployment from a soldier’s point of view, the story outlines the incommunicability of soldier to civilian, thus attempting to communicate to the reader the incommunicable. For example, throughout the story there is a theme of killing dogs; at the beginning it is portrayed as normal in the context of war, and we are not shocked. At the end, however it is him killing his own American dog, and the reader gets this feeling of horror and trauma from this description. In using the death of a dog, a subject that in western (civilian) terms we deem as normal to be humanized, he attempts to show the irony of not being able to sympathize with the lives of a human Iraqi. Klay’s story questions why it is that we feel sadder and more traumatized from the killing of a dog, but ignore or glorify the constant redeployment of soldiers who’s main purpose is to kill other humans that are much like our(them)selves? What are the ramifications of that missed communication of soldiers to public? These questions that arise from the multilayered theme of incommunicability in Klay’s story is what I found to be so interesting about this reading. It changed my own view of Veterans lives, and made me question the structure of our system in producing this lack of connection between people.

Thanks for reading!

• Sam