A few nights back, I was reading Phil Klay’s “Redeployment”. Different from many of the academic articles I had read in the past weeks, I had missed being exposed to a literary text, especially a short story. Through this reading I could find a variety of moments that relate with themes explored in our ASTU class throughout the year, like war, trauma, memory, and violence. Klay’s story narrates the experience of a soldier who struggles to readjust to the “home front” rather than the actual “war front” he was exposed to for seven months. The narrator protagonist portrays his thoughts and experiences, reminding readers about the personal and psychosocial effects of war. Klay also evidences the subconscious “militarization” (52) of the everyday life, as explained in Deer’s “Contemporary American War Culture” and shows how such behaviors difficult the soldier’s reinsertion to his home environment. This follow’s Deer’s ideas as the “authority of recent war culture… is based… on much partial, fragmented, and incoherent representations of wartime” (51).

The first thing that caught my attention was the title of the story. “Redeployment” refers to returning to battle ground, except in this case the real battle is re-inserting oneself in the “home front”. The term recalls of the character’s deployment experience and his difficulty at escaping such traumatic memories. Even though his environment has changed drastically, the soldier’s war experience has dissocialized him from carrying out mundane activities at home. His story embodies that of millions of soldiers around the world whom suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) after being involved in war or any military activity.

For instance, the protagonist mentions having chaotic flashbacks from the war front that interrupt his thoughts actions, and his constant rumination over mundane details start having a violent undertone. When the protagonist feels discomfort when going shopping with his wife, for example, he not only feels enclosed in the fitting room, but also recognizes his own uneasiness and trauma when he says “last time you walked down the city street, your Marine on point went down the side of the road, checking ahead… In a city there’s a million places they can kill you from” (12). This can be an evidence of what Deer refers to as “fragmentation”.

A key symbol in Klay’s story is dogs – most precisely the killing of them. The story begins with the protagonist “thinking [a lot] about… [the soldiers having] open season on dogs” (1), referring to the shocking normality of killing, especially of innocent animals. The final scene of the story reissues this symbol when the protagonist practices mercy killing on his own dog. This moment is a metaphor that embodies how his recovery from deployment (which includes not doing violent acts) hurts given his trauma, and he returns to carrying out a war-related activity that he was previously normalized to do (shooting) in an attempt from escaping the pain. When he narrates the meditative moment before the killing, he says, “each shot coming quick after the last so you can’t even recover, which is when in hurts” (16), but instead of referring to the dog’s death, he could further be referring to a tragic realization: how the practice of violence corrupts internal peace and drags the individual into despair or further violent acts that cause discord within the actors. After the act is done, he claims to have forgotten “what to do with the body”.

Klay also embodies such “militarization” of war culture through the protagonist’s setting descriptions and the use of normalized military-related language. Terms such as “let your guard down” (4) or “got him into base” (10) are both examples of expressions that are used in the daily life, but both have very big military connotations (the former used literally in the story’s context). On the other hand, some setting situations such as the scene in which the incoming soldiers had to be set on a “no-shit parade formation” (6), causes discord in the protagonist. Such paradox entails the celebration of soldiers that are not potentially proud about their actions in the battlefield, and instead are too psychologically drained to celebrate their arrival cheerfully. Additionally, it reflects how war culture is normalized and even celebrated in America.  A final moment caught my attention: “I saw my name on a sign: SGT PRICE, it said” (7). This line represents a shift in identity for the main character, as he learns to recognize himself as a soldier or “Sargent”, rather than through his first (more personal) name.

The overall story made me reflect not only on Deer’s account on the militarization of the daily life, but I also revisited the theme of trauma as seen previously in Obasan, where the protagonist is silent. In Klay’s story, the protagonist does not say much either (he is rather reserved, even with his wife), but the first-person narrative allows the reader to hear the noise within his thoughts. Furthermore, I also revisited Judith Butler’s “Frames of War”, when she highlights how master narratives are manipulated in vulnerable situations, such as in times of war. In page 11, Klay’s protagonist says: “We took my combat pay and did a lot of shopping. Which is how America fights back against the terrorists”, and such behavior relates to the public statement US ex-president Bush stated in the post-911 era. I also remembered Butler’s question “what makes a life worth grieving?” when Klay’s character describes the sport killing of dogs and comments that “It wasn’t American blood” (1), as if the dog, as “non-American” individual (presumably an Iraqui dog), falls out of the soldier’s frames of recognizability that war forces upon individuals.

During my first year, I am grateful for learning new skills and content. Through the texts studied, I have learned to appreciate new knowledge and hopefully come to apprehend, understand, and deconstruct frames and representations. ASTU class has definitely made an impact on me and fostered my critical thinking skills. Hopefully, they will keep improving in the near future.