Book Club Guide

Redeployment

by Phil Klay · 2014 · Literary Fiction

Key themes

The Iraq War as experienced by those who fought it — not the version on the news
The specific language that veterans use to process what they've done
Homecoming as its own impossible war

About this book

Fourteen stories about American soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan — some combat veterans, some rear-echelon, some still in country. Klay's National Book Award-winning debut collection is one of the most clear-eyed accounts of what the Iraq War did to the people who fought it and to the civilians who didn't.

Published in 2014, Redeployment won the National Book Award for Fiction. Klay served as a Marine public affairs officer in Iraq from 2007-08. The collection is widely used in military studies and veteran studies courses.

Discussion questions

The stories are told by different narrators with very different relationships to the war — infantry, PR officers, chaplains. What does this multiplicity say — and which perspective do you find most affecting?
The title story opens and closes the collection. What does Klay achieve through this framing — and what does 'redeployment' mean in both its military and emotional senses?
The language in the stories is often military jargon — abbreviations, euphemisms, acronyms. How does Klay use this — and what does insider language do for both character and reader?
The stories mostly avoid political argument about the war's merits. Is this restraint a limitation or a strength?
Klay is a veteran who served in Iraq. What does first-person authority give the collection — and what does fiction allow him to say that memoir could not?