Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I am a soldier's daughter. Because my father served in World War II (Navy then), he did not speak of the war to me when he came home. It wasn't done. But as I came through the Vietnam era in college and saw my students go off to wars in the Middle East as a teacher, I became more and more obsessed with understanding war. REDEPLOYMENT by Phil Klay gives a variety of perspectives of war. Because he uses short stories and a number of narrators, Klay can move from returned vet at the height of his PTSD to bored Foreign Service Officer trying to put Iraqi kids into baseball uniforms because someone upstairs wants a PR picture. Never mind that the child rounded up may have been working on an IED the day before. The plight of the soldier, his amped up emotions and his training to be vigilant, to KILL or BE KILLED, overrides all other themes. Whether a man has endured burns all over his body or has been awarded a Medal of Valor, the wars of this century have marked a generation of men (and women, whom Klay acknowledges) as surely as WWI marked Wilfred Owens, the poet. This is a bruising, snarling, hair-tearing blast of the breaths of death and war. Phil Klay, you speak of what you know. Though mankind does not seem to learn from the history of war, voices like Klay's help to remind those safely watching the evening news that the soldiers are people's sons, daughters, husbands, wives and the "collateral damage" includes children and families with no interest in politics or global strategies. Klay's narrators give us the shifting tides of war with the constant of harm, ruin, and pain.