Unquiet Memories

“If the past 10 years have taught us anything, it’s that in the age of an all-volunteer military it is far too easy for Americans to send soldiers on deployment after deployment without making a serious effort to imagine what that means,” klay wrote in a recent opinion piece in The New York Times. Having served in Iraq as a Marine, he hopes his collection of stories will help readers understand.

Klay returned home with “unquiet memories,” he says. His stories, which recount often-chilling wartime experiences and the difficult adjustment to being home, attempt to make sense of those memories and are written from perspectives other than klay’s. “I wanted to have different voices that I could play off one another rather than give an extended ‘this is how it was’ account,” he says. “you come back and you’re in a country that’s hardly paying attention. it’s confusing and alienating and you can’t put it to bed unless you’ve done justice to the seriousness of the experience by trying to think about it rigorously.”

The collection is ordered to provide a story arc much like a novel, Klay tells DAM. it begins with the jarring first lines of the title story—“we shot dogs. Not by accident. We did it on purpose, and we called it Operation scooby”—and works its way to “Ten kliks south,” an account of “one of the few artillery units actually doing artillery” and a soldier trying to cope with killing. in between are stories both comedic and dark. in “money as a weapons system,” we hear from a foreign service officer who wants to build a water treatment plant but is stymied by a leader who wants to teach iraqi war widows to raise bees and kids to play baseball. “prayer in the furnace” introduces us to a chaplain attached to a casualty-riddled battalion who hears about incidents he’d rather not know about.

Both mentors and fellow students in hunter College’s m.f.a. program, which he completed in 2011, influenced his work, klay says, “whether it’s something about the nature of the gothic and doppelgangers with Patrick mcgrath or formal constraints and acronyms with Colum mcCann.” klay also participated in nyu Veteran’s writers’ workshop. “i was always reading about something I wanted to write about, whether it was The Good Soldier Svejk by a Czech anarchist or george Bernanos’ The Diary of a Country Priest. i was always trying to educate myself.”

Redeployment PENGUIN PRESS 305 pp. $27