I was very glad to see Phil Klay’s work—both fiction and nonfiction—receive the attention it deserves in Suzy Hansen’s essay, “Twenty Years of Outsourced War,” in the New York Review of Books (October 19, 2023).
Hansen is right that his three books offer three different perspectives on the horror, tragedy, and irony of American war-making since 9/11. The stories in Redeployment, Hansen observes, “remain stuck in the solders’ experiences, which they can’t comprehend”—though I don’t think “stuck” is the right verb here. Klay’s stories don’t fail to transcend the soldiers’ viewpoint; they intentionally inhabit them. In his later novel, Missionaries, Klay zooms out to a more systemic, geopolitical perspective. We start to see the machination of capital and power that treat the bodies and lives of soldiers and civilians as pawns in a global chess match of mostly elite interests.1 And then in his most recent collection of nonfiction, Uncertain Ground, we–the non-combatant citizens of this war-making nation–are drawn into the fray, faced with our complicity even as we strain to look away. All three books are, I think, essential reading for those of us who can easily remain aloof from these dark, invisible realities in which we are implicated.
The only thing that Hansen misses, I think, is the way that Klay’s Catholic faith and formation imbue his mind & imagination with a deep sense of justice as well as an (Augustinian?) appreciation for the complex psychologies of all the actors involved. You can hear this more explicitly in his conversation with Nick Ripatrazone in Image 87.
Embedded in Hansen’s essay is also an utterly heart-breaking statistic:
According to a report by the Costs of War project at Brown University, as of 2021 the number of US soldiers who died in the so-called war on terror was 7,057, and the number of active-duty soldiers and veterans who committed suicide was 30,177, over four times as many. Do policymakers, writers, or citizens, Klay demands throughout his book, shoulder any such burden for twenty-first-century wars? Do we think of those wars at all?
As we stare down another possible conflagration in the Middle East, with itchy American trigger-fingers, I can think of no better curriculum than the books written by Phil Klay.
I also couldn’t help thinking of Josh Ritter’s (overlooked) searing take on the legacy of such war-making on generation upon generation: “Father’s War.”
I wrote something of a review of Missionaries in my Image newsletter a couple of years ago (scroll down).