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May 11, 2015Bill2smith rated this title 5 out of 5 stars
One thing I noticed pretty quickly as I began reading the stories in Redeployment was the number of abbreviations. One sentence in the second story, Frago: “Once the CASEVAC leaves, it’s mostly waiting. I give the LT my SITREP. He passes it on to Ops…” There’s no glossary, I noticed. In fact, the story “OIF” plays abbreviation games with us. It begins, “EOD handled the bombs. The 08s fired DPICM. The MAW provided CAS. The 03s patrolled the MSRs. Me and PFC handled the money.” What I took from this was that I’m very much an outsider; I don’t know the language; I haven’t had the experiences. And that comes up in some of the stories: Civilians really don’t know what these veterans go through. This book gives us a peek inside their world, but it’s clear, it’s alien to most of us; we’ve been placed in someone else’s world. The writing is sparse, much like the dessert, without a lot of description of the environment. Only a few of the stories involve actual battles, or encounters with insurgents. Each story is told in first person, each from a different viewpoint. The first story, “Redeployment,” describes how hard it is for a marine to come home, how disorienting. The characters and dialogue are very authentic. The writer’s voice and style are impeccable. I don’t believe there was an overt political perspective, though others find one in the stories. But there is definitely cynicism, both overt and in undercurrents. The most absurd, Heller-like story, and one of my two favorites, is “Money as a Weapons System.” The whole story is about a Foreign Service Officer who is trying to do something useful in the country, something that will be of consequence. The speaker says at the beginning, “I remember Condoleezza Rice declaring that civil administration and police functions had no place in a military campaign. ‘We don’t need to have the 82nd Airborne,’ she said, ‘escorting kids to kindergarten.’ In 2008, around the time I got there, the 82nd Airborne was building greenhouses in Tikrit.” The story is about the bureacratic hurdles and logistical dead ends the Foreign Service Officer encounters. One corporate executive with power and influence believes that baseball can change the Iraqi culture, sends uniforms and equipment, and demands that Iraqi kids be taught the game. There are common themes. One is the sense of isolation expressed by so many of the speakers, either their own, or in their descriptions of their comrades. The most moving story, and my other favorite, is “Prayer in the Furnace,” told by a chaplain. It’s about his difficulties advising men who are sent into harms way, often on futile missions, trying to give them some spiritual guidance. And it’s partly about his futile struggle to open an inquiry into a company commander that has encouraged a general hatred of all Iraqis, with no distinction between civilians and insurgents. Each story is a microcosmic view, a small piece of a chaotic, indecipherable puzzle. There is no holistic vision, because interpreting the whole picture is impossible. The last story expresses this best. “Ten Kliks South” is about an artillery team that is told they took out a group of insurgents. One of the men wants to see evidence, see bodies. They fire volleys at targets miles away, never see the results. In a way, this seems like a metaphor for the book, in that no one ever gets to view the “larger picture.”