“I had at least thought there would be nobility in war. I know it exists. There are so many stories, and some of them have to be true. But I see mostly normal men, trying to do good, beaten down by horror, by their inability to quell their own rages, by their masculine posturing and their so-called hardness, their desire to be tougher, and therefore crueler, than their circumstance. And yet, I have this sense that this place is holier than back home. Gluttonous, fat, oversexed, overconsuming, materialist home, where we’re too lazy to see our own faults.”

That’s just a sample of the stinging and raw prose found in Phil Klay’s collection of short stories, Redeployment. Klay, a veteran of the Iraq war and recipient of the National Book Award, sat down with us to talk about Memorial Day, why we find it diffi [...]

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