Why pretending we understand veterans is irresistible, a review of Phil Klay’s Redeployment.
A moderator at a panel discussion once introduced Jim Lehrer as a combat veteran from Vietnam. Lehrer, a former anchor of The News Hour, was tempted to let the mistake slide, enjoying the thrill of being associated with battle-hardened warriors, but ultimately corrected the moderator. Lehrer was a Marine during the Vietnam war, but never served in-country. Another respected and charismatic news anchor, Brian Williams, recently lied about his own experience as an embedded journalist, saying his helicopter received enemy fire during a flight through Iraq. Bill O’Reilly is also facing questions about his wartime reporting during the Falklands War.
It is easy to understand why journalists and storytellers are tempted to tether their own histories to the mysterious and powerful aura of war. There are few resume-builders as striking as time spent in the midst of the most powerful military institution in the history of mankind, especially when engaged in combat. It is why journalists embed, it is why so many of our finest storytellers opted to serve their country in foreign wars, and it is a big reason why I enlisted.
Yet, I am not a veteran. I exist in a weird in-between realm of military experience. Not fully just-a-civilian, but definitely not a Marine. I joined the Corps in the wake of 9/11, served a few quality months in Boot Camp, but was sent home after a medical condition arose. Neither an honorable or dishonorable discharge. Just the military version of a “Thanks, but no thanks.” The USMC decided that the expense of fixing me outweighed my value as a 0352 Infantry Tow Gunner.
When I arrived to the Routing Platoon, preparing to be shipped home, I was shocked at how easily I’d been discarded. I shared a converted storage space with a dozen or so other dazed recruits, watched planes take off and land at the San Diego International Airport next door, and waited on officers I would never meet to decide what the Corps would ultimately do with me. Some of the rejects in the Routing Platoon went back to training, but most of us were sent home.
I had no idea what to think about my fate. I spent most of my time writing, just recording all the pertinent moments of my abbreviated military career. Other rejects read magazines, argued politics, traded stories. A few rejects were on a near permanent bed rest including a man who was almost beaten to death by other recruits during an Intense Training drill that got out of hand. Another man boasted a cane and a permanent limp. Another refused to tell us what medical condition made him unfit for service, but instead only talked of returning to Alaska to go bow-hunting.
For those whose bodies failed them, it was an easier time since an odd air of respect was afforded us by the drill instructors. For those whose convictions failed them, the routing platoon was a tough existence. Left to ponder their failure, waiting to explain to their parents what went wrong, they were berated by almost everyone they came across. One young man cried when his father told him over the phone that he ripped the USMC bumper sticker off his truck. The poor kid had refused to train after a drill instructor punched him in the chest. Even we, his fellow rejects, couldn’t respect him. There was a sweet-hearted weirdo who, last I heard, was volunteering at a wolf preserve in California. He’d tried to jump off the third floor of the barracks after a DI called his bluff on his “suicidal intentions.”
There was also a salty Texan with low bone density, at least three who popped for marijuana on piss tests, a noble intellectual with a debilitating case of hemorrhoids, and a guy who refused to train after he finished the Gauntlet. It was the last major hurdle on the way to becoming a Marine. None of us could understand why he quite after coming so close and he didn’t like to be asked.
This was my military experience. Short and insignificant in comparison to an actual Marine, but still a very informative period of my life and I rarely miss a chance to swap stories with actual veterans, as if making it two months through boot camp made us the same.
So, reading Phil Klay’s brilliant series of short stories entitled Redeployment, I was struck by how the weird unreality of my boot camp memories actually permeates the rest of the Marine experience. Klay’s stories cover wartime, transitioning to civilian life, and, of course, redeployment. Klay captured these times from an array of viewpoints, all containing the big emotions and small details that strip strip away the mystery and glamour of war. His voice is warm and familiar with a deep affection for his characters, even as he lays out their scars and truths with a startling honesty. The experiences all read as unnatural, something humans aren’t meant to be doing. Like in the machinery of our minds, these moments are parts that simply will never fit with the rest of the gears and servos.
Then we, the civilians, thank the veterans for their service and beg for stories that they don’t want to tell. These stories are so foreign to our own that veterans might as well be speaking another language. Klay’s characters portion out their war stories to the uninitiated to angle for sex, sympathy, free drinks, all banking on the money shot: the mystique of suffering. That is the signature of the modern war story, what the author delves into, what draws young men and women to the battlefield and the rest of us to their stories.
My best friend is a combat vet. My father is a combat vet. I am always eager for their stories, partly out of voyeurism, partly because I like the feeling of being trusted by a veteran in a way they don’t trust others. It makes me feel like I somehow understand and am more engaged in the war experience. I am not, of course, and it is deeply embarrassing to admit that I am just another boot camp wash out. Redeplyment did an excellent job of calling me out on my bullshit.
The hard question is how do we help these veterans re-engage with civilian life? Redeployment doesn’t provide a firm answer because what they need changes from person to person and from moment to moment. Klay’s characters don’t want to be thanked for their service, nor do they want to be ignored. In Klay’s portrayal, the struggle does not end when the troops return home, but rather fades slowly. By attaching ourselves to the mystique of combat to embellish our own lives, we diminish the struggle of those who carry the real weight of war.
