A Marine veteran's fictional short story collection about the Iraq War is in the running for one of the nation's most prestigious awards for literature.
The book "Redeployment," written by former Marine captain Phil Klay, is among five on the short list for the National Book Award in the Fiction category. Klay was a public affairs officer who deployed to Anbar province, Iraq, from January 2007 to February 2008.
His stories, each told from the perspective of a different narrator, span the range of wartime emotions. He writes as a Marine squad leader; a deployed chaplain; a foreign service officer; a mortuary affairs Marine who handles and processes combat casualties.
Some of the stories highlight the humor and absurdity of Iraq, as in the drawn-from-life tale of a U.S. public works project run amok through politics and ignorance in "Money as a Weapons System." Others are terse and understated, emphasizing war's darkness and the price paid by the young men who fight it.
Klay, who has already been named a 2014 National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 Honoree, told Marine Corps Times earlier this year that his goal with his first book was to broaden public understanding of the fighting forces and the wars in which they serve.
"Most military folks are neither passive objects of pity or super-soldiers; the average Marine is a Marine put into an incredibly complex environment where he's forced to make moral choices and live with the choices that he makes," he said at the time. "I wanted people to engage with that and take the modern military seriously."
Winners of the National Book Awards will be announced Nov. 19, according to a news release from the National Book Foundation. The prize for winners is $10,000 and a bronze statue, while finalists receive $1,000 and a bronze medal, according to the release.
More information about Redeployment is available at Philklay.com.
