Excerpt
SUMMARY: Phil Klay, a veteran and author of the National Book Award-winning book “Redeployment,” explains the difficulty for service members trying figuring out what to say to family about their experience and role in fighting a war.
JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour): Now another installment in our series of NewsHour essays.
Essays are part of a long tradition at the NewsHour, and in the coming weeks and months, we hope to bring you a range of voices as varied as the ideas they will share with you.
Tonight, as the U.S. steps ups its military role in Iraq and Syria, we hear from Phil Klay, who served as a Marine in Iraq and is the author of “Redeployment,” a collection of short stories. It won the National Book Award for Fiction in 2014.
PHIL KLAY, Author, Redeployment: In January 2007, I arrived at a base on the banks of Lake Habbaniyah in Iraq’s Anbar province.
At the time, Anbar was the lost province, the heart of the Sunni insurgency. It was a tremendously violent place. In one of those early months, I set up a video teleconference call between some soldiers and their families back home. These soldiers were at the end of a 16-month deployment.
It was only supposed to have been 12 months, but they’d been extended, so a year to the day after they arrived, they were still patrolling the banks of Lake Habbaniyah. And it was on one of those patrols that they lost two soldiers to an IED.
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