<http://schema.org/articleBody>
"FacebookPinterest\u00A9 Bryan Denton/Corbis\n\nPhoto: Corbis Images\n\nAmerica's longest war is almost over\u2014President Obama announced yesterday that American troops will be withdrawn from Afghanistan by the end of 2016. But what can those men and women, many of whom served multiple tours of duty, expect when the sounds of combat have faded away to city blocks or tree-lined suburban streets? Phil Klay's Redeployment, a collection of short stories about the Iraq War, provides answers to that question; and though they're not quite Born on the Fourth of July, they're also not pretty. There is, for example, the story of a mortuary officer who collects remains day after day and returns home to discover his sweetheart no longer wants him\u2014a military man's biggest fear. But Klay, who served in Iraq, didn't want his stories to be glorious\u2014he wanted them to be real. We spoke with the author and veteran; highlights from our conversation:\n\n\n\nGQ: What inspired you to write Redeployment?\n\n I wrote the book because there were all these things that troubled me or confused me\u2014call them unquiet memories. It became very important to me to think about the broad experiences of American service members in Iraq, and what those experiences felt like on a human level: how they lived with difficult decisions afterward, what America looked like when they came home, what stories we tell ourselves afterwards.\n\nHow have war veterans responded to your stories?\n\n I've gotten a very positive reaction from a lot of vets. . . . I think that in today's culture, which is not like the Vietnam generation, veterans have had a much warmer reception. If you're an Iraq veteran, you're used to being thanked for your service, and yet maybe what you want is somebody to talk about the experience, to talk about how it really was in all its ugliness. Because if you're lauding somebody and not talking about their experiences, you're being patronizing, and it's not real.\n\nYour book has a number of characters with great voices. How did you develop those?\n\n Reading a lot, talking to a lot of vets, spending a lot of time with the ideas. With the first story, I had the voice very quickly, but then it took me two more years to finish the story. I would write anecdotes and ideas and certain scenes, and then the voice would come: That's my guy, this is what my guy would say.\n\nWhat's one thing to know about the war, looking back, that you think puts it in context?\n\n There's no one thing. One of the things that's very strange about Iraq is: you come back to this society, to people who haven't been over there. They have fid notions of what the Iraq War experience might mean, and yet the experience of veterans is so diverse and strange, and so dependent on where you were and what you did. I think that the main thing I want to say is: just avoid the search for easy answers. There's no real message that ties the Iraq War up in a bow, and that's part of the point.\n\n"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.gq.com/story/obama-troops-withdrawal-afghanistan>