Redeployment Kindle Notes

My 2015 Reading List is here.  Here's my 2014 Reading List as well.

With less than .4% of Americans serving in the military, this is the book the other 99.6% should read.  The idea of coming home as another deployment aptly captures what it's like for so many of our troops who fight our wars and then are supposed to just come back to a place that doesn't feel like home anymore. Klay has a beautiful line in one of the early stories:  "Getting back feels like your first breath after nearly drowning. Even if it hurts, it’s good."  Ultimately, reading this book serves as a cathartic communion of sorts for the reader, a chance for those who haven't served to break bread with those who have sacrificed so much.  My complete notes and highlights on it are here.

Redeployment by Phil Klay

So there you are. You’ve been in a no-shit war zone and then you’re sitting in a plush chair, looking up at a little nozzle shooting air-conditioning, thinking, What the fuck? You’ve got a rifle between your knees, and so does everyone else. Some Marines got M9 pistols, but they take away your bayonets because you aren’t allowed to have knives on an airplane.Read more at location 49

When I got to the window and handed in my rifle, though, it brought me up short. That was the first time I’d been separated from it in months. I didn’t know where to rest my hands. First I put them in my pockets, then I took them out and crossed my arms, and then I just let them hang, useless, at my sides.Read more at location 101

She said, “Isn’t it good to be home?” Her voice was shaky, like she wasn’t sure of the answer. And I said, “Yeah, yeah, it is.” And she kissed me hard. I grabbed her in my arms and lifted her up and carried her to the bedroom. I put a big grin on my face, but it didn’t help. She looked a bit scared of me,Read more at location 143

then. I guess all the wives were probably a little bit scared. And that was my homecoming. It was fine, I guess. Getting back feels like your first breath after nearly drowning. Even if it hurts, it’s good. I can’tRead more at location 145

Here’s what orange is. You don’t see or hear like you used to. Your brain chemistry changes. You take in every piece of the environment, everything. I could spot a dime in the street twentyRead more at location 184

yards away. I had antennae out that stretched down the block. It’s hard to even remember exactly what that felt like. I think you take in too much information to store so you just forget, free up brain space to take in everything about the next moment that might keep you alive. And then you forget that moment, too, and focus on the next. And the next. And the next. For seven months.Read more at location 185

Me and Timhead went right back to the can we shared. We didn’t want to talk to anybody else. I got on my PSP, played Grand Theft Auto, and Timhead pulled out his Nintendo DS and played Pokémon Diamond.Read more at location 410

A week later another IED hit. I heard the explosion and turned back. Garza was listening to the lieutenant screaming something on the radio. I couldn’t see to where they were. Could have been a truck in the convoy, could have been a friend. Garza said Gun Truck Three, Harvey’s. I swiveled the .50-cal. around, looking for targets, but nothing. Garza said, “They’re fine.” That didn’t make me feel better. It just meant I didn’t have to feel worse.Read more at location 497

Somebody said combat is 99 percent sheer boredom and 1 percent pure terror. They weren’t an MP in Iraq. On the roads I was scared all the time. Maybe not pure terror. That’s for when the IED actually goes off. But a kind of low-grade terror that mixes with the boredom. So it’s 50 percent boredom and 49 percent normal terror, which is a general feeling that you might die at any second and that everybody in this country wants to kill you. Then, of course, there’s the 1 percent pure terror, when your heart rate skyrockets and your vision closes in and your hands are white and your body is humming. You can’t think. You’re just an animal, doing what you’ve been trained to do. And then you go back to normal terror, and you go back to being a human, and you go back to thinking.Read more at location 501

the Professor looked at me and said, “There are other fees he may not anticipate, but which may complicate this matter.” He paused and added, “It is as they say. A rug is never fully sold.”Read more at location 1260

Twenty years ago, well before I became a priest, I used to box light heavyweight. Rage is good for amping you up before a fight, but something different happens once the fighting begins. There’s a kind of joy to it. A surrender. It’s not a particularly Christian feeling, but it’s a powerful one. Physical aggression has a logic and emotion of its own. That’s what I was seeing on Rodriguez’s face. The space between when rage ends and violence begins. I didn’t evenRead more at location 1486

When Fujita’s squad approached the battle cross, they knelt close together, their arms over one another’s shoulders, leaning into one another until it was one silent, weeping block. Geared up, Marines are terrifying warriors. In grief, they look like children. Then one by one they stood up, touched the helmet, and walkedRead more at location 1517

“So Ditoro ain’t saying shit to Acosta. And Acosta is buzzing. We’re not even looking and he strips to his underwear and Kevlar and goes out on the roof like that, dick hanging out, and he starts doing jumping jacks, screaming every Arabic curse word he knows.”Read more at location 1586

“A lance corporal,” Rodriguez said, “don’t have the power to make anything right.”Read more at location 1611

“No one’s hands are clean except Christ’s,” I said. “And I don’t know what any of us can do except pray He gives us the strength to do what we must.” He smiled at that. I wasn’t sure I believed the words I was saying to him or if there were any words I’d believe in. What do words matter in Ramadi?Read more at location 1772

Your attempts to bring transgressions to command attention are salutory. But as for your religious duties, remember these suspected transgressions, if real, are but the eruptions of sin. Not sin itself. Never forget that, lest you be inclined to lose your pity for human weakness. Sin is a lonely thing, a worm wrapped around the soul, shielding it from love, from joy, from communion with fellow men and with God. The sense that I am alone, that none can hear me, none can understand, that no one answers my cries, it is a sickness over which, to borrow from Bernanos, “the vast tide of divine love, that sea of living, roaring flame which gave birth to all things, passes vainly.” Your job, it seems, would be to find a crack through which some sort of communication can be made, one soul to another. I kept the letter with me throughout the rest of the deployment—always in the breast pocket of my uniform, always in plastic to protect it from sweat.

“We are part of a long tradition of suffering. We can let it isolate us if we want, but we must realize that isolation is a lie. Consider Owen. Consider that Iraqi father and that American father. Consider their children. Do not suffer alone. Offer suffering up to God, respect your fellow man, and perhaps the sheer awfulness of this place will become a little more tolerable.” I felt flushed, triumphant, but my sermon hadn’t gone over well. A number of Marines didn’t come up for Communion. Afterward, as I was gathering the leftover Eucharist, my RP turned to me and said, “Whoa, Chaps. That got a bit real.”

There’s an old joke, “How many Vietnam vets does it take to screw in a lightbulb?” “You wouldn’t know, you weren’t there.”

I smile a little “fuck you” smile. This Sarah is way too hot not to hate. Straight brown hair, sharp features, undetectable makeup, long pretty face, long thin legs, and a starvation zone body. Her getup is all vintage clothes, the carefully careless look worn by half of white Brooklyn. If you pick this girl up at a bar, other guys will respect you. Take her home, you win. And I can already tell she’s way too smart to ever give a guy like me a chance.

“Whether I’m a poor, disfigured vet who got exactly what he volunteered for,” I read, “or the luckiest man on earth, surrounded by love and care at what is unquestionably the worst period of my life, is really a matter of perspective. There’s no upside to bitterness, so why be bitter? Perhaps I’ve sacrificed more for my country than most, but I’ve sacrificed far, far less than some. I have good friends. I have all my limbs. I have my brain and my soul and hope for the future. What sort of fool would I have to be, to not accept these gifts with the joy they deserve?” SarahRead more at location 2693

“I’m good with people,” he said. “I’d be good with that.” He spoke with absolute composure. It made the room around him feel cold and still.Read more at location 2910

Strangely, I started feeling more like a Marine out of the Corps than I’d felt while in it. You don’t run into a lot of Marines in New York. All of my friends thought of me as “the Marine,” and to everyone I met, I was “the Marine.” If they didn’t know, I’d make sure to slip it into conversations first chance I got.

Vockler died in an IED, like the majority of combat casualties in these wars, a death that doesn’t offer a story younger Marines can read and get inspired by. IEDs don’t let you be a hero. That’s what makes Deme so important. The cold, hard courage that sends veterans like Vockler back to war is not what makes teenagers join the Corps in the first place. Without the rare stories like Deme’s, who’d sign up?Read more at location 3155