Kruse's Keys: Read (don't listen) to "Uncertain Ground" to Better Understand What it Means to be an American Citizen

I regret ever listening to Phil Klay’s 2022 collection of essays Uncertain Ground: Citizenship in an Age of Endless, Invisible War–I should have read it instead. As I listened to his 20 essays (divided into 4 sections: Soldiers, Citizen, Writing, and Faith) driving back and forth from the Licola suburbs to the U.S. Naval Base at Capodichino, I muttered countless complaints that there’s no way to take notes or make highlights in the Libby or Audible app! If I’d had a paperback version its margins would be scribbled with notes, quotes, and highlights…and this review would be a much stronger one.

For the uninitiated, Phil Klay is part of a slim company of writers (e.g., Ben Fountain, Atticus Lish, Roxana Robinson, Nate Fick, Andrew Exum, Gavin Kovite, Christopher Robinson, Elliot Ackerman) who grapple with America’s invisible conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan, and places most Americans don’t even realize we’re fighting. When I read his two earlier novels, Redeployment and Missionaries, I remember thinking every American needs to read these books. My hope being that his stories might wear away the calluses of an American public largely ignorant of the military service members’ sacrifices and scars. I observed that reading Redeployment could serve 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.

As I read Uncertain Ground, however, I continuously thought every service member needs to read this book. Klay’s essays focus on yes, what it means to serve, but more so what it means to be an American citizen. Quick note: It's to Klay’s credit that the author makes it quite clear that he never saw combat as a Marine Corps public affairs officer–he must have mentioned this fact some twenty times in the book. Countless other service members obfuscate their historical service leaving the public to guess or infer the nature of it. Klay’s clarity lends credibility to his writing as he is at times a marine once removed, an outsider listening and digesting all of his fellow marines’ combat trauma to shake the military reader awake to her responsibilities to be an active citizen engaged in the political process. One point he made that struck me, in particular, was the way he highlighted the knee-jerk military reaction that devalues anyone’s opinion on war who hasn’t served. I’m guilty of this. Klay makes a strong argument that the constitutional call for every American is to grapple with and hold our legislative and executive branches accountable for the lives of our soldiers, sailors, and airmen.

This is a book that I’ll order a paper copy of–I’d like the chance to read it again and mark it up, and discuss it with colleagues. He shares so many phenomenal insights (e.g., his approach to writing, his Catholic faith), that I want to be sure to capture them to refer to in future writing and conversations.

My 2015 review of Redeployment is here.
My 2021 review of Missionaries is here.

Looking for book ideas? Check out our 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015 and 2014 reading lists!

War of the Encyclopaedists: My Notes and Kindle Highlights

2015 Reading List

Kovite and Robinson have written something special together--they've penned a story that is gripping and unique, funny and sad--a book that's hard to put down.   

War of the Encyclopaedists is a story about war, love and friendship.  And like all good books there's a love triangle, an IED, an Iraqi kid named Monkey, a sperm bank and a sleep study.  With moments of humor and horror, passion and punch, the authors are part of the growing crop of writers (e.g. Klay, Fountain,  Lish, and Roxana) that are setting the war in Iraq into a context that the greater American culture can digest.  The ability to find and create this context in a balanced manner takes grit and talent--Kovite and Robinson have proved they have both in spades.  

One of my favorite lines from the book:

There is no definitive moment when two people become a couple. Elements of intimacy accumulate, and what makes a couple a couple is the gradual recognition of this accumulated intimacy.

War of the Encyclopaedists: A Novel by Christopher Robinson, Gavin Kovite

On Fifteenth Avenue, in Capitol Hill, Mickey Montauk and Halifax Corderoy were hosting their sixth event as “The Encyclopaedists.”Read more at location 20

Even Montauk had pointed out that Mani had been mooching off him since they’d met. He’d paid for her food, her drinks, her tickets to shows. He’d bought the plastic AK and the turban for her costume. He’d even bought the heels she was wearing. But he’d done it all gladly. And she’d been gracious and grateful and goddamn beautiful, and somehow, though she didn’t have any money, she’d been generous, generous with her time, her heart, her self. Corderoy was convinced she was a much better person than he.Read more at location 86

It had only been two months. And besides, he’d started dating her with a Get Out of Relationship Free Card: he was moving to Boston at the beginning of August, for grad school. She knew this. He’d told her the night they’d met, at the fourth Encyclopaedists event. It would have been a simple decision, if not for one problem: Corderoy loved Mani—maybe—and she was now homeless.Read more at location 117

He was Going to War.Read more at location 133

He used to cry, and still got teary-eyed, during Yoda’s speech before lifting the X-wing from the Dagobah swamp. Luminous beings are we, not this crude matter.Read more at location 163

This is why Corderoy loved Mani: She could roll her own cigarettes with one hand. She could recite large passages from Hunter S. Thompson. She looked exotic, with her olive skin and black hair, but she spoke like any college-aged American girl. One night she took him out to the woods in Interlaken Park with flashlights and beers to huddle in the dark and tell stories. When she wanted something, she had a way of setting her face in an almost-smile, a mischievous deadpan that held years of squealing, squirming mirth just below the surface.Read more at location 173

Corderoy loved Mani because he couldn’t figure her out, and he had a deep need to solve things. She was a Rubik’s Cube with one too many sides. No matter how he manipulated her, twisting her colors this way and that, she would always present another face, not quite aligned.Read more at location 180

why think about that when he could be thinking about Odysseus, how careless heRead more at location 278

was to allow his men to slaughter the oxen of the Sun God. How he was doomed never to return home, his ship destroyed, his men drowned. And really, was it all that bad an offense? It was absurdly easy to offend a god back then. The irony was that in choosing to avoid the difficult thought chains, Montauk inevitably fell into their metaphorical counterparts, which left him depressed and not knowing why.Read more at location 278

“I’m tired of fun, of racking up hipster cool points with the next clever thing.”Read more at location 347

This was true in a practical sense. Montauk was shipping out and would not be able to host absurd parties from the Middle East. But that would only be a limitation on his freedom if he saw deployment as a daunting imposition of someone else’s will. What if he saw it instead as the perfect opportunity to reinvent himself, a classic rite of passage that most of his coddled generation was denied?Read more at location 349

“There, look at how it always uses the word regime instead of government. This is why you can’t trust Wikipedia.”Read more at location 414

He had not been close with her, but the callousness with which he’d kicked her out that early morning had bitten him like a brown recluse—an ulcer had formed in his chest, and it was slowly turning black and gangrenous.Read more at location 468

Montauk, although known in his hipster set for horsing around, found it difficult to gauge what was an acceptable amount of grab-ass and unseriousness in an infantry platoon. He didn’t want to be seen as schoolmarmish, but he had to maintain his authority.Read more at location 730

KIA. Montauk had known that acronym before even joining the Army. Whoever that soldier was, on Monday, he’d probably been smoking cigarettes and making dick jokes. Tuesday, dead. And in just three weeks, Montauk and his boys would be manning that very checkpoint. He pictured a burning car, smoke and concrete debris, pieces of a soldier spread across the dirt. Sodium Joh, maybe. Maybe Ant.Read more at location 826

Corderoy found himself staring at the cleavage of the girl on the far left. Sandy? She was a little chubby and had an overly large jaw, which made him feel conflicted about his ogling. When a girl was pleasant to look at as a whole person, you could call her beautiful and it was refined to admire beauty. But if you had to ignore her face to enjoy her breasts, you were effectively sectioning her into isolated chunks and staring at only the good bits. There was no way to convince yourself that it was noble.Read more at location 1039

“The structuralists might say that upon breaking Star Wars down to its mythemes, the component parts of the larger mythos, we see that the actions of Luke, the orphaned hero, are significant only in the larger mythical structure, which contains the frail king and hidden father (Vader) and the prophecy (bringing balance to the Force), which itself is a kind of structure that binds everything together. And post-structuralism and deconstruction are what allow us to inhabit all these interpretations simultaneously.Read more at location 1115

was The Stranger, the Vintage paperback with the big sun on the cover and all those Arab faces, translated by Stuart Gilbert.Read more at location 1304

Part I of The Stranger—his favorite sentence, the one that always tipped him off to an inferior translation: “ ‘And each successive shot was another loud, fateful rap on the door of my undoing.’Read more at location 1307

“Did you read the essay prompt?” “Yes.” “Then you know it says you are to apply three of the schools of criticism we’ve discussed to a text and argue which one provides the most useful lens through which to read it. I did not assign this essay without cause. This is a peer-reviewed field, Mr. Corderoy. Do you imagine we are here purely for the pursuit of knowledge?” “Yes?” Corderoy ventured.Read more at location 2023

When you take your orals two years from now, your thesis advisers will expect you to be intimately familiar with post-structuralism, new historicism, phenomenology, and hermeneutics. You’re quite creative, Mr. Corderoy. And the insightful and unexpected thinking you demonstrated in this essay will make you an excellent critic and a great professor someday, if you take the time now to approach the field on its own terms.”Read more at location 2029

But as the city began appearing on the horizon through the thick haze, Montauk’s guilt gave way to amazement. Baghdad from the air was a land of fantasy, ripped right out of some cartoonish video game. Gigantic pastel mushrooms and blue eggs dotted the landscape. There were the Ba’athist pleasure domes, surrounded by greenery and kidney-shaped pools. The summer palaces on slopes where sheiks relaxed on their terraces while silken girls served sherbet. Many of the larger buildings hugged the Tigris, which curved in a lazy bend around the center of the capital. There was a large zoo with a Ferris wheel and a hippopotamus pond. Close by was an enormous white disc-shaped structure—the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, built in the wake of the Iran/Iraq war. And beyond that, the capstone of it all: the Swords of Qādisīyah, their massive blades gripped in hands rising out of the earth. Saddam was a cheesy son of a bitch, yes. But there was something awesome about commissioning an official government sculpture of your own hands holding 140-foot sabers, to be placed in the middle of the city.Read more at location 2175

You didn’t belong until someone newer than you cameRead more at location 2220

They set him down among the reeds, then walked away from the body and bent over, trying to breathe. Montauk closed his eyes, tight-lipped. The death smell made him want to kill.Read more at location 2633

Montauk was confronted with the fact that in his position, certain things were not merely unknowable, they seemed to not even have definitive truth values. There simply was no answer; in asking the question, you couldn’t help but affect the world you wanted to investigate. Babylon is nothing but an infinite game of chance.Read more at location 3036

“What do you do, really?” Tricia asked. “I told you,” Montauk said. “I fly blimps.” “You do not!” She hit him on the shoulder again. “For who?” “UAI. United Airships Incorporated. You think Goodyear owns their own blimps? They contract out to us, and we slap on their logo.” “But aren’t you a little young to be a blimp pilot?” “An aeronaut. And no, actually, most of us are young. The more experienced you get, the more likely you are to work ground control.Read more at location 3863

As he walked out of the airport, he wondered if he really was evil. He’d never done anything too immoral. There was the night of the last Encyclopaedists party, of course, but that moment had been blocked from mental search queries. He’d never cheated on a girlfriend, but maybe the opportunity had simply never presented itself. It was entirely possible that he’d lived a moral life thus far out of nothing other than circumstance.Read more at location 3927

There is no definitive moment when two people become a couple. Elements of intimacy accumulate, and what makes a couple a couple is the gradual recognition of this accumulated intimacy.Read more at location 5288