Redeployment

“We took my combat pay and did a lot of shopping. Which is how America fights back against the terrorists.” 

One of the challenges the veterans in the book face is that it is peacetime in America, while the American military is overseas at war. Civilians have a limited perspective on what is happening in Iraq, and engaging with returning veterans is a problem when the veterans can’t express what has happened to them, and civilians can’t find a way to help them. His wife’s shopping trip is her best attempt at helping the narrator reconnect to something like normal life.

“I didn’t see any tears of joy when we burst in, M4s at the ready. They were dead men. Then we doped them up, CASE-VAC’d them out, and they had to live again.”

After freeing two tortured men, the Marines tell themselves that they did a good thing. The narrator does not believe that they actually rescued the men, who had been ready to die. This is an echo of much of the Iraqis’ sentiments toward the American military men: They do not see them as liberators, but as a perpetuation and exacerbation of a problem that is already severe.

“You’re just an animal, doing what you’ve been trained to do.”

The Marines tell themselves that they are autonomous and that they act voluntarily. But the narrator of the story knows that he has been programmed and that he participated in the programming. He has been trained to do a task, and that training is the reason why he can do it in a relatively unfeeling, compartmentalized manner. Because he has no illusions about his own free will, he sees little difference between himself and an animal with no concept of volition.

“Every little bit hurts."

“He shrugged. ‘Only until you’re numb.” 

The narrator tries to express the pain he feels at knowing a boy’s family was there when he was shot and killed. His Staff Sergeant reinforces that the only way for things to stop hurting is to become numb to them, and the only way to become numb to them is to witness them repeatedly. One of the themes in Redeployment is the void that the Marines face when they lose the ability to be horrified.

“For a long time I was angry. I didn’t want to talk about Iraq, so I wouldn’t tell anybody I’d been. And if people knew, if they pressed, I’d tell them lies.”

The narrator of the story dealt with the remains of bodies in Mortuary Affairs, a grim job. When he comes home, he isn’t even sure what he is so angry about. He tells stories that are grotesquely embellished, even though his own experiences were lurid and gruesome. He suspects that the overblown lies protect him from truths that he can’t understand, which is evidenced by his story about the rocks in the Marine’s hands. 

“There were times, after dealing with the remains, when I’d grab a piece of my flesh and pull it back so I could see it stretch, and I’d think, This is me, this is all I am. But that’s not always so bad.”

The experience working with human remains is a constant reminder that the narrator, like the bodies, is just matter. He knows that he is not so different from the bodies he treats and that one day he will be dead. It is difficult for him to see himself as more important than he is.

“Give me a Nam with a V, give me the Medal of Honor, it doesn’t change that I’m still breathing.”

The narrator feels survivor’s guilt. His PFC died from an IED, and he did not. But the jargon he uses is foreign to civilian readers, and it is unclear exactly what he is rewarded for and what Nam with a V stands for. In this language, he can only commiserate with another military insider, which isolates him from any civilian who might understand him better if he could explain what had happened in layman’s terms.

“KIA means they gave everything. WIA means I didn’t.”

KIA stands for “killed in action.” WIA stands for “wounded in action.” The narrator redeploys, despite seeing the death of the PFC. He will deliberately put himself on the dangerous convoys again because he says that he has more to give. His wound does not serve as a warning to him, but as a deficit: He did not give as much as the PFC.

“If you want to succeed, don’t do big ambitious things. This is Iraq. Teach widows to raise bees.”

Bob, a man in Nathan’s unit, discourages the idealistic narrator from having unrealistic goals in Iraq. Nathan wants to turn the water back on at the water plant, which would be a boon to the community, but the bureaucracy will make the logistics unfeasible. Bob tells Nathan that their goal is to have successes so that they can prove they are doing real work, even if the work does not help the Iraqis. 

“The girl went to prison. For her, it was the best alternative.” 

Najdah, an assistant at the clinic a woman in Nathan’s unit helps create, tells Nathan about a 14-year old girl forced to work in a brothel because she had been raped and this had shamed her family. Najdah reports the brothel to the police so they will raid it and send the girl to prison, which is preferable to her status as a rape victim in Iraqi culture. Nathan is forced to admit that he is working within a system he does not understand.

“Doing anything in Iraq is hard.”

Throughout the book, new arrivals to Iraq are not encouraged to think optimistically but are actively discouraged from this. Nathan is told that everything will be difficult, no matter what it is, deflating his enthusiasm before he can even try anything. The war quickly erodes the ideals of well-intentioned people because they know they can expect little success.

“Look at women through the sights. Human, animal, human, animal.”

The narrator demonstrates how the dehumanization training of Marines can be applied. If he looks at a woman through the scope of a sniper rifle, she is no longer human, but an animal. He can restore her humanity by not looking at her through a weapon. But during his deployment, he will spend most of his time looking at Iraqis through the sights of his weapon. 

“I counted the money in my pocket. I had more than enough. If I let myself get into it again, it’d be almost as good as not being there.”

At the strip club, the narrator contemplates having sex with another prostitute. Women—or at least, their bodies—are typically presented in the book as comforts for men, but the men are rarely at ease with them when the interactions are not physical. Despite going to the strip club hoping for relief, the narrator views not being in the place where he can pay for sex as preferable to the act of sex itself.

“Geared up, Marines are terrifying warriors. In grief, they look like children.” 

At a funeral, the chaplain, the narrator of this story, witnesses the Marines crying over a fellow Marine who was killed. When they are not armed and armored, they look smaller, and they show that they have emotions they can’t hide. The chaplain’s later sermons on suffering reinforce the idea that one of their duties to each other is to ensure that they do not ever feel that they have to suffer alone, much as parents do for their children. 

“Sorry isn’t a feeling, you understand. It’s an action. A determination to make things right.”

The chaplain and other characters encounter this sentiment throughout the book. Nothing works the way that they think it should when they arrive and try to do their jobs. The effort—and the large lack of measurable results—make optimism a challenge. It also makes those who risk their lives in Iraq, as well as the suffering of the civilians, seem pointless when there are so few successes to point to. 

“Since thirteen months in Iraq left me well acquainted with war, I figured I’d go learn about punishment.”

Even though he tells his classmate Zara that he has done nothing wrong and is not sorry, the narrator implies more than once that he thinks he deserves to atone for his actions. It is unclear whether he believes that the war itself is unjust—he claims to continue to support it, although he is unconvincing—or whether he is referring to his actions as a propagandist.

“A better slogan would be ‘You can’t afford college without us.”

When Zara questions him about misguided ideals, the narrator shows her that there are people who enlist for practical reasons or because they are susceptible to recruiters. When their motivations for enlisting are not driven by ideology, it is harder for her to hold soldiers’ actions against them. The narrator is not convinced that everyone who enlists even knows exactly what his or her reasons are. 

“Language is a technology.” 

When the narrator tries to explain to Zara why he joined the military, he says that he was partially inspired by the Army’s propaganda, which promises glory, camaraderie, and honor. But he was more inspired by the thought that they would pay for his college degree, and he knows that he is not the only one who enlists with that in mind. He is aware of the irony that the Army helps pay for his classes at Amherst, where he is constantly defending America’s presence in Iraq. 

“Now, knowing I got no chance, it’s relaxing. I don’t have to bother.” 

Because of severe burns that have left him scarred, Jenks feels no pressure when talking to women or when choosing not to approach them. He has been freed of his own expectations and the expectations of how a man should act in a bar. He is free in a way that other characters, including the narrator, are not. The narrator sees two women walk into the bar and immediately strategizes about approaching them, as if he is a program that has been executed. This is an echo of his discussion about the programming that takes place during basic training. 

“I don’t trust my memories. I trust the vehicle, burnt and twisted and torn. Like Jenks. No stories. Things. Bodies. People lie. Memories lie.”

Despite the intensity of their experiences, the narrator is one of several characters who professes to mistrust his memories. He believes what he can see. This causes him to feel pessimistic when he is with Jenks, because Jenks is visible proof of the toll that the war took on a friend of his. He is reminded that he was part of something with terrible consequences.

“A human being in enough pain is just a screaming animal. You can’t get there with pleasure. You can try, but you can’t.”

The narrator recalls seeing injured Iraqis in great pain after suicide bombs exploded near them. He sometimes envies the fact that they had no room to think about anything or to worry. They were nothing but the pain. He tries to disappear into sex in a similar way, but it isn’t possible. Sex does not reduce someone to the animalistic oblivion of agony. 

“I don’t feel like I killed anybody,’ says a man named Jewett. ‘I think I’d know if I killed somebody.” 

Jewett cannot accept that he may have killed someone because he thinks he would feel something specific if he had. He is disappointed by the lack of reaction he is having. The importance of killing—and of being a warrior—has been built up so heavily in the narrator’s unit that the experience of taking a life has actually proven to be anticlimactic. 

“Somewhere, there’s a corpse lying out, bleaching in the sun. Before it was a corpse, it was a man who lived and breathed and maybe murdered and maybe tortured, the kind of man I’d always wanted to kill. Whatever the case, a man definitely dead.”

As he studies the guns that were used that morning in the shelling, the narrator can’t quite convince himself that they were involved in a killing. He imagines the body that must surely be out there. He wants to take responsibility for it, but the shells landed six miles away. He has to take his sergeant’s word for it that their target was destroyed.