The book consists of twelve stories that chronicle the experiences of soldiers and veterans who served during the Iraq War, specifically Operation Iraqi Freedom (2003 – 2010). Klay served in the United States Marine Corps from 2005 to 2009.[1] He was deployed to the Anbar Province in 2007–8.[2]
Klay has said that before and during his service in Iraq he did not have a "clear sense" that he was going to write about war, but that when he shared his plan to enter the military upon graduation, his Dartmouth College teacher and mentor, the American poet Tom Sleigh:[3]
"...made sure that before I went I'd read Tolstoy, Hemingway, Isaac Babel and David Jones. He thought it important to study what the greatest minds had to say about war."
Klay spent four years writing Redeployment.[4] The book's title story first appeared in the literary magazine Granta. It was reprinted in Fire and Forget: Short Stories from the Long War, an anthology of war fiction. Klay has stated that the process of writing the stories that became Redeployment involved years of meticulous research.[5]
Klay has described his own deployment in Iraq as "a mild experience"[6] where he did not see the war itself but only the effects of war second hand. To depict the war, he created a dozen characters, each with a different set of experiences and perspectives. Avoiding cliches and creating "prototypes", he has said, "was something I took very seriously. I did a lot a research, I talked to a lot of Marines, and spent a lot of time thinking about the subjects. Doing the kind of imaginative work, drafting stories over and over again until I had something that felt emotionally honest, which is also not the same as something that's going to please everyone who’s been through that experience."[7] He said he needed multiples voices because:[8]
...each person has such a small piece of the war, and that piece will be powerfully shaped not only by when they were there and where in Iraq they were, but also by what job they did. So rather than writing a unified novel about the experience of war, I wanted twelve different voices—voices that would approach similar themes but from very different perspectives. I don't think all my narrators would get along with each other. I don't think they'd agree with each other about what the war meant. And part of my intent was that that would open a space for the reader to come in and critically engage with the sorts of claims the narrators are making.... Also, it's just fascinating to me to step into very different heads. What was the war like for a mortuary affairs specialist? For a chaplain? For an artilleryman, who never sees the bodies of the enemy he has killed?
He said he had some models in mind of what he did not want to do: "There have been a couple books in the last couple years with almost comical misrepresentations of the military by authors who wanted to talk about Iraq, but clearly didn't want to do the hard work of learning enough about the subject to have something worth saying."[8] Klay included in Redeployment a list of works he read and found valuable in helping to shape his writing. He explained that:[8]
...before writing about a foreign service officer I read a memoir by one who'd served in Iraq, a fairly wonky book about career diplomacy, a lot of Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction reports, and so on. I also read a Czech World War I novel that seemed appropriate to gear me up, in terms of tone, and I talked to Civil Affairs soldiers and Foreign Service Officers, and I read a lot of journalism. Not everything I read was about war. Bernanos's Diary of a Country Priest and Edward P. Jones's The Known World and Nathan Englander's short stories, for example, were all very helpful at different points for different stories.
