47 pages • 1 hour read
Phil KlayRedeployment
Fiction | Short Story Collection | Adult | Published in 2014A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Summary
Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Story 1: “Redeployment”
Story 2: “Frago”
Story 3: “After Action Report”
Story 4: “Bodies”
Story 5: “OIF”
Story 6: “Money As a Weapons System”
Story 7: “In Vietnam They Had Whores”
Story 8: “Prayer in the Furnace”
Story 9: “Psychological Operations”
Story 10: “War Stories”
Story 11: “Unless It’s a Sucking Chest Wound”
Story 12: “Ten Kliks South”
Character Analysis
Themes
Symbols & Motifs
Important Quotes
Essay Topics
Tools
BetaCharacter Analysis
The Chaplain
In “Prayer in the Furnace,” the chaplain visits with a Marine named Rodriguez. Rodriguez is jittery and angry, giving the chaplain a vibe that he doesn’t want to be around. Rodriguez hints that he is responsible for something that resulted in a Marine’s death. One of the men in Rodriguez’s unit, Fujita, has just died, and the chaplain wonders if Rodriguez might be referring to him. At first, he is unsure whether to treat their conversation as if it were a confession from a parishioner to a priest or a military subordinate to a superior—he outranks Rodriguez. As he learns more through subsequent conversations with Rodriguez, he becomes increasingly disturbed. He is convinced that an investigation is warranted, but when he approaches his superiors, he is rebuffed harshly each time. The Marines are not interested in investigating anything to do with their unit, Charlie Company, which has produced more kills than any other squad.
The chaplain eventually writes to one of his mentors from the seminary, hoping for advice. His mentor replies that the only thing he can do is to make sure that the Marines know that they do not suffer alone and also that their suffering is inevitable. As the story ends, Rodriguez tells the chaplain that nothing matters, and there is persuasive evidence in the story that the chaplain might have started to believe that there is no meaning to the war and possibly to life. It is unclear whether his faith has been damaged irreparably, but he is not as strong in his beliefs as he is when the story begins.
Jenks
In “War Stories,” Jenks is not the narrator but an injured friend of the narrator. Jenks was in a vehicle that was hit by an IED. As a result, he suffered severe burns to his face and the loss of his ears. The running joke in the story is that he has become too ugly for anyone except other deformed people to have sex with. Jenks is the book’s most fully realized expression of a character living with catastrophic physical consequences of the war. He also—at least, as presented—has a better attitude than most characters in the book. After his injury, he realizes that his memories are deteriorating, so he writes a twenty-page document of everything he remembers, because he does not want his evolving memory to eventually betray the facts. He feels that his injuries are for nothing until he gets the opportunity to speak with a woman who is collaborating on an anti-war play about Iraq. But when he tries to read to her from his document, she interrupts constantly, trying to steer the conversation back to details that Jenks considers less important and less real. He has received the opportunity to tell his true war story, only to find that it is not the story that the writer wishes to hear. He is disillusioned and says that he wants to stop telling war stories altogether. At the end, he is left only with his injured body and is now unsure of his own story.
The Propagandist
In “Psychological Operations,” the narrator is frequently mistaken for a Muslim because of his dark skin and Arab appearance. He is an Egyptian Coptic Christian, however. After the 9/11 attacks, he and his family are targeted by their communities. The narrator enlists in the Army in order to make his pro-American father proud, but even in basic training, he is hazed and harassed by other soldiers. In the Army, he creates propaganda in Psychological Operations. He becomes adept at broadcasting public insults that will bait Iraqi fighters into challenging the Marine platoons who then kill them with ease.
He tells this to Zara, a fellow student at Amherst College and the only other nonwhite student in his class. Zara is a recent convert to Islam and is opposed to the American military in Iraq. She lodges a complaint with the Office of Diversity and Inclusion when the narrator makes an offhand joke about being allowed to kill Muslims. After the mediation with a campus official, Zara and the narrator talk while smoking a hookah. He tells her that when he told his father about the propaganda that he broadcast, he ended up screaming the insults in his father’s face without knowing why. His father kicked him out of the house. To his surprise, Zara says that maybe they can talk again another time. He does not understand why he wants to shock her, but he is surprised when she does not react to his story with horror. As the story ends, the title of Psychological Operations applies to the conversation he had with Zara, as well as the other incidents in the story.
