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War is, by far, an incredibly fascinating subject worthy of study. War is compelling, devastating, destructive, restorative, exhausting, enthralling, morally complex, and something that often raises a number of questions. War frequently leaves participants, bystanders, and environments forever changed. Writer Tim O'Brien thoroughly describes war in a complicated manner: "War is hell [...] war is also mystery and terror and adventure and courage and discovery and holiness and pity and despair and longing and love. War is nasty; war is fun. War is thrilling; war is drudgery. War makes you man; war makes you dead" (O'Brien 80). There are aspects of war which are timeless (aggressive conflict between two or more ethnic or religious groups, countries, etc.), and other ever-changing aspects, such as military strategies and battlefield technologies. Even more fascinating is the idea of how exactly war is documented and processed over time-whether it be via veteran's journals, poetry, memoirs, newspapers and other media, documentaries, blogs, Hollywood blockbusters, or most recently, several fictional texts that grapple with the contemporary conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. From about 2011 onward, there has been a surge of novels and short stories that delve into American perspectives of these conflicts. Of particular interest is Phil Klay's Redeployment, a compilation of short stories that bears considerable resemblance to (and some departures from) a collection published twenty-four years prior: Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried.
Many debates about Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried.' (1990) attempt to designate the book as part of a particular genre, and such debates often become circuitous and fail to reach a consensus about the book. When it comes to contemporary war fiction, genre debates about books such as Phil Klay's Redeployment (2014) are virtually absent-but this makes sense, given the book seldom blurs lines between fact and fiction. Contrary to Redeployment, O'Brien's Things features a narrator ironically named "Tim O'Brien" (36), and debates regarding how much of Things is fact and how much is fiction seem appropriate, given the deliberate blurring that occurs throughout the book. Redeployment, however, does not feature a narrator named "Phil Klay." Rather, Klay's short story compilation features twelve different narrators of various ranks within the U.S. military, providing a micro-panoramic glimpse into the conflict in Iraq.
Genre is still...