Phil Klay: Finding Meaning in a Time of Ambiguity

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One does not just read Phil Klay; one experiences his writing deeply. Be it fiction or nonfiction, Klay’s writing evokes a visceral response. He writes about what it is like to be in a war zone and how that experience shapes everything that happens next.?

A Marine who served in Iraq, Klay is a writer who is equally at home in both fiction and nonfiction. His first book of short stories,?Redeployment ?won the National Book Award in 2014. President Barack Obama cited his debut novel,?Missionaries , as one of his favorites of 2020, the year it was published.

Seeking to explain

Klay’s newest work is?Uneven Ground: Citizenship in an Era of Endless, Invisible War . The essays contained within trace his thoughts and feelings about what the war and its after-effects were having on the nation he had served. His work is very relevant to anyone in management because his insights into what it takes to lead in a time of uncertainty and ambiguity ring true.

In a review for the?New York Times , James Fallows, an author and long-time commentator on national defense issues, writes that “the book is engrossing and important, and I hope readers will start with the longest parts first.” It is in the long parts, as in Klay’s fiction, that we feel the power of his story and the truths he tells.

Connectedness in a time of conflict

In an interview ?Klay told me, “Joining the military breaks you out of your bubble… You meet every kind of person in the military, which is one of the great things about it. And you're all bound together by and stamped with a common identity and common purpose. You have a sort of common, intense experiences because you all go through the same sort of training and are gearing up to the same conflicts.”

Coming home can be challenging.??“When sometimes the veterans have difficult experiences suggesting to the civilian world, the assumption is that it's because of negative things that they experience in the military.’ As true as that may be, Klay says, “It's also important to note that there's a lot of positive things about life in the military,” such as the sense of bonding, trust, and “a sense of broader purpose and mission.” Klay admits, “Of course, war makes you feel as though what you're doing is extremely important because the stakes are life and death. That can be in some ways intoxicating.”

Klay offers advice for loved ones of combat veterans who have experienced some kind of trauma. “Ask him first to [talk about] the good things in his deployment. The people he loved and why he went in.” It is important, says Klay, to get the context, the totality of the experience beyond the bad experiences. “Whereas it's the connections between people and the love between people and the, the richness of life that is destroyed in war. You need to understand that richness of life first for any of the bad things to have any kind of meaning.”

Diplomacy in conflict

War, as Klay explains, can teach diplomacy. This lesson was imparted to him when he witnessed the reaction of Special Forces Major Ian Fishback to the loss of two soldiers. It would have been acceptable for him to retaliate with more force, but Fishback opted for another course. “What he knew was that this was an extremely fragile situation that could have easily exploded into widespread violence. And so he went with the political solution, not knowing how it would turn out, whether it would be a good thing in the end.”?

Klay adds,?“We often substitute an easy problem, which is, can I kill this guy with a hard problem, which is, can I operate in this region in a way that will, in the long-term lead to a more stable settlement that is in everybody's interest.”

Sadly, such diplomacy is not serving those Afghans who worked with Americans and are still in Afghanistan. “The wars of the sort that we have waged where a lot was asked of a very small number of people, we haven't even lived up to the promises that we made to those who helped us.” Such a policy reveals “an unwillingness to deal with the sort of after-effects of that [war] in a serious way.”

Personal stories

The stories that Klay tells resonate with humanity, none more powerfully than the story of Chaplain Patrick McLaughlin. In addition to offering support for Marines, the chaplain made a point of comforting the children, particularly those wounded fatally. “Chaps”??,-McLaughlin would rock them in his arms as they died. He had a rocking chair for every victim and when he left the base to return to the States, he burned them all in a bonfire. Klay?writes ?that Chaps “watched as the embers rose heavenward to, as he put it, ‘the children that once occupied them in my arms.’”

It is those after affects—most only soldiers and veterans – that Klay explores in his writing. And in doing so he casts a light on the effect of the war on his generation and the nation it served. Klay’s voice has urgency that compels us to listen and by listening to the issues facing, not simply those with direct experience of war, but also their families as well as the psyche of the nation that sent them there.

First posted on Forbes.com 08.28.2022

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