Redeployment
Phil Klay. New York: The Penguin Press, 2014. 291 pp. $26.95.
Reviewed by Lieutenant Commander Christopher Nelson, U.S. Navy
Over the past 12 years there have been a small but notable number of novels published on the Iraq War. Kevin Powers’ The Yellow Birds and Ben Fountain’s Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk—both National Book Award finalists—come to mind. We can now add former Marine and public-affairs officer Phil Klay’s magnificent novel Redeployment to that list.
Redeployment is a collection of a dozen short stories about the Iraq War and the psychological effects it leaves on those who have seen its face. The voices on the page are mostly Marines—officer and enlisted—and the stories are told in a powerful first-person prose.
From the opening page and the first few sentences of the book’s self-titled short story, a young Marine returning from war draws you in: “We shot dogs. Not by accident. We did it on purpose and called it Operation Scooby.” As he makes his way home from Iraq, along the way he tries to decompress, moving from what was once “normal” in a war zone to figuring out what “normal” is when he returns. His memory is a scattered mess, recalling scenes in spurts—“You don’t think, Oh, I did A, then B, then C, then D.”
Klay also shows incredible skill, drawing on his experiences to inhabit other characters who are not Marines. In the biting satirical story “Money As A Weapons System,” (a prod at General David Petreaus’ COIN maxim), a Foreign Service Officer is trying to restore power to parts of an Iraqi city. Meanwhile, he is given a box of baseball uniforms and is told that he has to teach some Iraqi children how to play the game. Later he finds out that a representative’s wealthy constituent believes “baseball diplomacy” would be effective.
In the excellent story “Prayer In The Furnace,” a military chaplain struggles to minister to his Marines—“How do you spiritually minister to men who are still being assaulted?”—while trying to reconcile his concerns about the mistreatment of Iraqi civilians by some of the men in his unit.
In “Unless It’s A Sucking Chest Wound,” a Marine adjutant officer takes immense pride in writing up a Marine killed in combat for the Medal of Honor. He later gets out and goes to law school, only to find out that the war never left him.
Even the shortest story, “OIF,” at four pages, is a reminder that military men and women can say so much without really saying anything at all. An enlisted Marine covers his deployment in bursts of acronym-laced prose, weaving in full words along the way—“EOD handled the bombs. SSTP treated the wounds. PRP processed the bodies.”
What is probably most impressive about the book is Klay’s ability to maintain an authentic voice throughout. From enlisted Marine to officer, from military chaplain to government officials, while sometimes profane and other times reflective or poignant, they all sound true.
Previous Iraq or Afghanistan war novels have often viewed the war from one lens—the Army solider returning from deployment or the soldier stuck on a forward operating base. The Iraq and Afghanistan wars, however, are composed of hundreds if not thousands of perspectives—grunts, medics, aviators, chaplains, commanders, civilians, and others. With these dozen short stories, Klay reminds us that the wars are seen through thousands of different eyes, and each has a unique story. Yet the moral and psychological scars remain, connecting tissue for so many.
Redeployment is an excellent collection. Klay’s toughest audience will be the men and women he served with: Marines and military members past and present. After reading this book, I doubt that any of them will say that he failed. The sum of its parts outweighs any of its weaknesses. Redeployment deserves many readings and a place next to the best books on the Iraq and Afghanistan wars that fill the shelves today.
Neptune: The Allied Invasion of Europe and the D-Day Landings
Craig L. Symonds. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014, 302 pp. $29.95.
Reviewed by Christopher Yung
When historians write, they are judged on three things: Is the history accurate? Does the work contribute to the field? And is the work readable? It was therefore surprising that Craig Symonds immediately leapt into the middle of the biggest argument among military historians related to the cross-channel attack with little new evidence to support one side or the other. To summarize this debate, military historians have followed one of three lines of the D-day historical narrative: First, that the British were clever and astute military and political thinkers and outfoxed American strategists leading to an indirect strategy but ultimately ending up with a cross-channel invasion, as espoused by Chester Wilmot. Second, as Alex Danchev claims, that the British were unalterably opposed to the invasion, deathly afraid of the cost in blood of a direct assault and did everything in their power to delay. The Americans, on the other hand, were always for a direct assault, and consistently pressed the British for the cross-channel invasion, which they got in 1944. Finally, that Operation Overlord was a compromise between American strategy (a direct attack) and British strategy (a series of indirect attacks seeking to weaken Nazi Germany but ultimately leading to a cross-channel invasion as a death blow) as Maurice Matloff writes.
Symonds’ account places him firmly in the second camp. His description of the interaction between the American Joint Chiefs and the British Chiefs of Staff and the interactions between Prime Minister Winston Churchill and President Franklin D. Roosevelt are largely based on the diary entries and memoirs of the principals—well-trod historical ground, but questionable in terms of firmly establishing British motives. In siding with a narrative that suggests the British were opposed to the invasion, Symonds ignores a large body of evidence to the contrary. Why did the British create an organization—the Combined Operations Command—entirely meant to execute a cross-channel attack? Why would the British specifically assign flag officers—the Combined Commanders—to take charge of the mission of planning and acquiring the material resources to return to the continent? Why would the British, over the course of the war, experiment with all kinds of odd contraptions, such as the Mulberry Harbors, Flail Tanks, Phoenixes, and PLUTO, whose singular purpose was to ensure a successful continental invasion? Why would the British launch a series of amphibious raids—some of which, like Dieppe, were extremely costly in lives—on the continent in order to test amphibious doctrine? And most important, why would the British Joint Planning Staff have created the first plan—Round Up—for a cross-channel invasion even prior to the American entry into the war?
At the same time, though, Neptune is unquestionably a work that makes major contributions to the field. Symonds’ book unearths unknown historical gems. For instance, through the extensive use of primary sources he sheds greater light on the demise of Rear Admiral Don P. Moon, commander Force Utah. Additionally, he is particularly good at drawing links between lesser-known facts about the war and their impact on the invasion, for example that the American G.I.’s daily allotment of meat (12 oz.) was far greater than the daily allotment for his British counterpart (8 oz.) and the effect of this on logistical planning.
Neptune is also a finely written piece of history. Symonds is especially gifted at transporting the reader to another time. The description of the American G.I.’s culture clash with the English is exceptional. But Symonds’ knack for “word-play” truly shines in his descriptions of the action leading up to and including D-day itself. The reader can almost feel how wet and nauseous the soldiers and sailors must have felt as they weathered the 4 June storm on landing craft and LSTs, and the reader is exposed to all of the horrors combat units experienced that 6 June day as they suffered withering fire from Normandy’s defenders.
Craig Symonds’ Neptune is a significant historical work that should be picked up by serious students of World War II. It is very readable and hard to put down. Although Symonds’ work is firmly on the side of those historians who argue that the British were against a cross-channel attack and had to be dragged across the English Channel, readers should examine this and other related works to make up their own minds.
The Dragon Extends its Reach: Chinese Military Power Goes Global
Larry M. Wortzel. Potomac Books, 2013. 224 pp. Biblio. Index. Notes. $29.95.
Reviewed by Captain Dale C. Rielage
Despite its provocative subtitle, The Dragon Extends its Reach is not an alarmist tome that suggests China is about to challenge the United States for global dominance. Rather, Larry Wortzel, one of the nation’s most experienced and respected China military watchers, has produced a sober and carefully researched view of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) drawn largely from its own writings. In doing so, he offers a picture of a military working both to dominate its neighboring region and to protect its nation’s increasing overseas interests. It is growing into these missions while simultaneously facing significant challenges in modernizing its own organization and incorporating new technology into the force.
Chinese publications universally emphasize the PLA’s defensive orientation. Wortzel does an excellent job of explaining that key Chinese defensive doctrines have heavily offensive components with significant implications for U.S. understanding. In these doctrines, China thinks of itself as being always on the strategic defense, protecting its rightful interests in a non-aggressive manner. The Chinese assess, however, that successful defense requires a capacity for sudden and violent offensive action, often before the aggressor has the opportunity to strike. This doctrine of “active defense” bears a strong resemblance to what Western strategists would call preemption. The PLA has developed a suite of offensive capabilities that seek to push its defense as far as possible from the Chinese mainland, striking intervening forces before they arrive in the western Pacific. These weapon systems are supported by growing PLA intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance capabilities, creating a system similar to the integrated Soviet Reconnaissance Strike Complex aimed at protecting Russian territory from U.S. forces during the Cold War.
While focused on defending the mainland, China’s expanding global ties have pushed the PLA’s requirements beyond the Pacific. Under the rubric of “New Historic Missions,” the PLA is now tasked with protecting Chinese interests, lives, and property across the globe. This new requirement demands an extended reach that the PLA increasingly reflects in its doctrine, structure, and equipment. Wortzel concludes that this requirement does not mean that the PLA Navy wants to emulate the global posture of the U.S. Navy, but that it nonetheless “seeks the capacity to act globally . . . on a more limited scale.”
The PLA is acutely aware that success in both regional defense and global force- projection missions requires developing new warfare areas and technologies. Wortzel explains the Chinese synthesis of cyber- and electronic-warfare concepts into the idea of Integrated Network Electronic Warfare and places the concept firmly in the center of PLA modernization efforts. In areas such as space policy, where Chinese thinking remains a work in progress, he captures the ongoing debate within the PLA and its implications.
While other authors have attempted to deal with PLA modernization in recent works, Wortzel extends to his Chinese counterparts a genuine professional respect that western commentators often lack. Before arriving in China as a military attaché in the late 1980s, Wortzel had been briefed that the PLA lacked the capability “to be anything more than a nuisance.” This contempt, coming less than a generation removed from China’s effective intervention against the United States in Korea and Vietnam, struck him as misplaced. Personal experience taught him that, however dated their equipment, Chinese “soldiers were tough and their leaders quite capable.” With constraints on military contacts since the Tiananmen Massacre in 1989, Wortzel’s deep personal experience with the PLA has become less and less common in U.S. circles. The pervasive contempt for Chinese competence he identifies, unfortunately, has not.
The book’s focus on mission and doctrine highlights one of the key challenges in thinking about the Chinese military: distinguishing future plans from current reality. Wortzel works hard to parse Chinese accounts of their own training and exercises for insight. The increasing tempo of PLA Navy operations outside the First Island Chain suggests that improvement is real and widespread. However, a work based on Chinese internal discussions inherently presents more of China’s military aspirations than its challenges.
Filled with dense and sometimes unfamiliar Chinese concepts and terminology, The Dragon Extends its Reach is not an easy read. It is, however, an effective introduction to how the Chinese military sees itself and its assigned missions. Any naval professional interested in a deeper view of this rapidly evolving force will find the effort rewarding.