War is Hell, and coming home not much better 
 The title piece in this collection by an Iraq War veteran is simply terrific. "We shot dogs. Not by accident. We did it on purpose, and we called it Operation Scooby." Dogs were shot because they were lapping up the blood of the dead. After his tour, the narrator comes home to Camp Lejeune, his waiting wife, and his old Labrador dog, who is suffering from cancer. The story is less about what happened in Iraq than the difficulties of settling back home. If every story in the volume were as good as this one, it would be a stunning collection. And indeed all are strong, all carry the stamp of authenticity, but not all have quite the humanity or the focus of this opener. 
 That authenticity. Klay served from 2007 to 2008 with the US Marines. He was not an infantryman, but a Public Affairs Officer. All the same, he must have gone through the Marine training, imbibed the Marine ethos, and listened attentively to the other men. His ear for Marine talk is remarkable--laden with profanity, and studded with acronyms incomprehensible to an outsider. Indeed one of the shorter stories, "OIF" (don't ask me), is constructed almost entirely of abbreviations: 
 SEO handled the bombs. SSTP treated the wounds. PRP processed the bodies. The 08s fired DPICM. The MAW provided CAS. The 03s patrolled the MSRs. Me and PFC handled the money. 
 And so on, up to the ending: 
 Instead I will remember that our HMMWV has 5 PAX. That the SITREP was 2 KIA, 3 WIA. That KIA means they gave everything. That WIA means I didn't. 
 That last line, though, reflects a personal failure, a human touch that reminds one that, even in a technical tour-de-force such as this one, all Klay's stories are about the effect of war on the people who had to fight it. The second story for instance, "Frago," opens with an intense description of a fire-fight as Marines clear an Al Quaeda house. But the point is as much what happens later, to the private who got his first kill. In the next story, "After Action Report," the narrator agrees to take responsibility for the shooting of a teenager, out of consideration for the buddy who actually did it; but he suffers as much in the aftermath as if he actually had fired the shots. 
 At first, I felt that this collection was every bit as strong as 
 The Yellow Birds 
 by Kevin Powers, a short novel that has many of the same qualities. But as I read on, I began to feel a certain sameness. Inevitably, I started to make a more difficult comparison, to Tim O'Brien's Vietnam collection, The Things They Carried, which is similarly divided between intense action and long, bewildering aftermath, but which is distinguished by an extraordinary variety in the individual pieces, both in viewpoint and technique. I was struck, therefore, when Klay took a different tack with his own stories, as in "Money as a Weapons System," from the point of view of a civilian aid administrator, and especially "Prayer in the Furnace," which raises deep moral and theological questions through the eyes of a Marine Chaplain. But both these stories needed stronger editing to reduce their sprawl. Even so, the handful of stories in this collection which have the sharp focus and personal involvement of the opening piece show that Klay promises to be a writer to watch.