Twice in my life I have seriously considered joining the military. The first time I spoke with a Navy recruiter, my strong fear of drowning and lack of confidence in my swimming abilities kept me from signing up (clever as I generally think myself, until I saw that recruitment video, I'd never linked serving in the Navy to swimming skills). The second time, the likelihood of being sent somewhere far from my children and spouse put the idea on the back burner, which is likely where it will remain. 
 I grew up a Navy dependent---living in military housing, buying groceries at the commissary, calling ahead to the gate if civilian friends were coming to visit so they could get on base---so I knew what the military was like from that side of things. It was a family, or something similar, and I felt special to be part of it. I think that specialness and belonging is much of what I was looking for each of the times I made a move in the direction of joining the military myself. 
 So for me, one of the most interesting aspects of reading Phil Klay's Redeployment was reading about people's reasons for joining the military. Mostly they didn't really know why they'd joined or at least didn't have any strong reason to point at, and when they got there, it was different than they'd expected. I expect I would have a similar experience. 
 Klay's characters feel a mix of specialness and cog-in-the-wheel-ness in the military, and then something bordering invisibility when they return to civilian life and find themselves surrounded by people who view life in a completely different context. His characters struggle to make sense of and make peace with these differences. Pretty much all of the stories involve characters who are seeing war and civilian life from different perspectives, and this is the main strength of the collection. 
 As with any collection of short stories, some stories are stronger than others. There were a couple stories in the middle that seemed to stop abruptly rather than end, and I wasn't always keen on reading about strip clubs and picking up women in bars. Aside from being distasteful, these things just seem cliched. And trying to read the story "Bodies" while eating breakfast was just a bad idea, but that's not Phil Klay's fault. The last two stories---"Unless it's a Sucking Chest Wound" and "Ten Kliks South"---were my favorite. They were both especially strong in structure and in emotional content. It will be interesting to see which stories and images from this collection stick with me.