Marine veteran Phil Klay wins National Book Award
By Derrick Perkins, Staff writer 2:08 p.m. EST November 20, 2014
Veteran Marine Capt. Phil Klay's fictional account of the Iraq War earned one of literature's most esteemed awards Wednesday night.
"Redeployment," a collection of short stories about the conflict told from the point of view of a variety of narrators, won the 2014 National Book Award for fiction. Though Klay served as a public affairs officer during his 13-month deployment in Anbar province, his protagonists include a chaplain, Marine squad leader and a mortuary affairs Marine.
As his collection hit the shelves in book stores across the country in March, Klay told Marine Corps Times he was disheartened by the apathy shown towards today's troops returning from the war zone. He said he hoped his stories helped civilians connect with the military.
"The average Marine is a Marine put into an incredibly complex environment where he's forced to make moral choices and live with the choices that he makes," Klay said. "I wanted people to engage with that and take the modern military seriously."
He reiterated that point during his acceptance speech at Wednesday night's award ceremony in New York City, thanking anyone who read his book for joining "the conversation."
"War is too strange to be processed alone," Klay said.
Klay left the Marine Corps in 2009. While in Iraq from January 2007 to February 2008, he worked alongside "a truly exceptional group of Marines" and met journalists, civilians and local police officers. Klay described writing the collection as a way of processing his wartime experiences after returning home.
"What do you do when you're struggling to find the words to explain to the father of a fallen Marine exactly what that Marine meant to you? What do you do when one of your best Marines calls you to tell you that he's been drinking too much, that he feels isolated at college, surrounded by 18-year-olds he can't make sense of and who can't make sense of him?'" he asked. "...I don't actually have the answers to those questions, but the book was the only way I knew how to start really thinking them through."
Klay, a graduate of Dartmouth College and Hunter College, previously was named a National Book Foundation 5 under 35 Honoree. Winning the top prize in the organization's fiction category earned him $10,000 and a bronze statue.
"Redeployment" is Klay's first book.
http://www.militarytimes.com/story/military/2014/11/20/marine-national-book-award/19321139/
