Analysis Of Redeploy By Phil Klay

United States Marine veteran, Phil Klay, recounts the experiences that he and his comrades/soldiers encountered during the Iraq War. “Redeployment” consists of twelve stories that illustrate the soldier’s battles on and off the battlefields that they are placed in. The story begins with Klay’s blunt claims about the things he had done as a soldier and the things he enjoyed as a person, back at home. Klay introduces us to the transition time for soldiers between fighting and the end of deployment, where soldiers are put on a logistics base to “decompress.” He articulates the enigma surrounding the term, and asserts that soldiers are hardly aware what that even means, but he makes a point in saying that it wasn't “a straight shot” back to their normal lives.

Ultimately, he argues that because of the compelling demands that come with being a soldier, it wouldn’t be healthy for soldiers to be thrown back into life, to act “normal.” The story then transitions into anecdotes about war occurrences such as killing dogs, killing people, and killing children.

He then shifts to rationalizing the difference between a person’s thought process, and then the ordinal, yet spacial, thought process that soldiers are trained to possess. Moreover, he explains the different construed mechanisms that soldiers manifested over time in order to cope with this new mental, physical, and emotional modification. Throughout the story, Klay explicates his experience back at home and essentially, the acute ordeals he encountered in this “normal” way of living life that resulted in the detachment of emotional security from his weapon, unsettling new social demands, and emotional/mental

readjustment.
American writer, Phil Klay, depicts the soldier’s overwhelming struggle of putting the needs of the country first that entitles the soldier to dehumanize in order to serve. This is to say that basically, in order for soldiers to be good at what they do and perform at par, they mustn’t allow their humanely wired emotions or predispositions to factor into the decisions they make at battle. Klay supports this when he color-codes the different modes of living for soldiers once they are back, and his was orange:
“Here’s what orange is. You don’t see or hear like you used to. Your brain chemistry changes. You take in every piece of the environment, everything. I could spot a dime in the street twenty yards away. I had antennae out that stretched down the block. It’s hard to even remember exactly what that felt like. I think you take in too much information to store so you just forget, free up brain space to take in everything about the next moment that might keep you alive. And then you forget that moment, too, and focus on the next. And the next. And the next. For seven months.” (pg.10)
Essentially, what Klay illustrates is the radical interchange between being a soldier and being a person, two phenomena that do not collide or coincide. He articulates that your actual brain chemistry changes, your mind begins to deem certain things more important than others, it all becomes very animalistic, basically a fight or flight series. In doing so, soldiers have no brain space to rationalize their feelings or process their emotions, which he explains is something you do later, when you are given time, and your thoughts bombard you altogether. It is because Klay lives at orange that he was able to kill the very own dog he loved, because the soldier is able to strip the emotion away from actions that need to get done, hence, dehumanizing the soldier.