Description
From the National Book Awardwinning author of Redeployment and Missionaries an astonishing fever graph of the effects of twenty years of war in a brutally divided America
When Phil Klay left the Marines a decade ago after serving as an officer in Iraq he found himself a part of the community of veterans who have no choice but to grapple with the meaning of their wartime experiencesfor themselves and for the country American identity has always been bound up in warfrom the revolutionary war of our founding to the civil war that ended slavery to the two world wars that launched America as a superpower What did the current wars say about who we are as a country and how should we respond as citizens
Unlike in previous eras of war relatively few Americans have had to do any real grappling with the endless invisible conflicts of the post9/11 world in fact increasingly few people are even aware they are still going on It is as if these wars are a dark star with a strong gravitational force that draws a relatively small number of soldiers and their families into its orbit while remaining inconspicuous to most other Americans In the meantime the consequences of American military action abroad may be out of sight and out of mind but they are very real indeed
This chasm between the military and the civilian in American life and the moral blind spot it has created is one of the great themes of Uncertain Ground Phil Klays powerful series of reckonings with some of our countrys thorniest concerns written in essay form over the past ten years In the name of what do we ask young Americans to kill and to die In the name of what does this country hang together As we see at every turn in these pages those two questions have a great deal to do with each another and how we answer them will go a long way toward deciding where our troubled country goes from here
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