Innocence, Provocation, and Moral Injury: The Problem of Discrimination in Phil Klay’s Redeployment

Abstract

Although riddled with the improvised explosive devices (IEDs) and firefights that have characterized the United States’ 21st-century wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the stories of Phil Klay’s National Book Award-winning collection, Redeployment (2014) feature only one central character who suffers from war’s devastating physical wounds. In “War Stories,” Jenks, a former Marine Corps engineer, shares his memories of the IED blast that left him with lasting pain and destroyed his looks. Despite fifty-four surgeries, when he smiles, “[t] he left side of his face is twisted up, the wrinkled skin over the cheeks bunched and his thin-lipped slit of a mouth straining toward where his ear should be. The right side stays still, but that’s standard for him, given the nerve damage” (Klay 215). According to Sarah, the woman to whom Jenks tells his story, “‘IEDs cause the signature wounds of this war,’” by which she means burns and traumatic brain injuries (TBIs) (222). No doubt, the number of these wounds is staggering: the Department of Defense and the Defense and Veteran’s Brain Injury Center estimate that more than 20% of the injuries from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan take the form of TBIs (Summerall), and, as of 2006, 368 burn casualties had been recorded in Iraq (Pruitt). Aside from “War Stories,” however, the majority of the pieces in Klay’s collection of Iraq War tales focus on a different sort of injury. The soldiers, marines, and veterans in these stories suffer damage that goes largely unseen by those around them—damage not to their bodily selves but to their moral selves, or what theorists call “moral injury.” Nearly all of Klay’s stories include a character contending with some form of moral injury, which, according to Brett Litz and others, occurs as a result of someone “perpetrating, failing to prevent, or bearing witness to acts that