Uncertain Ground: Citizenship in an Age of Endless, Invisible War

Phil Klay is among a group of veterans who have used the written word as a tool to make sense of their experiences serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. With Uncertain Ground, he shifts to nonfiction to explore, in a tightly focused collection of essays, some of the themes that have surfaced in his earlier writing--most notably the tension between the perspective of soldiers embroiled in combat in the U.S.'s "forever wars" for more than two decades and the disengagement of an American public in whose name they fight.

Klay (RedeploymentMissionaries) spotlights that tension almost from the opening pages, remarking on a complacent citizenry that "remains blissfully at peace until an American dies, and it turns out we were at war all along." His criticism of the leaders of both political parties is unsparing, holding them responsible for this state of willful ignorance. Time and again in these 21 essays, written between 2010 and early 2020, he paints a stark contrast between the outlook of soldiers who have been dispatched on ill-defined foreign missions, many of them multiple times, and the unwillingness of their civilian counterparts to engage in some of the most rudimentary obligations of citizenship and hold their leaders accountable for the decisions that place these volunteers in peril.

Thoughtful readers will come away from this book with a clearer understanding of where the U.S. has fallen short of its ideals since 9/11 and of at least some of the questions its citizens should be asking about the country's current and future military missions. --Harvey Freedenberg, freelance reviewer

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