Klay, Phil

Phil Klay is a veteran of the U.S. Marine Corps and the author of Redeployment, which won the 2014 National Book Award for fiction, and Missionaries, which was named one of the Ten Best Books of 2020 by The Wall Street Journal. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, and elsewhere. In Uncertain Ground: Citizenship in an Age of Endless, Invisible War (Penguin Press), Klay, who served as an officer in Iraq, notes that American identity has always been bound up in war – from the Revolutionary War of our founding and the Civil War that ended slavery, to the two world wars that launched America as a superpower. But unlike during previous eras of war, few Americans have had to grapple with the endless, invisible conflicts of the post-9/11 world; in fact, increasingly few people are even aware they are still going on. But while American military actions abroad may be out of sight and out of mind, the consequences are real. In the name of what, exactly, do we ask young Americans to kill and to die? In the name of what does this country hang together?