review 1: "Prayer in the Furnace" is the best of the collection. "Money as a Weapons System" is my second favorite because I love a cynical comedy about bureaucracy. "After Action Report", "Bodies", and "War Stories" are all strong. "Redeployment" and "Frago" had heartbreaking and nauseating images that made it difficult to move on to the next story, but I haven't thought about them after moving on the way I did with the stories already listed. The others tried very hard to be deep and thoughtful, but didn't quite make it. More than half of this collection will stick with me, though. review 2: Started reading this on Veteran's Day -- what an appropriate choice! This collection of short stories about veterans of the Iraq War is as close as I’ll ever come to having a se... morense of what our volunteer military personnel experienced in that conflict. Klay provides a window into the hearts and minds of a wide variety of Marines, including those involved in the greatest daily danger, chaplains, mortuary service personnel, artillerymen (who inflict terrible damage but never see the carnage), and administrative adjuncts. We see them through the stress and adrenaline-rush of battle, the tortuous losses, the tug and pull of their inner humanity against the Marine culture of bravado, their deep devotion to each other, the disorientation of homecoming, and the minefield of adjusting to civilian life. The shortest story in the collection “OIF” is written in such a dense package of acronyms that, although I understood the basic point of the story, it was like reading a foreign language in which I’m far from fluent – brilliantly making the point that no matter how much I try to empathize or understand, I can only do so from the vantage point of an outsider. There is only one female veteran depicted in all the stories (a secondary character in “War Stories” where a severely burned veteran is trying to share his story with a civilian) which might give the impression only men served and experience these traumas. This is an observation, not criticism; it doesn’t change the impact and reality of the experiences depicted. less
