Klay distinguishes his identity as an American citizen from his specific identity as a former military serviceman precisely to connect civic responsibility to all Americans, not just those who have been in the military. Military service is one identity that implicitly undergirds much of his writing, but he also claims other identities: “f I have authority to speak about our military policy it’s because I’m a citizen responsible for participating in self-governance, not because I belonged to a warrior caste.” This specificity is the native ground of Klay’s writing. He begins each essay with a date or time frame and often the specific places that spawned his analysis. Klay is a former marine and Iraq veteran. In doing so, he traces the fraught relationship between service members and civilians as he grapples with how to portray war and the people who fight it. Throughout the essays, Klay revisits the experiences of inflicting violence, of having violence inflicted upon you, or of witnessing violence up close. He conceptualizes Americanness and citizenship expansively and generatively. He does not seek certain ground where all Americans stand in consensus, but he points toward a United States where military service is not the metric for real Americanness. Klay worries that 20 years of war have divided Americans against one another. Uncertain Ground is about the nature of the post-9/11 wars and their impact on how Americans view and treat one another, who counts as American within the boundaries they draw, and how different versions of Americanness configure relations with people globally. His essays represent an attempt at collective critical remembrance of war and its aftermath, while eschewing the memorialization that he critiques. BECAUSE HE “can’t simply memorialize,” Phil Klay takes a different approach to war in his recent essay collection, Uncertain Ground: Citizenship in an Age of Endless, Invisible War (2022).
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