Uncertain Ground: Citizenship in an Age of Endless, Invisible War
by Phil Klay
Penguin, $27, 272 pages
Leaving the Marine Corps in 2009 to embark on an instantly successful writing career, Phil Klay “envisioned task primarily as making sense of the past”. He discovered quickly that it was not the past. Six years later, Barack Obama claimed “we’ve ended two wars”, but mid-scale conflicts dragged on both in Iraq, where Klay had served, and in Afghanistan. “No wonder our troops were having difficulty articulating why they were fighting,” says Klay. “Their commander-in-chief couldn’t even bring himself to admit that we were still at war.”
