As a part of Kansas State University’s series celebrating the Universities role in national military and veterans affairs, a noted author and Iraq war veteran was the guest speaker Wednesday at the Alumni Center.

Phil Klay is the author of “Redeployment” a book that draws Klay’s personal experience as a Marine Captain detailing the Iraq war and the psychic toll it continues to take on those who fight in it. He explained that when service members return from war they each have a role or job to do, and he felt like his was to tell the stories of war.

“Stories that we tell about war, they shape how we perceive veterans. They shape our policy, they shape what we think we can accomplish militarily, what we can’t. They are also related to how we look at our civilian authority who are ultimately responsible for prosecuting our wars,” says Klay. “I think that it’s very easy to look at war in an abstract way, or in terms of the political parties that you agree with. But one of the things that I wanted to do with the book was really force people to inhabit the heads of people who have gone over seas, and think very deeply about what that was like.”

“Redeployment” was recently nominated for a national book award for fiction. It contains twelve stories each with a different narrative from soldiers at war to soldiers who return home and their interaction with their families and friends.