"Redeployment" author Phil Klay was so sure he wasn’t going to win the National Book Award for fiction that he didn’t even prepare a just-in-case speech until the morning of the award ceremony, when his wife told him he had to write something.

Nearly a week after his name was announced at the swank dinner in New York City, the 31-year-old Marine Corps veteran was still having a hard time believing he had won.

“It’s a pretty wild thing,” Klay said, laughing. “I’m still kind of amazed. … I don’t even know how to describe it.”

Klay, who was also recognized by the National Book Foundation as one of “5 Under 35” authors, was a writer before he joined the Marine Corps and might have guessed he would write something about the military, but hadn’t planned to write a book about Iraq.

Then, in 2007, he deployed to Al-Taqaddum Air Base for 13 months as the public affairs officer for the 2nd Marine Logistics Group.

“I went to Iraq, and then I came back. And then, of course. Of course that’s what I wrote about,” he said. “That was the thing that I was trying to make sense of: What was that? And not just ‘what was that’ for me, but ‘what was that’ for the people in my life.”

But instead of a memoir, then-1st Lt. Klay began writing a short story from the perspective of a Marine infantry sergeant who has just returned home to North Carolina from Iraq.

After he left the Marine Corps in 2009, he began graduate school at Hunter College in New York and wrote other stories, told by other narrators: A chaplain. An artilleryman. A foreign service officer.

“For me, fiction is the best way that I know to write about this kind of stuff,” Klay said. “If I was writing from my own perspective it would be my reflection on things that have happened to me. And I like good memoirs, but … I wanted to have a lot of different perspectives about the war, a lot of different experiences, a lot of disagreements about what the war was, what it might be.”

It took more than four years to write the book, Klay said, and he worked hard to get the details right: interviewing other veterans, asking lots of questions, and finding people from other jobs and military occupational specialties to read drafts.

The feedback from veterans has been mainly positive, he said; for the most part, people were happy to see someone trying to tell the story from different perspectives, and to bridge the disconnect between veterans and civilians.

“We’re a country that goes to war, and if we’re going to be good citizens, all of us, veterans and civilians alike, we should be able to talk about what the experience of war means, so we know what the hell we’re voting for, what we’re doing as a country,” he said.

The hope Klay said he had with the book was to invite veterans and civilians “into the skulls of other narrators and really think about what those people, what their story was and what it might mean.”

In his award acceptance speech, Klay said he had returned from Iraq “not knowing what to think about so many things.”

“What do you make of it when the middle school students you’re teaching ask you if you’ve killed anyone, and are horribly disappointed when you say no? When strangers at a bar insist on treating you as though you must be psychologically damaged, just because you’re a vet?” he said. “I don’t actually have the answers to those questions, but the book was the only way that I knew to really start thinking them through.”

Writing is a way of starting a conversation, he said, and he “can’t think of a more important conversation to be having. War’s too strange to be processed alone.”

hlad.jennifer@stripes.com