Uncertain Ground
Citizenship in an Age of Endless, Invisible War
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Narrated by:
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Josh Casaubon
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By:
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Phil Klay
About this listen
From the National Book Award-winning author of Redeployment and Missionaries, an astonishing fever graph of the effects of 20 years of war in a brutally divided America.
When Phil Klay left the marines a decade ago after serving as an officer in Iraq, he found himself a part of the community of veterans who have no choice but to grapple with the meaning of their wartime experiences—for themselves and for the country. American identity has always been bound up in war—from the revolutionary war of our founding, to the civil war that ended slavery, to the two world wars that launched America as a superpower. What did the current wars say about who we are as a country, and how should we respond as citizens?
Unlike in previous eras of war, relatively few Americans have had to do any real grappling with the endless, invisible conflicts of the post-9/11 world; in fact, increasingly few people are even aware they are still going on. It is as if these wars are a dark star with a strong gravitational force that draws a relatively small number of soldiers and their families into its orbit while remaining inconspicuous to most other Americans. In the meantime, the consequences of American military action abroad may be out of sight and out of mind, but they are very real indeed.
This chasm between the military and the civilian in American life, and the moral blind spot it has created, is one of the great themes of Uncertain Ground, Phil Klay’s powerful series of reckonings with some of our country’s thorniest concerns, written in essay form over the past 10 years. In the name of what do we ask young Americans to kill, and to die? In the name of what does this country hang together? As we see at every turn in this book, those two questions have a great deal to do with each another, and how we answer them will go a long way toward deciding where our troubled country goes from here.
©2022 Phil Klay (P)2022 Penguin AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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Critic reviews
“Uncertain Ground solidifies Mr. Klay’s place among the best of an increasing number of writers who served in Iraq and Afghanistan and, while recounting their experiences in combat realistically and unheroically, raise profound questions about the nature of contemporary warfare.” —Wall Street Journal
“[The] longest, meatiest and most probing essays and articles presented here share the lasting power of Klay’s acclaimed fiction. They were published separately, in different places over a decade-plus span. But read together they amount to an interwoven, evolving and revealing examination of Klay’s central topic: What it means for a country always at war, that so few of its people do the fighting . . . It is engrossing and important, and I hope readers will start with the longest parts first.” —James Fallows, New York Times Book Review
“The keenness of his observations is unmatched . . . With this collection, Klay transcends his self-description as ‘a writer who was once a Marine and writes about war’ to become more of a philosopher. He uses war to pose urgent questions about political identity and personal faith that will endure long after the narratives of recent conflicts get revised and their terminology fades into history.” —Los Angeles Times
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Story
In a fast-paced and action-packed narrative, Navy SEAL commander Rorke Denver tackles the questions that have emerged about America's past decade at war - from what makes a hero to why we fight and what it does to us. Heroes are not always the guys who jump on grenades. Sometimes, they are the snipers who decide to hold their fire, the wounded operators who find fresh ways to contribute, or the wives who keep the families together back home.
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An Analysis of Recent History
- By Jean on 06-19-16
By: Ellis Henican, and others
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We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families
- Stories from Rwanda
- By: Philip Gourevitch
- Narrated by: Philip Gourevitch
- Length: 10 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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An unforgettable firsthand account of a people's response to genocide and what it tells us about humanity. This remarkable audiobook chronicles what has happened in Rwanda and neighboring states since 1994, when the Rwandan government called on everyone in the Hutu majority to murder everyone in the Tutsi minority.
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Things you'd never imagine
- By LEE on 12-27-19
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Vietnam
- The Australian War
- By: Paul Ham
- Narrated by: Peter Byrne
- Length: 31 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
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Drawing on hundreds of accounts by soldiers, politicians, aid workers, entertainers and the Vietnamese people, Paul Ham reconstructs for the first time the full history of our longest military campaign. From the commitment to engage, through the fight over conscription and the rise of the anti - war movement, to the tactics and horror of the battlefi eld, Ham exhumes the truth about this politicians' war - which sealed the fate of 50,000 Australian servicemen and women.
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Fascinating detailed account
- By Alan T Alcock on 04-21-09
By: Paul Ham
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Looking for the Good War
- American Amnesia and the Violent Pursuit of Happiness
- By: Elizabeth D. Samet
- Narrated by: Suzanne Toren
- Length: 14 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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In Looking for the Good War, Elizabeth D. Samet reexamines the literature, art, and culture that emerged after World War II, bringing her expertise as a professor of English at West Point to bear on the complexity of the postwar period in national life. She exposes the confusion about American identity that was expressed during and immediately after the war, and the deep national ambivalence toward war, violence, and veterans - all of which were suppressed in subsequent decades by a dangerously sentimental attitude toward the United States' "exceptional" history and destiny.
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Essential reading for military officers and political decision makers.
- By Arlene S. Burke on 02-23-22
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The Vietnam War
- An Intimate History
- By: Geoffrey C. Ward, Ken Burns
- Narrated by: Fred Sanders, Ken Burns, Brian Corrigan
- Length: 31 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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More than 40 years after it ended, the Vietnam War continues to haunt our country. We still argue over why we were there, whether we could have won, and who was right and wrong in their response to the conflict. When the war divided the country, it created deep political fault lines that continue to divide us today. Now, continuing in the tradition of their critically acclaimed collaborations, the authors draw on dozens and dozens of interviews in America and Vietnam to give us the perspectives of people involved at all levels of the war.
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The usual Vietnam info delivered in the old prose
- By Kevin Warren on 10-26-17
By: Geoffrey C. Ward, and others
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Un-American
- A Soldier's Reckoning of Our Longest War
- By: Erik Edstrom
- Narrated by: Christopher Ragland
- Length: 10 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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Un-American is a hybrid of social commentary and memoir that exposes how blind support for war exacerbates the problems it’s intended to resolve, devastates the people allegedly being helped and diverts assets from far larger threats like climate change. Un-American is a revolutionary act, offering a blueprint for redressing America’s relationship with patriotism, the military and military spending.
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This Veteran supports many of the points in this book!
- By Kevin H. on 06-26-22
By: Erik Edstrom
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There Was a Country
- A Personal History of Biafra
- By: Chinua Achebe
- Narrated by: Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje
- Length: 9 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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The defining experience of Chinua Achebe's life was the Nigerian civil war, also known as the Biafran War, of 1967-1970. The conflict was infamous for its savage impact on the Biafran people, Chinua Achebe's people, many of whom were starved to death after the Nigerian government blockaded their borders. Immediately after, Achebe took refuge in an academic post in the United States, and for more than 40 years he has maintained a considered silence on the events of those terrible years. Now, decades in the making, comes a towering reckoning with one of modern Africa's most fateful events.
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The Audible Edition Is a Disaster
- By Olu on 11-28-12
By: Chinua Achebe
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The Korean War
- A History
- By: Bruce Cumings
- Narrated by: David de Vries
- Length: 8 hrs
- Unabridged
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In sobering detail, The Korean War chronicles a US home front agitated by Joseph McCarthy, where absolutist conformity discouraged open inquiry and citizen dissent. Cumings incisively ties our current foreign policy back to Korea: an America with hundreds of permanent military bases abroad, a large standing army, and a permanent national security state at home, the ultimate result of a judicious and limited policy of containment evolving into an ongoing and seemingly endless global crusade.
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A real eye-opener
- By Bookworm on 10-09-19
By: Bruce Cumings
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We'll Be Back
- The Fall and Rise of America
- By: Kurt Schlichter
- Narrated by: Damon Abernathy
- Length: 9 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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In 1991, the smoldering ruins of Saddam Hussein’s regime testified to America’s unchallenged might. Having defeated one of the world’s largest armies in a matter of days, the United States looked forward to a new century of peace and prosperity. Thirty years later, a ragtag Taliban chased us out of Afghanistan in a humiliating rout. At home, our cities are cesspools of homelessness and crime. The former land of opportunity seems to be in irreversible decline.
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Run!’nnnn
- By Mike Shirley on 08-19-22
By: Kurt Schlichter
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Why We Fight
- Defeating America's Enemies - with No Apologies
- By: Sebastian Gorka
- Narrated by: Sebastian Gorka
- Length: 7 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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WAR. It will happen again. We must be ready. Sober words from Dr. Sebastian Gorka, a man who has made the unvarnished truth his specialty. And there’s one eternal truth that Americans are in danger of forgetting: the most important weapon in any geopolitical conflict is the will to win. And we must win. In this powerful manifesto, Dr. Gorka explains the basic principles that have guided strategists since Sun Tzu penned The Art of War in the sixth century BC. To defeat your enemy, you must know him. But that’s the last thing liberal elites are interested in.
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Extremely informative and educational
- By Kami on 10-16-18
By: Sebastian Gorka
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Vietnam
- An Epic Tragedy, 1945-1975
- By: Max Hastings
- Narrated by: Max Hastings, Peter Noble
- Length: 33 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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Vietnam became the Western world’s most divisive modern conflict, precipitating a battlefield humiliation for France in 1954, then a vastly greater one for the US in 1975. Max Hastings has spent the past three years interviewing scores of participants on both sides, as well as researching a multitude of American and Vietnamese documents and memoirs, to create an epic narrative of an epic struggle. Here are the vivid realities of strife amid jungle and paddies that killed two million people.
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A more nuanced view than Ken Burns' companion book
- By Vu on 10-21-18
By: Max Hastings
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What It Is Like to Go to War
- By: Karl Marlantes
- Narrated by: Bronson Pinchot
- Length: 8 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
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In 1969, at the age of twenty-three, Karl Marlantes was dropped into the highland jungle of Vietnam, an inexperienced lieutenant in command of a platoon of forty marines who would live or die by his decisions. Marlantes survived, but like many of his brothers in arms, he has spent the last forty years dealing with his war experience.
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Destined to become a Classic
- By Lynn on 09-05-11
By: Karl Marlantes
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Hammerhead Six
- How Green Berets Waged an Unconventional War Against the Taliban to Win in Afghanistan's Deadly Pech Valley
- By: Ronald Fry, Tad Tuleja - contributor
- Narrated by: Ronald Fry
- Length: 10 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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In 2003, the Special Forces soldiers entered an area later called "the most dangerous place in Afghanistan". Here, where the line between civilians and armed zealots was indistinct, they illustrated the Afghan proverb "I destroy my enemy by making him my friend." Fry recounts how they were seen as welcome guests rather than invaders. Soon after their deployment ended, the Pech Valley reverted to turmoil. Their success was never replicated.
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A compelling read from start to finish
- By Gregory on 03-05-16
By: Ronald Fry, and others
What listeners say about Uncertain Ground
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Jodie
- 08-07-23
A compelling set of essays
With a fresh perspective on military service, and the demands of citizenship, Klay has crafted a book that really is a compelling read. With language artistry a kin to that of Tim O’Brien, and some stories that echo, O’Briens sentiments, Klay, nonetheless urges Americans to live up to their rights and responsibilities as citizens. This set of essays, especially a few special ones, will find their way into my classroom units on O’Briens *The Things They Carried* from now on.
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