Obama on Phil Klay’s “Redeployment”

Mr. Obama’s interview with CNN aired on Tuesday, January 27.

In a recent interview with CNN’s Fareed Zakaria, President Obama named Redeployment, a series of non-fiction short stories, as a book he had read in recent months and would highly recommend. The author of Redeployment is none other than Dartmouth College graduate and former U.S. Marine Phil Klay ’05, who was interviewed by The Dartmouth Review‘s Alexander J. Kane this past May. Published in March of 2014, Redeployment won the National Book Award for Fiction in November.

Describing Klay’s stories as “…a reminder, particularly important for a Commander-in-Chief, that the antiseptic plans and decisions and strategies and opining of pundits that take place in Washington is very different from war and conflict as it’s experienced by people on the ground,” Obama credits accounts of American soldiers such as those in Redeployment as influential in his decisions regarding deployment of troops and other foreign policy tactics.