Many of the stories feature a veteran ruminating on the significance of bodies. The narrator of “Redeployment” is uncomfortable reacquainting himself with his wife’s body, even though he knows that sex is something he should want after being gone for so long. He worries over his dog Vicar’s languishing body and does not know what to do with it after he shoots him. Other veterans obsess over women’s bodies in strip clubs and bars and when reuniting with former girlfriends. The burned Jenks’s body in “War Stories” is something like a cage he cannot escape from. The narrator of “Bodies” works in Mortuary Affairs, processing the bodies of the dead, and is forced to think about the fragility of his own body. The ruined bodies of the two tortured men in “Frago” are cause enough for the men to resent being rescued by the Marines. And of course, the various forms of violence that accompany every war are destroying the bodies of Marines and Iraqis in every story.

In “Bodies,” the narrator returns from Iraq with a piece of gravel that he still has in his pocket when he is telling his story at a bar. He had been tasked with processing the body of a badly burned Marine who had died of his wounds.