“You can’t describe it to someone who wasn’t there,” says a Marine who’s served in Iraq, “you can hardly remember how it was yourself because it makes so little sense. And to act like somebody could live and fight for months” there “and not go insane, well, that’s what’s really crazy.”

In “Redeployment,” his searing debut collection of short stories, Phil Klay — a veteran of the United States Marine Corps, who served in Iraq during the surge — gives the civilian reader a visceral feeling for what it is like to be a soldier in a combat zone, and what it is like to return home, still reeling from the dislocations of war. Gritty, unsparing and fiercely observed, these stories leave us with a harrowing sense of the war in Iraq as it was experienced, day by day, by individual soldiers; it achieves through fiction something very similar to what David Finkel’s 2009 nonfiction book “The Good Soldiers” did through tough but empathetic reporting.

There are stories of heroism and kindness here: A sergeant is killed rushing to help three of his wounded men in a narrow Iraqi city alley (“Unless It’s a Sucking Chest Wound”); a lance corporal takes responsibility for a killing he didn’t commit so that his young buddy, a kid who still plays Pokemon, won’t have to (“After Action Report”).

There are also tales of sadistic violence, demented machismo and hopelessness in the face of the surreal, “Groundhog Day”-like madness of fighting in places like Fallujah and Ramadi. “What are we doing?” a soldier asks a chaplain in “Prayer in the Furnace.” “We go down a street, get I.E.D.’d, the next day go down the same street and they’ve I.E.D.’d it again. It’s like, just keep going till you all die.”