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" Going to war is a rare experience in American culture, so it's easy for simple notions to gain a lot of weight. The reality is always more complex. "
Phil Klay
Culture
War
Experience
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" A lot of times, you're interacting with people for whom you're one of the very few veterans that they've met or had a lot of interactions with, and there's a temptation for you to feel like you can pontificate about what the experience was or what it meant, and that leads to a lot of nonsense. "
Phil Klay
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Experience
" Treating war as farce is one way soldiers deal with it. "
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" I'm not anti-war. I served in a war, and I served proudly. But just or not, necessary or not, war is the industrial-scale slaughter of other humans. "
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" War is too strange to process alone. "
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" We're so used to using military terminology in civilian speech that we forget those terms might mean something very specific. "
Phil Klay
Forget
Used
Speech
" There's something odd about working 24/7, being consumed with everything that's happening in Iraq, and then coming back to the country that ordered you over there only to realize that a lot of Americans are not really paying attention. "
Phil Klay
Realize
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" People have a very political way of looking at war, and that's understandable. "
Phil Klay
Looking
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" I always wrote - not about war, necessarily, but I always wrote stories. I tried to write while I was in Iraq. It's not really - I didn't do a very good job, and not about war. "
Phil Klay
Good Job
Write
War
" There's a tendency to look at anybody who joined the military as if they underwrote everything that happened policy-wise. That's not really the case. I have a friend who both protested the Iraq War and joined the military, and ended up serving two deployments in Afghanistan. "
Phil Klay
Serving
War
Up
" I never thought anyone would pity me because of my time in the Marine Corps. "
Phil Klay
Never
Thought
Time
" One of the things that's difficult for people to understand is when you join the military, you don't sign up as an endorsement of any particular policy of the moment. "
Phil Klay
Policy
Understand
People
" War is complicated and intense, and it takes time and thoughts to understand what it was. "
Phil Klay
Intense
Thoughts
Time
" There's a tradition of public service in my family. I'm one of three boys that joined the military. My father was in the Peace Corps. "
Phil Klay
Three
Service
Family
" I have, for a very long time, been a huge admirer of Marilynne Robinson, whose work I just love. "
Phil Klay
Time
Long
Long Time
" We have a tendency to think of war as this quasi-mystical thing, and that interpretation flattens the experience - by using different perspectives, I wanted to open a place for readers to compare and contrast, to make judgments, to engage. "
Phil Klay
Place
Experience
Think
" The civilian wants to respect what the veteran has gone through. The veteran wants to protect memories that are painful and sacred to him from outside judgment. "
Phil Klay
Memories
Painful
Judgment
" I suppose it is the lot of soldiers and Marines to be objectified according to the politics of the day and the mood of the American people about their war. "
Phil Klay
War
Day
American
" I went straight from the Marine Corps to the MFA. The way that you would express things among Marines is somewhat different than the way you're supposed to express things in a creative-writing workshop. "
Phil Klay
Way
You
Marine Corps
" It's a professional military. You sign up and agree to allow your countrymen to use your life as they see fit for the next four years. And I think we all should have a greater role in ensuring that we use those lives wisely. "
Phil Klay
You
Up
See
" I love opera. I love jazz, especially Mingus. This makes me sound highbrow. I'm not. "
Phil Klay
Jazz
Sound
Opera
" We're told that when we remember, the same parts of our brain light up as when we experienced the event we're remembering. Your brain lives through it again. "
Phil Klay
Brain
Up
Remembering
" I think that just because you've been through an experience doesn't make you the ultimate arbiter of what it means. We figure things out; we work things out through the help of other people who can engage with us but also be intelligently critical. "
Phil Klay
Work
Think
People
" Pity sidesteps complexity in favor of narratives that we're comfortable with, reducing the nuances of a person's experience to a sound bite. "
Phil Klay
Person
Sound
Experience
" Fiction is the best way I know how to think something through. "
Phil Klay
Fiction
Way
Through
" If you write a novel where war is nothing but hell and no one experiences excitement or cracks a dark joke, then you're not actually admitting the full experience. "
Phil Klay
Experience
You
War
" Resilience is, of course, necessary for a warrior. But a lack of empathy isn't. "
Phil Klay
Resilience
Lack
Empathy
" Less than 1 percent of American have served in 12 years of war, and serious public conversation about military policy is sorely lacking. "
Phil Klay
War
American
Conversation
" You're not supposed to risk your life just for the physical safety of American citizens - you're supposed to risk your life for American ideals as well. "
Phil Klay
Life
Risk
You
" There's a tradition in war writing that the veteran goes over and sees the truth of war and comes back. And I'm skeptical of that. "
Phil Klay
Writing
Truth
Tradition
" Certainly, when I'd left Iraq back in 2008, I'd been proud of my service, but whether we'd been successful or not was still an open question. "
Phil Klay
Successful
Service
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