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" I don't want to act as though my deployment was particularly rough, because it wasn't. I had a very mild deployment; I was a staff officer. "
Phil Klay
Want
Staff
Though
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" I never thought anyone would pity me because of my time in the Marine Corps. "
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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. "
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Used
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" After the fighting is done, and even when it's still happening, apologies are often needed for the recounting of bare facts. Sometimes bare facts feel unpatriotic. "
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" I've certainly thought a lot more about things like tyranny and patriotism and violence. I think I found some kind of clarity - definitely a thicker understanding. "
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" Fiction is the best way I know how to think something through. "
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" The First Battle of Fallujah was called off in part because of the intensity of non-U.S. media coverage of civilian casualties from outlets like Al Jazeera. "
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" In war, it feels like everything you're doing is more important because you're in the proximity of violence and death, and that proximity changes your relationship to America because it changes the way you see the world. "
Phil Klay
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" People should be able to tell stories that are important to them to try and understand what they mean. I don't think you figure anything out on your own. Certainly not war stories. "
Phil Klay
People
Think
Try
" I didn't want to write a 'this is how it is' Iraq book, because the Iraq War is an intensely complicated variety of things. "
Phil Klay
War
Complicated
Want
" Supposedly, going to war initiates you into this gnostic priesthood of people who've had a liminal experience forever separating them from civilians. Except... you go there, and it is what it is. A form of human activity as varied as any other. "
Phil Klay
You
War
People
" 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
" For me, leaving the Marine Corps was more disorienting than returning home. "
Phil Klay
Me
Than
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" Though I continue to tell stories about Iraq, I sometimes fear this makes me a fraud. I feel guilty about the sorrow I feel because I know it is manufactured, and I feel guilty about the sorrow I do not feel because it is owed, it is the barest beginnings of what is owed to the fallen. "
Phil Klay
Sometimes
Feel
Fear
" 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
" I saw so many radically different versions of Iraq. It would have been difficult for me to come back and think, 'This is the Iraq experience.' "
Phil Klay
Difficult
Back
Think
" Writing 'Redeployment' shook me in ways I never expected. "
Phil Klay
Writing
Expected
Me
" War is too strange to process alone. "
Phil Klay
Strange
War
Too
" I got to travel around Anbar Province, had a great group of Marines who worked for me who traveled around Anbar Province. I got to hang out with a lot of different types of Marines and soldiers and sailors. "
Phil Klay
Great
Travel
Soldiers
" Sometimes macho language is to mask things people are not ready to deal with. "
Phil Klay
Ready
People
Mask
" When I first came back from Iraq, I of course found myself thinking a lot about it. Not just my experiences, but those of people I talked to, friends, and colleagues. "
Phil Klay
Thinking
People
Myself
" Treating war as farce is one way soldiers deal with it. "
Phil Klay
Farce
Soldiers
Way
" War is an arena for the display of courage and virtue. Or war is politics by other means. War is a quasi-mystical experience where you get in touch with the real. There are millions of narratives we impose to try to make sense of war. "
Phil Klay
War
Politics
Experience
" 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
" 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
" One thing I've always liked about the military is there's a certain amount of pragmatism. "
Phil Klay
About
Always
Military
" Certainly, my exposure in high school to writers like Flannery O'Connor, Shusaku Endo, Fyodor Dostoevsky and Graham Greene was formative. "
Phil Klay
School
High School
Like
" I literally went straight to New York City from Iraq, which was bizarre and complicated. I was walking down Madison Avenue, and it was spring, and people were smartly dressed, and it was so strange because there was no sense that we were at war. It was something to grapple with. "
Phil Klay
New York
City
People
" Writing fiction was a way to take the ideas that troubled me or confused me and put them under pressure. "
Phil Klay
Pressure
Confused
Ideas
" 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. "
Phil Klay
Anti-War
War
Just
" Resilience is, of course, necessary for a warrior. But a lack of empathy isn't. "
Phil Klay
Resilience
Lack
Empathy