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" I'm generally not a fan of didactic art because it papers over many of the hard experiences about war or anything else in life. I wanted to explore various aspects of the experience without an eye towards delivering any particular message. "

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" I grew up a little north of New York City and went to high school at Regis, an all-boys tuition-free high school in Manhattan. "

Phil Klay

High School

City

New

" It's very strange getting out of the military, when you've lived in Iraq, and people you know are going overseas again and again. Some of them are getting injured. "

" If we fetishize trauma as incommunicable, then survivors are trapped - unable to feel truly known by their nonmilitary friends and family. "

" 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. "

" I have friends with post-traumatic stress - friends with post-traumatic stress who are, you know, highly successful, capable people. "

" 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

See

" People have a very political way of looking at war, and that's understandable. "

" 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. "

" I was a public affairs officer. I worked with the media, but I didn't just stay at my desk. I assisted in military duties, travelled around Anbar province, hung out with a wide variety of Marines. "

" We're so used to using military terminology in civilian speech that we forget those terms might mean something very specific. "

" Bombs do very, very bad things to human bodies. It's incredibly shocking to see. "

" One thing I've always liked about the military is there's a certain amount of pragmatism. "

" The notion that war forever separates veterans from the rest of mankind has been long embedded in our collective consciousness. "

" 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. "

" In a strange way, you have to have a certain amount of distance from a thing in order to be able to write about it. "

" When I was in Marine training I memorised 'The Waste Land,' which was a significant experience in terms of really breaking apart language and thinking about how the different voices in that poem function. "

" I like the ethos of the military and the idea of joining an institution in which, at the very least, everyone who signs up believes in something. "

Phil Klay

Signs

Everyone

" I have, for a very long time, been a huge admirer of Marilynne Robinson, whose work I just love. "

" When I tell stories about Iraq, the ones people react to are always the stories of violence. This is strange for me. "

" In State of the Union addresses, I always look at the foreign policy and military parts first, which are generally pretty minimal. "

" I started with things that I was troubled by or confused by or interested in, and then I wrote stories to try to puzzle my way through it. But the question is not how to represent war, because it's an abstract thing that's felt differently for all the characters. "

" I have two friends named Matt. They're both scouts in the cavalry. They both served in the same section of Iraq. They both worked with the same Iraqi translator. And yet, if you talk to them, their stories couldn't be more different, because one was there in 2006. One was there in 2008. "

" People lie to themselves all the time about what they've been through and what it means - I'm no exception. But you write those lies down - lies that really matter to you and that are really painful to let go of because they've become a part of who you are - and they don't work. "

" I ended up going to Dartmouth, and I did Marine Officer Candidate School during my junior summer. "

Phil Klay

Going

Summer

" Fiction is the best way I know how to think something through. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" There's a wide spectrum between a Navy SEAL hero-killer and a traumatized victim, but those are the archetypes - hashed and rehashed in the media, in popular culture, in the minds of people with a lot of preconceived notions but not much else. "

" 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. "

" 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. "