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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. "
Phil Klay
Anti-War
War
Just
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" I never thought anyone would pity me because of my time in the Marine Corps. "
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" I'd been in college studying English creative writing and history when I made the decision to join the Marines in the runup to the Iraq war. "
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" One thing I've always liked about the military is there's a certain amount of pragmatism. "
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" 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. "
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" People have a very political way of looking at war, and that's understandable. "
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" 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. "
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" 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. "
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" Even if torture works, what is the point of 'defending' America using a tactic that is a fundamental violation of what America ought to mean? "
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" Sometimes macho language is to mask things people are not ready to deal with. "
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" If we fetishize trauma as incommunicable, then survivors are trapped - unable to feel truly known by their nonmilitary friends and family. "
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Friends
Family
" 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. "
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Culture
People
Media
" 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. "
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Want
Staff
Though
" If you're going to write about war, the ugly side is inevitable. Suffering and death are obviously part of war. "
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Side
Death
Suffering
" 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. "
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Death
America
" Treating war as farce is one way soldiers deal with it. "
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Farce
Soldiers
Way
" With fiction, you can take something that bothers you, or that you don't have in clear focus, and you can put it under as much stress as you want. Really get underneath the skin. With nonfiction, you're restricted to what happened. "
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You
Clear
Want
" 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
" A great writer is a great writer... Tolstoy was not a woman, but 'Anna Karenina' is still a pretty good book. "
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Pretty
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" 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. "
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You
Military
Know
" 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. "
Phil Klay
Think
Patriotism
Thought
" 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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War
Experience
Art
" 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
" Oftentimes, discussion of war gets flattened to a discussion of trauma. "
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Discussion
Flattened
Gets
" Marines and soldiers don't issue themselves orders; they don't send themselves overseas. United States citizens elect the leaders who send us overseas. "
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" Pity sidesteps complexity in favor of narratives that we're comfortable with, reducing the nuances of a person's experience to a sound bite. "
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Person
Sound
Experience
" 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. "
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" It's easier to get people to talk to you if you're a vet and you want to interview a vet about war. Sometimes they open up a little bit easier. "
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Want
You
War
" 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. "
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Language
Training
Thinking
" 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. "
Phil Klay
Work
You
Down
" 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. "
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Place
Experience
Think