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" 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. "
Phil Klay
Able
Write
You
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" The Cold War provided justification for a larger peacetime military, since we were never really at peace, or so the argument went. "
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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. "
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" Pity addresses the perceived suffering, not the whole individual. "
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" Oftentimes, discussion of war gets flattened to a discussion of trauma. "
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" 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. "
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" In the Marine Corps, you meet this really broad segment of the country; you're working with people from all kinds of backgrounds. And it exposes you to the American military, particularly the American military at war. "
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" Writing fiction was a way to take the ideas that troubled me or confused me and put them under pressure. "
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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. "
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" 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. "
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" 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
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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. "
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Sometimes
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" I've been asked what differentiates war literature as a category, and I don't think there is anything. "
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" I love opera. I love jazz, especially Mingus. This makes me sound highbrow. I'm not. "
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" I doubt there's anything you could say to Donald Rumsfeld that would puncture the armor of his narcissism. "
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" Less than 1 percent of American have served in 12 years of war, and serious public conversation about military policy is sorely lacking. "
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" 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. "
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Serving
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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
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" Writing 'Redeployment' shook me in ways I never expected. "
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" 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. "
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" A lot of the great pieces of journalism from Iraq showed how important command influence was in violent, aggressive environments, where Marines and soldiers had a constrained set of choices to make in sudden moments. "
Phil Klay
Moments
Choices
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" The Iraq I returned from was, in my mind, a fairly simple place. By which I mean it had little relationship to reality. It's only with time and the help of smart, empathetic friends willing to pull through many serious conversations that I've been able to learn more about what I witnessed. "
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Relationship
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Time
" I have, for a very long time, been a huge admirer of Marilynne Robinson, whose work I just love. "
Phil Klay
Time
Long
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" 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. "
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Life
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" I don't believe in any Greatest Generation. I believe in great events. They sweep ordinary people up, expose them to extremes of human behavior and unimaginable tests of integrity and courage, and then deposit them back on the home front. "
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Courage
Integrity
Great
" 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
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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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America
Mean
" 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. "
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People
Think
Try
" The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are as much every U.S. citizen's wars as they are the veterans' wars. If we don't assume that civilians have just as much ownership and the moral responsibilities that we have as a nation when we embark on something like that, then we're in a very bad situation. "
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Veterans
Situation
Nation
" 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. "
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