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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. "

Phil Klay

You

Military

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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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" 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 tradition of public service in my family. I'm one of three boys that joined the military. My father was in the Peace Corps. "

" For me, leaving the Marine Corps was more disorienting than returning home. "

Phil Klay

Than

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

" At least for me, writing a book is continual exposure to blind spots. There were things I wanted to be true and wanted to believe, but it always got more complicated in the fiction. "

" It's often difficult to get perspective on your own stories, on your own experiences, without talking them through with someone who is genuinely interested in thinking about them. And that's the key. "

" I've been asked what differentiates war literature as a category, and I don't think there is anything. "

" 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. "

" Political novels are full of pitfalls, particularly for a novelist with strong political leanings. "

" 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. "

" Responsibility and accountability is a big part of being in the military. "

" I never thought anyone would pity me because of my time in the Marine Corps. "

" 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. "

" If you're going to write about war, the ugly side is inevitable. Suffering and death are obviously part of war. "

" Writing fiction was a way to take the ideas that troubled me or confused me and put them under pressure. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" War is too strange to process alone. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

Phil Klay

Off

Media

" 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