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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" I doubt there's anything you could say to Donald Rumsfeld that would puncture the armor of his narcissism. "

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

Friends And Family

" Less than 1 percent of American have served in 12 years of war, and serious public conversation about military policy is sorely lacking. "

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

" 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. "

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

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

" I did try to write in Iraq, and I failed. I think you just don't have the brain space for it. "

" 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. "

" It's not a problem to be surrounded by other writers if that's the craft that you're doing. I suppose if you get obsessed with the notion of being a writer more than the writing itself, that would be bad. But I live near really smart, thoughtful people who take writing very seriously, and I can meet them for breakfast and talk books. "

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

" I always wrote - not about war, necessarily, but I always wrote stories. I tried to write while I was in Iraq. It's not really - I didn't do a very good job, and not about war. "

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

" Resilience is, of course, necessary for a warrior. But a lack of empathy isn't. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" There's a very particular way that the military speaks. There's a lot of profanity and a lot of acronyms. "

" 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. "

" I was studying with Peter Carey, Colum McCann; but also, my fellow students were really critical readers for me. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Sometimes macho language is to mask things people are not ready to deal with. "

" 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. "