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" 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. "

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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. "

Phil Klay

Policy

Understand

People

" 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. "

" 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. "

" We're told that when we remember, the same parts of our brain light up as when we experienced the event we're remembering. Your brain lives through it again. "

Phil Klay

Brain

Remembering

" 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. "

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

Phil Klay

Critical

Studying

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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 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'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. "

" 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. "

" A lot of times, you're interacting with people for whom you're one of the very few veterans that they've met or had a lot of interactions with, and there's a temptation for you to feel like you can pontificate about what the experience was or what it meant, and that leads to a lot of nonsense. "

" War is too strange to process alone. "

" 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. "

" Certainly, when I'd left Iraq back in 2008, I'd been proud of my service, but whether we'd been successful or not was still an open question. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

Phil Klay

Serving

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. "

" If you write a novel where war is nothing but hell and no one experiences excitement or cracks a dark joke, then you're not actually admitting the full experience. "

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

Phil Klay

Than

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

" I love opera. I love jazz, especially Mingus. This makes me sound highbrow. I'm not. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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