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

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" 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. "

" 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. "

" When I tell stories about Iraq, the ones people react to are always the stories of violence. This is strange for me. "

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

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

" 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. "

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

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

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

" 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 ended up going to Dartmouth, and I did Marine Officer Candidate School during my junior summer. "

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

" 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. "

" 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 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. "

" 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. "

" The Cold War provided justification for a larger peacetime military, since we were never really at peace, or so the argument went. "

" I have, for a very long time, been a huge admirer of Marilynne Robinson, whose work I just love. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" I like the ethos of the military and the idea of joining an institution in which, at the very least, everyone who signs up believes in something. "

" 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. "

" I started with things that I was troubled by or confused by or interested in, and then I wrote stories to try to puzzle my way through it. But the question is not how to represent war, because it's an abstract thing that's felt differently for all the characters. "

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

" 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. "

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

" Writing 'Redeployment' shook me in ways I never expected. "

" 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. "

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