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" Supposedly, going to war initiates you into this gnostic priesthood of people who've had a liminal experience forever separating them from civilians. Except... you go there, and it is what it is. A form of human activity as varied as any other. "

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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. "

Phil Klay

Work

You

Down

" 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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

Phil Klay

Going

Summer

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

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

" 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. "

" Prayer in a combat zone serves exactly the same purpose as it does in peacetime. In war, the stakes are life and death, true; but if you believe in God and in the notion of a human soul, then we are always making decisions of tremendous significance. "

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

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

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

Phil Klay

Than

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" Treating war as farce is one way soldiers deal with it. "

" 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. "

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

" There's a tradition in war writing that the veteran goes over and sees the truth of war and comes back. And I'm skeptical of that. "

" 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. "

" When I was in Marine training I memorised 'The Waste Land,' which was a significant experience in terms of really breaking apart language and thinking about how the different voices in that poem function. "

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