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" The Iraq I returned from was, in my mind, a fairly simple place. By which I mean it had little relationship to reality. It's only with time and the help of smart, empathetic friends willing to pull through many serious conversations that I've been able to learn more about what I witnessed. "

Phil Klay

Relationship

Smart

Time

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

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" Even if torture works, what is the point of 'defending' America using a tactic that is a fundamental violation of what America ought to mean? "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

Phil Klay

Critical

Studying

" Oftentimes, discussion of war gets flattened to a discussion of trauma. "

" I don't believe in any Greatest Generation. I believe in great events. They sweep ordinary people up, expose them to extremes of human behavior and unimaginable tests of integrity and courage, and then deposit them back on the home front. "

" 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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" I write in coffee shops, libraries, parks, museums. I get antsy and then get on my bike and go someplace else, letting the ideas spin around in my head as I dodge taxis. "

" 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. "

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

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

Phil Klay

Writing

Expected

" 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. "

" A great writer is a great writer... Tolstoy was not a woman, but 'Anna Karenina' is still a pretty good book. "