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

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" 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. "

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

" The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are as much every U.S. citizen's wars as they are the veterans' wars. If we don't assume that civilians have just as much ownership and the moral responsibilities that we have as a nation when we embark on something like that, then we're in a very bad situation. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" War is an arena for the display of courage and virtue. Or war is politics by other means. War is a quasi-mystical experience where you get in touch with the real. There are millions of narratives we impose to try to make sense of war. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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 didn't want to write a 'this is how it is' Iraq book, because the Iraq War is an intensely complicated variety of things. "

" 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. "

" 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? "

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

" 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. "

" I have friends with post-traumatic stress - friends with post-traumatic stress who are, you know, highly successful, capable people. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" War is complicated and intense, and it takes time and thoughts to understand what it was. "

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