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" 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. "

Phil Klay

War

Politics

Experience

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

" 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. "

" Pity addresses the perceived suffering, not the whole individual. "

" There's a tradition of public service in my family. I'm one of three boys that joined the military. My father was in the Peace Corps. "

" Marines and soldiers don't issue themselves orders; they don't send themselves overseas. United States citizens elect the leaders who send us overseas. "

Phil Klay

Leaders

Marines

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

Phil Klay

Writing

Expected

" 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. "

" You're not supposed to risk your life just for the physical safety of American citizens - you're supposed to risk your life for American ideals as well. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

Phil Klay

Than

" 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. "

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

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

" 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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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 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 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. "

" The notion that war forever separates veterans from the rest of mankind has been long embedded in our collective consciousness. "

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

" 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. "

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