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" War is too strange to process alone. "

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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. "

" 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. "

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

Friends And Family

" 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. "

" With fiction, you can take something that bothers you, or that you don't have in clear focus, and you can put it under as much stress as you want. Really get underneath the skin. With nonfiction, you're restricted to what happened. "

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

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

" I think that just because you've been through an experience doesn't make you the ultimate arbiter of what it means. We figure things out; we work things out through the help of other people who can engage with us but also be intelligently critical. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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 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. "

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

" 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 saw so many radically different versions of Iraq. It would have been difficult for me to come back and think, 'This is the Iraq experience.' "

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" I've been asked what differentiates war literature as a category, and I don't think there is anything. "

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

" In State of the Union addresses, I always look at the foreign policy and military parts first, which are generally pretty minimal. "

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

" 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. "

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

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

" We're told that when we remember, the same parts of our brain light up as when we experienced the event we're remembering. Your brain lives through it again. "

" 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. "