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" 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. "

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" 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. "

Phil Klay

Culture

War

Experience

" It's a professional military. You sign up and agree to allow your countrymen to use your life as they see fit for the next four years. And I think we all should have a greater role in ensuring that we use those lives wisely. "

Phil Klay

You

See

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

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

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

Phil Klay

Brain

Remembering

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

" You come back from war, and you have a certain authority to talk about war. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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? "

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

" War is too strange to process alone. "

" 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. "

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

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

Phil Klay

Writing

Expected