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.
— Phil Klay
Less than 1 percent of American have served in 12 years of war, and serious public conversation about military policy is sorely lacking.
I was studying with Peter Carey, Colum McCann; but also, my fellow students were really critical readers for me.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
Pity addresses the perceived suffering, not the whole individual.
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.
After the fighting is done, and even when it's still happening, apologies are often needed for the recounting of bare facts. Sometimes bare facts feel unpatriotic.
Oftentimes, discussion of war gets flattened to a discussion of trauma.
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.
War is too strange to process alone.
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.
You come back from war, and you have a certain authority to talk about war.
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.
The Cold War provided justification for a larger peacetime military, since we were never really at peace, or so the argument went.
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.
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.
Political novels are full of pitfalls, particularly for a novelist with strong political leanings.
The notion that war forever separates veterans from the rest of mankind has been long embedded in our collective consciousness.
For me, leaving the Marine Corps was more disorienting than returning home.
If you're going to write about war, the ugly side is inevitable. Suffering and death are obviously part of war.
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 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.
I'm not anti-war. I served in a war, and I served proudly. But just or not, necessary or not, war is the industrial-scale slaughter of other humans.
Resilience is, of course, necessary for a warrior. But a lack of empathy isn't.
'Redeployment' is a military term. It means to transfer a unit from one area to another.
In State of the Union addresses, I always look at the foreign policy and military parts first, which are generally pretty minimal.
Treating war as farce is one way soldiers deal with it.
Writing 'Redeployment' shook me in ways I never expected.
Fiction is the best way I know how to think something through.
When I tell stories about Iraq, the ones people react to are always the stories of violence. This is strange for me.
Certainly, when I'd left Iraq back in 2008, I'd been proud of my service, but whether we'd been successful or not was still an open question.
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.
Responsibility and accountability is a big part of being in the military.
If we fetishize trauma as incommunicable, then survivors are trapped - unable to feel truly known by their nonmilitary friends and family.
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 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.
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.
Pity sidesteps complexity in favor of narratives that we're comfortable with, reducing the nuances of a person's experience to a sound bite.
I never thought anyone would pity me because of my time in the Marine Corps.
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.
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.
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?
We're so used to using military terminology in civilian speech that we forget those terms might mean something very specific.
Supposedly, going to war initiates you into this gnostic priesthood of people who've had a liminal experience forever separating them from civilians. Except... you go there, and it is what it is. A form of human activity as varied as any other.
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.
