Phil Klay Quotes
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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.
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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.
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Resilience is, of course, necessary for a warrior. But a lack of empathy isn't.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I ended up going to Dartmouth, and I did Marine Officer Candidate School during my junior summer.
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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.
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War is too strange to process alone.
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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.
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I never thought anyone would pity me because of my time in the Marine Corps.
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For me, leaving the Marine Corps was more disorienting than returning home.
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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.
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If you're going to write about war, the ugly side is inevitable. Suffering and death are obviously part of war.
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If we fetishize trauma as incommunicable, then survivors are trapped - unable to feel truly known by their nonmilitary friends and family.
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We're so used to using military terminology in civilian speech that we forget those terms might mean something very specific.
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Writing 'Redeployment' shook me in ways I never expected.
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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?
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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.
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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.
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People have a very political way of looking at war, and that's understandable.
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Pity addresses the perceived suffering, not the whole individual.
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Sometimes macho language is to mask things people are not ready to deal with.
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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.