Phil Klay Quotes
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In war, it feels like everything you're doing is more important because you're in the proximity of violence and death, and that proximity changes your relationship to America because it changes the way you see the world.
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I love opera. I love jazz, especially Mingus. This makes me sound highbrow. I'm not.
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There's a tendency to look at anybody who joined the military as if they underwrote everything that happened policy-wise. That's not really the case. I have a friend who both protested the Iraq War and joined the military, and ended up serving two deployments in Afghanistan.
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Treating war as farce is one way soldiers deal with it.
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Fiction is the best way I know how to think something through.
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A lot of the great pieces of journalism from Iraq showed how important command influence was in violent, aggressive environments, where Marines and soldiers had a constrained set of choices to make in sudden moments.
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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.
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Certainly, my exposure in high school to writers like Flannery O'Connor, Shusaku Endo, Fyodor Dostoevsky and Graham Greene was formative.
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I've been asked what differentiates war literature as a category, and I don't think there is anything.
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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.
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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.
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The notion that war forever separates veterans from the rest of mankind has been long embedded in our collective consciousness.
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Political novels are full of pitfalls, particularly for a novelist with strong political leanings.
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I got to travel around Anbar Province, had a great group of Marines who worked for me who traveled around Anbar Province. I got to hang out with a lot of different types of Marines and soldiers and sailors.
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When I tell stories about Iraq, the ones people react to are always the stories of violence. This is strange for me.
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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.
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One thing I've always liked about the military is there's a certain amount of pragmatism.
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Less than 1 percent of American have served in 12 years of war, and serious public conversation about military policy is sorely lacking.
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A great writer is a great writer... Tolstoy was not a woman, but 'Anna Karenina' is still a pretty good book.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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It's easier to get people to talk to you if you're a vet and you want to interview a vet about war. Sometimes they open up a little bit easier.
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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.