Phil Klay Quotes
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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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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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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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Marines and soldiers don't issue themselves orders; they don't send themselves overseas. United States citizens elect the leaders who send us overseas.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I was studying with Peter Carey, Colum McCann; but also, my fellow students were really critical readers for me.
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A lot of times, you're interacting with people for whom you're one of the very few veterans that they've met or had a lot of interactions with, and there's a temptation for you to feel like you can pontificate about what the experience was or what it meant, and that leads to a lot of nonsense.
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There's a very particular way that the military speaks. There's a lot of profanity and a lot of acronyms.
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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.
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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.'
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I write in coffee shops, libraries, parks, museums. I get antsy and then get on my bike and go someplace else, letting the ideas spin around in my head as I dodge taxis.
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I doubt there's anything you could say to Donald Rumsfeld that would puncture the armor of his narcissism.
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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.
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I did try to write in Iraq, and I failed. I think you just don't have the brain space for it.
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War is complicated and intense, and it takes time and thoughts to understand what it was.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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If you write a novel where war is nothing but hell and no one experiences excitement or cracks a dark joke, then you're not actually admitting the full experience.
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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.
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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.