Phil Klay Quotes
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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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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.
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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.
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I have two friends named Matt. They're both scouts in the cavalry. They both served in the same section of Iraq. They both worked with the same Iraqi translator. And yet, if you talk to them, their stories couldn't be more different, because one was there in 2006. One was there in 2008.
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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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War is complicated and intense, and it takes time and thoughts to understand what it was.
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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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Writing fiction was a way to take the ideas that troubled me or confused me and put them under pressure.
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Bombs do very, very bad things to human bodies. It's incredibly shocking to see.
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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.
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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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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.
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Oftentimes, discussion of war gets flattened to a discussion of trauma.
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In State of the Union addresses, I always look at the foreign policy and military parts first, which are generally pretty minimal.
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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.
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I went straight from the Marine Corps to the MFA. The way that you would express things among Marines is somewhat different than the way you're supposed to express things in a creative-writing workshop.
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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.
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The Cold War provided justification for a larger peacetime military, since we were never really at peace, or so the argument went.
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I have friends with post-traumatic stress - friends with post-traumatic stress who are, you know, highly successful, capable people.
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'Redeployment' is a military term. It means to transfer a unit from one area to another.
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I'd been in college studying English creative writing and history when I made the decision to join the Marines in the runup to the Iraq war.
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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.
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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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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.