Phil Klay Quotes
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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 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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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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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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With fiction, you can take something that bothers you, or that you don't have in clear focus, and you can put it under as much stress as you want. Really get underneath the skin. With nonfiction, you're restricted to what happened.
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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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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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War is complicated and intense, and it takes time and thoughts to understand what it was.
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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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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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Bombs do very, very bad things to human bodies. It's incredibly shocking to see.
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Oftentimes, discussion of war gets flattened to a discussion of trauma.
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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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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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I have friends with post-traumatic stress - friends with post-traumatic stress who are, you know, highly successful, capable people.
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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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'Redeployment' is a military term. It means to transfer a unit from one area to another.
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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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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.
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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.