Phil Klay Quotes
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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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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 think that just because you've been through an experience doesn't make you the ultimate arbiter of what it means. We figure things out; we work things out through the help of other people who can engage with us but also be intelligently critical.
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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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I have, for a very long time, been a huge admirer of Marilynne Robinson, whose work I just love.
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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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Bombs do very, very bad things to human bodies. It's incredibly shocking to see.
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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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It's very strange getting out of the military, when you've lived in Iraq, and people you know are going overseas again and again. Some of them are getting injured.
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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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Pity sidesteps complexity in favor of narratives that we're comfortable with, reducing the nuances of a person's experience to a sound bite.
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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 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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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'm not anti-war. I served in a war, and I served proudly. But just or not, necessary or not, war is the industrial-scale slaughter of other humans.
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Oftentimes, discussion of war gets flattened to a discussion of trauma.
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After the fighting is done, and even when it's still happening, apologies are often needed for the recounting of bare facts. Sometimes bare facts feel unpatriotic.
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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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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 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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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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'Redeployment' is a military term. It means to transfer a unit from one area to another.
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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 have friends with post-traumatic stress - friends with post-traumatic stress who are, you know, highly successful, capable people.