Phil Klay Quotes
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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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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 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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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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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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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 have, for a very long time, been a huge admirer of Marilynne Robinson, whose work I just love.
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Bombs do very, very bad things to human bodies. It's incredibly shocking to see.
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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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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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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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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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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 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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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'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.