Phil Klay Quotes
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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 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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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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Bombs do very, very bad things to human bodies. It's incredibly shocking to see.
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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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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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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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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 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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Writing fiction was a way to take the ideas that troubled me or confused me and put them under pressure.
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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 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 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'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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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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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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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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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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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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'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.