Phil Klay Quotes
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In a strange way, you have to have a certain amount of distance from a thing in order to be able to write about it.
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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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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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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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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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Bombs do very, very bad things to human bodies. It's incredibly shocking to see.
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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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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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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'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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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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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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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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War is complicated and intense, and it takes time and thoughts to understand what it was.
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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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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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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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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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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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You come back from war, and you have a certain authority to talk about war.