Words matter. These are the best Phil Klay Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
The Cold War provided justification for a larger peacetime military, since we were never really at peace, or so the argument went.
War is complicated and intense, and it takes time and thoughts to understand what it was.
In State of the Union addresses, I always look at the foreign policy and military parts first, which are generally pretty minimal.
Treating war as farce is one way soldiers deal with it.
Less than 1 percent of American have served in 12 years of war, and serious public conversation about military policy is sorely lacking.
Writing fiction was a way to take the ideas that troubled me or confused me and put them under pressure.
I’ve been asked what differentiates war literature as a category, and I don’t think there is anything.
There’s a very particular way that the military speaks. There’s a lot of profanity and a lot of acronyms.
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.
For me, leaving the Marine Corps was more disorienting than returning home.
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.
Supposedly, going to war initiates you into this gnostic priesthood of people who’ve had a liminal experience forever separating them from civilians. Except… you go there, and it is what it is. A form of human activity as varied as any other.
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.
I always wrote – not about war, necessarily, but I always wrote stories. I tried to write while I was in Iraq. It’s not really – I didn’t do a very good job, and not about war.
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.
I have friends with post-traumatic stress – friends with post-traumatic stress who are, you know, highly successful, capable people.
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.
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.
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.
Political novels are full of pitfalls, particularly for a novelist with strong political leanings.
Pity sidesteps complexity in favor of narratives that we’re comfortable with, reducing the nuances of a person’s experience to a sound bite.
Even if torture works, what is the point of ‘defending’ America using a tactic that is a fundamental violation of what America ought to mean?
The civilian wants to respect what the veteran has gone through. The veteran wants to protect memories that are painful and sacred to him from outside judgment.
In the Marine Corps, you meet this really broad segment of the country; you’re working with people from all kinds of backgrounds. And it exposes you to the American military, particularly the American military at war.
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.
I grew up a little north of New York City and went to high school at Regis, an all-boys tuition-free high school in Manhattan.
Resilience is, of course, necessary for a warrior. But a lack of empathy isn’t.
When I tell stories about Iraq, the ones people react to are always the stories of violence. This is strange for me.
Marines and soldiers don’t issue themselves orders; they don’t send themselves overseas. United States citizens elect the leaders who send us overseas.
People should be able to tell stories that are important to them to try and understand what they mean. I don’t think you figure anything out on your own. Certainly not war stories.
I got to travel around Anbar Province, had a great group of Marines who worked for me who traveled around Anbar Province. I got to hang out with a lot of different types of Marines and soldiers and sailors.
If we fetishize trauma as incommunicable, then survivors are trapped – unable to feel truly known by their nonmilitary friends and family.
There’s a tendency to look at anybody who joined the military as if they underwrote everything that happened policy-wise. That’s not really the case. I have a friend who both protested the Iraq War and joined the military, and ended up serving two deployments in Afghanistan.
If you’re going to write about war, the ugly side is inevitable. Suffering and death are obviously part of war.
The Iraq I returned from was, in my mind, a fairly simple place. By which I mean it had little relationship to reality. It’s only with time and the help of smart, empathetic friends willing to pull through many serious conversations that I’ve been able to learn more about what I witnessed.
War is an arena for the display of courage and virtue. Or war is politics by other means. War is a quasi-mystical experience where you get in touch with the real. There are millions of narratives we impose to try to make sense of war.
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.
There’s a wide spectrum between a Navy SEAL hero-killer and a traumatized victim, but those are the archetypes – hashed and rehashed in the media, in popular culture, in the minds of people with a lot of preconceived notions but not much else.
I’m generally not a fan of didactic art because it papers over many of the hard experiences about war or anything else in life. I wanted to explore various aspects of the experience without an eye towards delivering any particular message.
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.
I love opera. I love jazz, especially Mingus. This makes me sound highbrow. I’m not.
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.
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.
I did try to write in Iraq, and I failed. I think you just don’t have the brain space for it.
Fiction is the best way I know how to think something through.