Writing fiction was a way to take the ideas that troubled me or confused me and put them under pressure. – Phil Klay
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. – Phil Klay
I ended up going to Dartmouth, and I did Marine Officer Candidate School during my junior summer. – Phil Klay
A lot of times, you’re interacting with people for whom you’re one of the very few veterans that they’ve met or had a lot of interactions with, and there’s a temptation for you to feel like you can pontificate about what the experience was or what it meant, and that leads to a lot of nonsense. – Phil Klay
Certainly, my exposure in high school to writers like Flannery O’Connor, Shusaku Endo, Fyodor Dostoevsky and Graham Greene was formative. – Phil Klay
I did try to write in Iraq, and I failed. I think you just don’t have the brain space for it. – Phil Klay
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. – Phil Klay
If you’re going to write about war, the ugly side is inevitable. Suffering and death are obviously part of war. – Phil Klay
I was a public affairs officer. I worked with the media, but I didn’t just stay at my desk. I assisted in military duties, travelled around Anbar province, hung out with a wide variety of Marines. – Phil Klay
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. – Phil Klay
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. – Phil Klay
When I first came back from Iraq, I of course found myself thinking a lot about it. Not just my experiences, but those of people I talked to, friends, and colleagues. – Phil Klay
It’s a professional military. You sign up and agree to allow your countrymen to use your life as they see fit for the next four years. And I think we all should have a greater role in ensuring that we use those lives wisely. – Phil Klay
I started with things that I was troubled by or confused by or interested in, and then I wrote stories to try to puzzle my way through it. But the question is not how to represent war, because it’s an abstract thing that’s felt differently for all the characters. – Phil Klay
Prayer in a combat zone serves exactly the same purpose as it does in peacetime. In war, the stakes are life and death, true; but if you believe in God and in the notion of a human soul, then we are always making decisions of tremendous significance. – Phil Klay
A lot of the great pieces of journalism from Iraq showed how important command influence was in violent, aggressive environments, where Marines and soldiers had a constrained set of choices to make in sudden moments. – Phil Klay
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. – Phil Klay
I don’t want to act as though my deployment was particularly rough, because it wasn’t. I had a very mild deployment; I was a staff officer. – Phil Klay
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. – Phil Klay
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. – Phil Klay
There’s a tradition of public service in my family. I’m one of three boys that joined the military. My father was in the Peace Corps. – Phil Klay
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. – Phil Klay
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? – Phil Klay
I have, for a very long time, been a huge admirer of Marilynne Robinson, whose work I just love. – Phil Klay