Though I continue to tell stories about Iraq, I sometimes fear this makes me a fraud. I feel guilty about the sorrow I feel because I know it is manufactured, and I feel guilty about the sorrow I do not feel because it is owed, it is the barest beginnings of what is owed to the fallen.

Phil Klay

Resilience is, of course, necessary for a warrior. But a lack of empathy isn't.

Phil Klay

I don't believe in any Greatest Generation. I believe in great events. They sweep ordinary people up, expose them to extremes of human behavior and unimaginable tests of integrity and courage, and then deposit them back on the home front.

Phil Klay

'Redeployment' is a military term. It means to transfer a unit from one area to another.

Phil Klay

In war, it feels like everything you're doing is more important because you're in the proximity of violence and death, and that proximity changes your relationship to America because it changes the way you see the world.

Phil Klay

There's a tradition in war writing that the veteran goes over and sees the truth of war and comes back. And I'm skeptical of that.

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

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 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.

Phil Klay

There's a very particular way that the military speaks. There's a lot of profanity and a lot of acronyms.

Phil Klay

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.

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

If we fetishize trauma as incommunicable, then survivors are trapped - unable to feel truly known by their nonmilitary friends and family.

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

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

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.

Phil Klay

It's easier to get people to talk to you if you're a vet and you want to interview a vet about war. Sometimes they open up a little bit easier.

Phil Klay

Bombs do very, very bad things to human bodies. It's incredibly shocking to see.

Phil Klay

Pity addresses the perceived suffering, not the whole individual.

Phil Klay

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.

Phil Klay

Sometimes macho language is to mask things people are not ready to deal with.

Phil Klay