Quotes from Phil Klay

In State of the Union addresses, I always look at the foreign policy and military parts first, which are generally pretty minimal.

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

Marines and soldiers don't issue themselves orders; they don't send themselves overseas. United States citizens elect the leaders who send us overseas.

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.

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.

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.

I love opera. I love jazz, especially Mingus. This makes me sound highbrow. I'm not.

I have friends with post-traumatic stress - friends with post-traumatic stress who are, you know, highly successful, capable people.

The First Battle of Fallujah was called off in part because of the intensity of non-U.S. media coverage of civilian casualties from outlets like Al Jazeera.

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.

Veteran art creates a meeting place between veterans and civilians, or simply between veterans with different experiences.

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.

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.

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'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.

I was studying with Peter Carey, Colum McCann; but also, my fellow students were really critical readers for me.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The notion that war forever separates veterans from the rest of mankind has been long embedded in our collective consciousness.

You come back from war, and you have a certain authority to talk about war.

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?

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.