American - Writer | 1983 -
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.
Phil Klay
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There's a very particular way that the military speaks. There's a lot of profanity and a lot of acronyms.
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A great writer is a great writer... Tolstoy was not a woman, but 'Anna Karenina' is still a pretty good book.
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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.
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One of the things that's difficult for people to understand is when you join the military, you don't sign up as an endorsement of any particular policy of the moment.
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People have a very political way of looking at war, and that's understandable.
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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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At least for me, writing a book is continual exposure to blind spots. There were things I wanted to be true and wanted to believe, but it always got more complicated in the fiction.
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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.
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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.
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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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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.
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