Phil Klay
Phil Klay
Phil Klayis an American writer and United States Marine officer who won the National Book Award for fiction in 2014 for his first book-length publication, a collection of short stories, Redeployment...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionWriter
CountryUnited States of America
certainly figure people stories war
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.
war
I've been asked what differentiates war literature as a category, and I don't think there is anything.
deal macho people
Sometimes macho language is to mask things people are not ready to deal with.
takes time understand war
War is complicated and intense, and it takes time and thoughts to understand what it was.
arena courage display experience impose millions narratives politics touch war
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.
flattened gets war
Oftentimes, discussion of war gets flattened to a discussion of trauma.
bare needed recounting
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.
aggressive command great iraq journalism marines pieces soldiers sudden
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.
experience few leads met people temptation whom
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.
citizens ideals life physical risk safety supposed
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.
compare experience open readers tendency using war
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.
affairs assisted hung public stay travelled variety wide worked
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.
foreign generally state union
In State of the Union addresses, I always look at the foreign policy and military parts first, which are generally pretty minimal.
both iraqi scouts section served stories worked
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.