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
apart breaking experience language marine poem terms thinking voices waste
When I was in Marine training I memorised 'The Waste Land,' which was a significant experience in terms of really breaking apart language and thinking about how the different voices in that poem function.
goes sees skeptical truth veteran war
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.
empathetic fairly iraq learn mean pull relationship returned serious time willing
The Iraq I returned from was, in my mind, a fairly simple place. By which I mean it had little relationship to reality. It's only with time and the help of smart, empathetic friends willing to pull through many serious conversations that I've been able to learn more about what I witnessed.
flattened gets war
Oftentimes, discussion of war gets flattened to a discussion of trauma.
admitting cracks excitement experience full hell novel war
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.
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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.
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The Cold War provided justification for a larger peacetime military, since we were never really at peace, or so the argument went.
lived overseas people
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.
assume bad civilians embark iraq nation ownership wars
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.
civilian gone outside painful protect respect sacred veteran wants
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.
archetypes minds navy notions people popular seal spectrum wide
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.
coming consumed country happening ordered paying
There's something odd about working 24/7, being consumed with everything that's happening in Iraq, and then coming back to the country that ordered you over there only to realize that a lot of Americans are not really paying attention.
collective embedded mankind notion rest separates war
The notion that war forever separates veterans from the rest of mankind has been long embedded in our collective consciousness.
particular
There's a very particular way that the military speaks. There's a lot of profanity and a lot of acronyms.