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.
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.
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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.
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.
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I suppose it is the lot of soldiers and Marines to be objectified according to the politics of the day and the mood of the American people about their war.
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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.
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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.
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.
war
I've been asked what differentiates war literature as a category, and I don't think there is anything.
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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.
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I started with things that I was troubled by or confused by or interested in, and then I wrote stories to try to puzzle my way through it. But the question is not how to represent war, because it's an abstract thing that's felt differently for all the characters.