Phil Klay

The Cold War provided justification for a larger peacetime military, since we were never really at peace, or so the argument went.

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.

Bombs do very, very bad things to human bodies. It's incredibly shocking to see.

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.

I never thought anyone would pity me because of my time in the Marine Corps.

War is complicated and intense, and it takes time and thoughts to understand what it was.

If you're going to write about war, the ugly side is inevitable. Suffering and death are obviously part of war.

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.

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.

War is too strange to process alone.

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?

People lie to themselves all the time about what they've been through and what it means - I'm no exception. But you write those lies down - lies that really matter to you and that are really painful to let go of because they've become a part of who you are - and they don't work.