Phil Klay Quotes & Sayings

For me, leaving the Marine Corps was more disorienting than returning home. — Phil Klay

God always offers forgiveness," I said, softening my tone, "to those who are truly sorry. But sorry isn't a feeling, you understand. It's an action. A determination to make things right. — Phil Klay

I doubt there's anything you could say to Donald Rumsfeld that would puncture the armor of his narcissism. — Phil Klay

Resilience is, of course, necessary for a warrior. But a lack of empathy isn't. — Phil Klay

Responsibility and accountability is a big part of being in the military. — Phil Klay

We've got some PTSD vets," Sarah says, making it sound like she's keeping them in jars somewhere. — Phil Klay

When I tell stories about Iraq, the ones people react to are always the stories of violence. This is strange for me. — Phil Klay

She spent all his combat pay before he got back, and she was five months pregnant, which, for a Marine coming back from a seven-month deployment, is not pregnant enough. — Phil Klay

Pity sidesteps complexity in favor of narratives that we're comfortable with, reducing the nuances of a person's experience to a sound bite. — Phil Klay

It's often difficult to get perspective on your own stories, on your own experiences, without talking them through with someone who is genuinely interested in thinking about them. And that's the key. — Phil Klay

There are two ways to tell the story. Funny or sad. Guys like it funny, with lots of gore and a grin on your face when you get to the end. Girls like it sad, with a thousand-yard stare out to the distance as you gaze upon the horrors of war they can't quite see. Either way, it's the same story. — Phil Klay

I've been asked what differentiates war literature as a category, and I don't think there is anything. — Phil Klay

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. — Phil Klay

It's not so much the question that offends me; it's that the people asking it don't seem to respect the moral seriousness of the question. — Phil Klay

Though I continue to tell stories about Iraq, I sometimes fear this makes me a fraud. I feel guilty about the sorrow I feel because I know it is manufactured, and I feel guilty about the sorrow I do not feel because it is owed, it is the barest beginnings of what is owed to the fallen. — Phil Klay

I was new to the cc game, a game played with skill by staff officers throughout the military, but I knew enough to know that the more senior people you could comfortably cc on your e-mails, the more everyone had to put up with whatever bullshit your e-mails were actually about. — Phil Klay

Fiction offered me tools that allowed me to approach a wider variety of issues than the events of my own life would. — Phil Klay

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. — Phil Klay

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

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

I didn't want to write a 'this is how it is' Iraq book, because the Iraq War is an intensely complicated variety of things. — Phil Klay

Chaplain Vega's a tall Mexican guy with a mustache that looks like it's about to jump off his face and fuck the first rodent it finds. Kind of mustache only a chaps could get away with in the military. — Phil Klay

With fiction, you can take something that bothers you, or that you don't have in clear focus, and you can put it under as much stress as you want. Really get underneath the skin. With nonfiction, you're restricted to what happened. — Phil Klay

And that was my homecoming. It was fine, I guess. Getting back feels like your first breath after nearly drowning. Even if it hurts, it's good. — Phil Klay

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

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. — Phil Klay

It's not a problem to be surrounded by other writers if that's the craft that you're doing. I suppose if you get obsessed with the notion of being a writer more than the writing itself, that would be bad. But I live near really smart, thoughtful people who take writing very seriously, and I can meet them for breakfast and talk books. — Phil Klay

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. — Phil Klay

Writing 'Redeployment' shook me in ways I never expected. — Phil Klay

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. — Phil Klay

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. — Phil Klay

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. — Phil Klay

Marines and soldiers don't issue themselves orders; they don't send themselves overseas. United States citizens elect the leaders who send us overseas. — Phil Klay

Oftentimes, discussion of war gets flattened to a discussion of trauma. — Phil Klay

Supposedly, going to war initiates you into this gnostic priesthood of people who've had a liminal experience forever separating them from civilians. Except ... you go there, and it is what it is. A form of human activity as varied as any other. — Phil Klay

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. — Phil Klay

It's a professional military. You sign up and agree to allow your countrymen to use your life as they see fit for the next four years. And I think we all should have a greater role in ensuring that we use those lives wisely. — Phil Klay

Certainly, when I'd left Iraq back in 2008, I'd been proud of my service, but whether we'd been successful or not was still an open question. — Phil Klay

Our country regularly uses military force, but only a fraction of Americans serve in the military. This means fewer and fewer people have a direct link to the military, and yet it remains as important as ever that we have a rich understanding of what we are doing as a country. — Phil Klay

I've certainly thought a lot more about things like tyranny and patriotism and violence. I think I found some kind of clarity - definitely a thicker understanding. — Phil Klay

Veteran art creates a meeting place between veterans and civilians, or simply between veterans with different experiences. — Phil Klay

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. — Phil Klay

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. — Phil Klay

But platitudes are most appealing when they're least appropriate. — Phil Klay

And glad as I was to be in the States, and even though I hated the past seven months and the only thing that kept me going was the Marines I served with and the thought of coming home, I started feeling like I wanted to go back. Because fuck all this. — Phil Klay

Sin is a lonely thing, a worm wrapped around the soul, shielding it from love, from joy, from communion with fellow men and with God. The sense that I am alone, that none can hear me, none can understand, that no one answers my cries, it is a sickness over which, to borrow from Bernanos, "the vast tide of divine love, that sea of living, roaring flame which gave birth to all things, passes vainly." Your job, it seems, would be to find a crack through which some sort of communication can be made, one soul to another. — Phil Klay

I was angry. I'd gotten a lot of Thank You For Your Service handshakes, but nobody really knew what that service meant, you know? — Phil Klay

People have a very political way of looking at war, and that's understandable. — Phil Klay

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. — Phil Klay

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. — Phil Klay

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. — Phil Klay

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. — Phil Klay

Political novels are full of pitfalls, particularly for a novelist with strong political leanings. — Phil Klay

You can't describe it to someone who wasn't there, you can hardly remember how it was yourself because it makes so little sense. And to act like somebody could live and fight for months in that shit and not go insane, well, that's what's really crazy. And then Alex is gonna go and act like a big hero, telling everybody how bad we were. We weren't bad. I wanted to shoot every Iraqi I saw, every day. And I never did. — Phil Klay

I like the ethos of the military and the idea of joining an institution in which, at the very least, everyone who signs up believes in something. — Phil Klay

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. — Phil Klay

I did try to write in Iraq, and I failed. I think you just don't have the brain space for it. — Phil Klay

If we fetishize trauma as incommunicable, then survivors are trapped - unable to feel truly known by their nonmilitary friends and family. — Phil Klay

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. — Phil Klay

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. — Phil Klay

Going to war is a rare experience in American culture, so it's easy for simple notions to gain a lot of weight. The reality is always more complex. — Phil Klay

The notion that war forever separates veterans from the rest of mankind has been long embedded in our collective consciousness. — Phil Klay

I'm not anti-war. I served in a war, and I served proudly. But just or not, necessary or not, war is the industrial-scale slaughter of other humans. — Phil Klay

And yet, I have this sense that this place is holier than back home. Gluttonous, fat, oversexed, overconsuming, materialist home, where we're too lazy to see our own faults. At least here, Rodriguez has the decency to worry about hell. — Phil Klay

It's a powerful moment, when you discover a vocabulary exists for something you'd thought incommunicably unique. Personally, I felt it reading Joseph Conrad's "Lord Jim." I have friends who've found themselves described in everything from science fiction to detective novels. This self-recognition through others is not simply a by-product of art - it's the whole point. — Phil Klay

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. — Phil Klay

You come back from war, and you have a certain authority to talk about war. — Phil Klay

I don't want to act as though my deployment was particularly rough, because it wasn't. I had a very mild deployment; I was a staff officer. — Phil Klay

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. — Phil Klay

'Redeployment' is a military term. It means to transfer a unit from one area to another. — Phil Klay

Maybe you didn't understand American foreign policy or why we were at war. Maybe you never will. But it doesn't matter. You held up your hand and said, "I'm willing to die for these worthless civilians. — Phil Klay

late for that," said Major Zima. "Besides, if there's one thing I've learned doing Civil Affairs in Iraq, it's that it's hard to come in and change people's culture. — Phil Klay

Writing fiction means putting a lot of what you believe about the world at risk, because you have to follow your characters. — Phil Klay

War is too strange to process alone. — Phil Klay

I saw so many radically different versions of Iraq. It would have been difficult for me to come back and think, 'This is the Iraq experience.' — Phil Klay

I grew up a little north of New York City and went to high school at Regis, an all-boys tuition-free high school in Manhattan. — Phil Klay

I have friends with post-traumatic stress - friends with post-traumatic stress who are, you know, highly successful, capable people. — Phil Klay

We're told that when we remember, the same parts of our brain light up as when we experienced the event we're remembering. Your brain lives through it again. — Phil Klay

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. — Phil Klay

We're so used to using military terminology in civilian speech that we forget those terms might mean something very specific. — Phil Klay

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. — Phil Klay

Writing fiction was a way to take the ideas that troubled me or confused me and put them under pressure. — Phil Klay

I write in coffee shops, libraries, parks, museums. I get antsy and then get on my bike and go someplace else, letting the ideas spin around in my head as I dodge taxis. — Phil Klay

I was studying with Peter Carey, Colum McCann; but also, my fellow students were really critical readers for me. — Phil Klay

Treating war as farce is one way soldiers deal with it. — Phil Klay

Pity addresses the perceived suffering, not the whole individual. — Phil Klay

I always wrote - not about war, necessarily, but I always wrote stories. I tried to write while I was in Iraq. It's not really - I didn't do a very good job, and not about war. — Phil Klay

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. — Phil Klay

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

[Prayer] will not protect you. It will help your soul. It's for while you're alive. — Phil Klay

The First Battle of Fallujah was called off in part because of the intensity of non-U.S. media coverage of civilian casualties from outlets like Al Jazeera. — Phil Klay

There's a very particular way that the military speaks. There's a lot of profanity and a lot of acronyms. — Phil Klay

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

All That You Can Be'?" I said. "I don't know. That was the slogan for me, growing up. And then it was 'Army of One,' which I never understood, and then it was 'Army Strong,' which is about as good a slogan as 'Fire Hot' or 'Snickers Tasty' or 'Herpes Bad.' A better slogan would be, 'You Can't Afford College Without Us. — Phil Klay

there are circumstances that trump personal feelings. — Phil Klay

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. — Phil Klay

Bob, I quickly learned, had an existential view of the Iraq war. — Phil Klay

In State of the Union addresses, I always look at the foreign policy and military parts first, which are generally pretty minimal. — Phil Klay

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. — Phil Klay

I got to travel around Anbar Province, had a great group of Marines who worked for me who traveled around Anbar Province. I got to hang out with a lot of different types of Marines and soldiers and sailors. — Phil Klay