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
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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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If we fetishize trauma as incommunicable, then survivors are trapped - unable to feel truly known by their nonmilitary friends and family.
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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.
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Political novels are full of pitfalls, particularly for a novelist with strong political leanings.
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One thing I've always liked about the military is there's a certain amount of pragmatism.
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I was studying with Peter Carey, Colum McCann; but also, my fellow students were really critical readers for me.
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Less than 1 percent of American have served in 12 years of war, and serious public conversation about military policy is sorely lacking.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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The notion that war forever separates veterans from the rest of mankind has been long embedded in our collective consciousness.
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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.
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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.
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It's easier to get people to talk to you if you're a vet and you want to interview a vet about war. Sometimes they open up a little bit easier.