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
Phil Klay quotes about
certainly clarity definitely found patriotism tyranny
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.
particular
There's a very particular way that the military speaks. There's a lot of profanity and a lot of acronyms.
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.
anybody both ended happened iraq joined serving tendency war
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.
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.
craft meet near notion obsessed people problem suppose surrounded talk writers
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.
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.
exposure
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.
bit easier interview open people talk vet war
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.
aggressive command great iraq journalism marines pieces soldiers sudden
A lot of the great pieces of journalism from Iraq showed how important command influence was in violent, aggressive environments, where Marines and soldiers had a constrained set of choices to make in sudden moments.
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.
experience few leads met people temptation whom
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.
certainly figure people stories war
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.
flattened gets war
Oftentimes, discussion of war gets flattened to a discussion of trauma.