Phil Klay

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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?

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.

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.

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.