Quotes from Phil Klay

Sometimes macho language is to mask things people are not ready to deal with.

I ended up going to Dartmouth, and I did Marine Officer Candidate School during my junior summer.

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?

I don't believe in any Greatest Generation. I believe in great events. They sweep ordinary people up, expose them to extremes of human behavior and unimaginable tests of integrity and courage, and then deposit them back on the home front.

Prayer in a combat zone serves exactly the same purpose as it does in peacetime. In war, the stakes are life and death, true; but if you believe in God and in the notion of a human soul, then we are always making decisions of tremendous significance.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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