Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
War is too strange to be processed alone.
Treating war as farce is one way soldiers deal with it.
Writing 'Redeployment' shook me in ways I never expected.
Fiction is the best way I know how to think something through.
Pity addresses the perceived suffering, not the whole individual.
Oftentimes, discussion of war gets flattened to a discussion of trauma.
Responsibility and accountability is a big part of being in the military.
You come back from war, and you have a certain authority to talk about war.
For me, leaving the Marine Corps was more disorienting than returning home.
I never thought anyone would pity me because of my time in the Marine Corps.
Sometimes macho language is to mask things people are not ready to deal with.
People have a very political way of looking at war, and that's understandable.
Resilience is, of course, necessary for a warrior. But a lack of empathy isn't.
Bombs do very, very bad things to human bodies. It's incredibly shocking to see.
I love opera. I love jazz, especially Mingus. This makes me sound highbrow. I'm not.
'Redeployment' is a military term. It means to transfer a unit from one area to another.
War is complicated and intense, and it takes time and thoughts to understand what it was.
One thing I've always liked about the military is there's a certain amount of pragmatism.
I did try to write in Iraq, and I failed. I think you just don't have the brain space for it.
I have, for a very long time, been a huge admirer of Marilynne Robinson, whose work I just love.
I ended up going to Dartmouth, and I did Marine Officer Candidate School during my junior summer.
Political novels are full of pitfalls, particularly for a novelist with strong political leanings.
I've been asked what differentiates war literature as a category, and I don't think there is anything.
Writing fiction was a way to take the ideas that troubled me or confused me and put them under pressure.
There's a very particular way that the military speaks. There's a lot of profanity and a lot of acronyms.
I doubt there's anything you could say to Donald Rumsfeld that would puncture the armor of his narcissism.
A great writer is a great writer... Tolstoy was not a woman, but 'Anna Karenina' is still a pretty good book.
If you're going to write about war, the ugly side is inevitable. Suffering and death are obviously part of war.
I was studying with Peter Carey, Colum McCann; but also, my fellow students were really critical readers for me.
In a strange way, you have to have a certain amount of distance from a thing in order to be able to write about it.
When I tell stories about Iraq, the ones people react to are always the stories of violence. This is strange for me.
Fiction offered me tools that allowed me to approach a wider variety of issues than the events of my own life would.
Veteran art creates a meeting place between veterans and civilians, or simply between veterans with different experiences.
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.
Writing fiction means putting a lot of what you believe about the world at risk, because you have to follow your characters.
We're so used to using military terminology in civilian speech that we forget those terms might mean something very specific.
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.
The notion that war forever separates veterans from the rest of mankind has been long embedded in our collective consciousness.
The Cold War provided justification for a larger peacetime military, since we were never really at peace, or so the argument went.
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.
In State of the Union addresses, I always look at the foreign policy and military parts first, which are generally pretty minimal.
I have friends with post-traumatic stress - friends with post-traumatic stress who are, you know, highly successful, capable people.
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.
Less than 1 percent of American have served in 12 years of war, and serious public conversation about military policy is sorely lacking.
Certainly, my exposure in high school to writers like Flannery O'Connor, Shusaku Endo, Fyodor Dostoevsky and Graham Greene was formative.
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.
If we fetishize trauma as incommunicable, then survivors are trapped - unable to feel truly known by their nonmilitary friends and family.
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.
Pity sidesteps complexity in favor of narratives that we're comfortable with, reducing the nuances of a person's experience to a sound bite.
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.