
Oftentimes, discussion of war gets flattened to a discussion of trauma.

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.

War is complicated and intense, and it takes time and thoughts to understand what it was.

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.

In State of the Union addresses, I always look at the foreign policy and military parts first, which are generally pretty minimal.

there are circumstances that trump personal feelings.

War is too strange to be processed alone,

But platitudes are most appealing when they're least appropriate.

I love opera. I love jazz, especially Mingus. This makes me sound highbrow. I'm not.

Bob, I quickly learned, had an existential view of the Iraq war.

People have a very political way of looking at war, and that's understandable.

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.

I'm not anti-war. I served in a war, and I served proudly. But just or not, necessary or not, war is the industrial-scale slaughter of other humans.

I saw so many radically different versions of Iraq. It would have been difficult for me to come back and think, 'This is the Iraq experience.'

Writing fiction means putting a lot of what you believe about the world at risk, because you have to follow your characters.

A great writer is a great writer ... Tolstoy was not a woman, but 'Anna Karenina' is still a pretty good book.

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.

Certainly, when I'd left Iraq back in 2008, I'd been proud of my service, but whether we'd been successful or not was still an open question.

There's a very particular way that the military speaks. There's a lot of profanity and a lot of acronyms.

Political novels are full of pitfalls, particularly for a novelist with strong political leanings.

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.

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.

I have, for a very long time, been a huge admirer of Marilynne Robinson, whose work I just love.

Responsibility and accountability is a big part of being in the military.

I was angry. I'd gotten a lot of Thank You For Your Service handshakes, but nobody really knew what that service meant, you know?

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

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

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.

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.

We are part of a long tradition of suffering. We can let it isolate us if we want, but we must realize that isolation is a lie.

We've got some PTSD vets," Sarah says, making it sound like she's keeping them in jars somewhere.

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.

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

War is too strange to process alone.

I doubt there's anything you could say to Donald Rumsfeld that would puncture the armor of his narcissism.

'Redeployment' is a military term. It means to transfer a unit from one area to another.

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?

You come back from war, and you have a certain authority to talk about war.

Resilience is, of course, necessary for a warrior. But a lack of empathy isn't.