I went straight from the Marine Corps to the MFA. The way that you would express things among Marines is somewhat different than the way you're supposed to express things in a creative-writing workshop.
The Cold War provided justification for a larger peacetime military, since we were never really at peace, or so the argument went.
In State of the Union addresses, I always look at the foreign policy and military parts first, which are generally pretty minimal.
When I tell stories about Iraq, the ones people react to are always the stories of violence. This is strange for me.
There's something odd about working 24/7, being consumed with everything that's happening in Iraq, and then coming back to the country that ordered you over there only to realize that a lot of Americans are not really paying attention.
Oftentimes, discussion of war gets flattened to a discussion of trauma.
Fiction is the best way I know how to think something through.
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'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.
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.
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.'
Sometimes macho language is to mask things people are not ready to deal with.
One thing I've always liked about the military is there's a certain amount of pragmatism.
I started with things that I was troubled by or confused by or interested in, and then I wrote stories to try to puzzle my way through it. But the question is not how to represent war, because it's an abstract thing that's felt differently for all the characters.
Marines and soldiers don't issue themselves orders; they don't send themselves overseas. United States citizens elect the leaders who send us overseas.
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.
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.
When I first came back from Iraq, I of course found myself thinking a lot about it. Not just my experiences, but those of people I talked to, friends, and colleagues.
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.
Bombs do very, very bad things to human bodies. It's incredibly shocking to see.
