Resilience is, of course, necessary for a warrior. But a lack of empathy isn't.
'Redeployment' is a military term. It means to transfer a unit from one area to another.
The First Battle of Fallujah was called off in part because of the intensity of non-U.S. media coverage of civilian casualties from outlets like Al Jazeera.
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.
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 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.
There's a wide spectrum between a Navy SEAL hero-killer and a traumatized victim, but those are the archetypes - hashed and rehashed in the media, in popular culture, in the minds of people with a lot of preconceived notions but not much else.
I got to travel around Anbar Province, had a great group of Marines who worked for me who traveled around Anbar Province. I got to hang out with a lot of different types of Marines and soldiers and sailors.
In war, it feels like everything you're doing is more important because you're in the proximity of violence and death, and that proximity changes your relationship to America because it changes the way you see the world.
I ended up going to Dartmouth, and I did Marine Officer Candidate School during my junior summer.
War is complicated and intense, and it takes time and thoughts to understand what it was.
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.
Responsibility and accountability is a big part of being in the military.
If you're going to write about war, the ugly side is inevitable. Suffering and death are obviously part of war.
I doubt there's anything you could say to Donald Rumsfeld that would puncture the armor of his narcissism.
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.
In the Marine Corps, you meet this really broad segment of the country; you're working with people from all kinds of backgrounds. And it exposes you to the American military, particularly the American military at war.
The civilian wants to respect what the veteran has gone through. The veteran wants to protect memories that are painful and sacred to him from outside judgment.
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.
