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.
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.
The Cold War provided justification for a larger peacetime military, since we were never really at peace, or so the argument went.
Political novels are full of pitfalls, particularly for a novelist with strong political leanings.
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.
One thing I've always liked about the military is there's a certain amount of pragmatism.
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.
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.
Pity sidesteps complexity in favor of narratives that we're comfortable with, reducing the nuances of a person's experience to a sound bite.
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.
We're so used to using military terminology in civilian speech that we forget those terms might mean something very specific.
It's not a problem to be surrounded by other writers if that's the craft that you're doing. I suppose if you get obsessed with the notion of being a writer more than the writing itself, that would be bad. But I live near really smart, thoughtful people who take writing very seriously, and I can meet them for breakfast and talk books.
After the fighting is done, and even when it's still happening, apologies are often needed for the recounting of bare facts. Sometimes bare facts feel unpatriotic.
