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

I don't believe in any Greatest Generation. I believe in great events. They sweep ordinary people up, expose them to extremes of human behavior and unimaginable tests of integrity and courage, and then deposit them back on the home front.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

With fiction, you can take something that bothers you, or that you don't have in clear focus, and you can put it under as much stress as you want. Really get underneath the skin. With nonfiction, you're restricted to what happened.

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.