One of the things that's difficult for people to understand is when you join the military, you don't sign up as an endorsement of any particular policy of the moment.

I always wrote - not about war, necessarily, but I always wrote stories. I tried to write while I was in Iraq. It's not really - I didn't do a very good job, and not about war.

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.

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.

Marines and soldiers don't issue themselves orders; they don't send themselves overseas. United States citizens elect the leaders who send us overseas.

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.

One thing I've always liked about the military is there's a certain amount of pragmatism.

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'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.

Less than 1 percent of American have served in 12 years of war, and serious public conversation about military policy is sorely lacking.

Fiction is the best way I know how to think something through.

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

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.

When I tell stories about Iraq, the ones people react to are always the stories of violence. This is strange for me.

The Cold War provided justification for a larger peacetime military, since we were never really at peace, or so the argument went.

I suppose it is the lot of soldiers and Marines to be objectified according to the politics of the day and the mood of the American people about their war.

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.

The Iraq I returned from was, in my mind, a fairly simple place. By which I mean it had little relationship to reality. It's only with time and the help of smart, empathetic friends willing to pull through many serious conversations that I've been able to learn more about what I witnessed.

I have two friends named Matt. They're both scouts in the cavalry. They both served in the same section of Iraq. They both worked with the same Iraqi translator. And yet, if you talk to them, their stories couldn't be more different, because one was there in 2006. One was there in 2008.

The notion that war forever separates veterans from the rest of mankind has been long embedded in our collective consciousness.

People lie to themselves all the time about what they've been through and what it means - I'm no exception. But you write those lies down - lies that really matter to you and that are really painful to let go of because they've become a part of who you are - and they don't work.

I ended up going to Dartmouth, and I did Marine Officer Candidate School during my junior summer.

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

I was studying with Peter Carey, Colum McCann; but also, my fellow students were really critical readers for me.