The war came to me in my dreams and showed me its sole purpose: to go on, only to go on.

I understood that 'The Yellow Birds' would be a peculiar representation of the experience of being at war. I intended it to be so.

You want to fall, that's all. You think it can't go on like that. It's as if your life is a perch on the edge of a cliff and going forward seems impossible, not for a lack of will, but a lack of space. The possibility of another day stands in defiance of the laws of physics. And you can't go back. So you want to fall, let go, give up, but you can't. And every breath you take reminds you of that fact. So it goes.

My personal opinion is that if someone writes honestly about war, it will inherently be anti-war.

It reminded me of talking, how what is said is never quite what was thought, and what is heard is never quite what was said. It wasn’t much in the way of comfort, but everything has a little failure in it, and we still make do somehow.

One of the things my service in Iraq did give me was this freedom from fear of failure or any kind of expectations that I had to take a standard path.

I'm always most interested in writing about things that I don't understand.