It's not so much the question that offends me; it's that the people asking it don't seem to respect the moral seriousness of the question.

Writing fiction means putting a lot of what you believe about the world at risk, because you have to follow your characters.

War is too strange to be processed alone.

The part of the strangeness of coming back from the war is the way we talk about it. We try to have a discussion about the war that doesn't turn into a discussion about one political side or the other. I wanted to reach out and talk to people about it through fiction, the way a narrative can draw someone in and ask them those questions.

Fiction offered me tools that allowed me to approach a wider variety of issues than the events of my own life would.

I think in America, especially today, our relationship to war is incredible distant. Yet narratives of war have such a primal power in this culture. They mainline directly into a whole series of emotional reactions and understandings of American patriotism, masculinity, and all of these other things.

Veteran art creates a meeting place between veterans and civilians, or simply between veterans with different experiences.