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.

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

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.

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.

Part of the reason I'm writing it is to try to figure out what that is myself. It's not like I came back from Iraq and said, "We need to have a conversation, I know exactly what it is." It was just this sort of sense of something missing and then trying to write toward what that was, and to solicit from other people a sense of what that might be.

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

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