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.

Fiction is a place where people can meet, where they take the time to very seriously examine and think about the experiences of other people and about the sorts of moral decisions those characters are making.

And that was my homecoming. It was fine, I guess. Getting back feels like your first breath after nearly drowning. Even if it hurts, it's good.

War is too strange to be processed alone.

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.

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.

There are two ways to tell the story. Funny or sad. Guys like it funny, with lots of gore and a grin on your face when you get to the end. Girls like it sad, with a thousand-yard stare out to the distance as you gaze upon the horrors of war they can't quite see. Either way, it's the same story.