Our country regularly uses military force, but only a fraction of Americans serve in the military. This means fewer and fewer people have a direct link to the military, and yet it remains as important as ever that we have a rich understanding of what we are doing as a country.

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.

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

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.

Sin is a lonely thing, a worm wrapped around the soul, shielding it from love, from joy, from communion with fellow men and with God. The sense that I am alone, that none can hear me, none can understand, that no one answers my cries, it is a sickness over which, to borrow from Bernanos, “the vast tide of divine love, that sea of living, roaring flame which gave birth to all things, passes vainly.” Your job, it seems, would be to find a crack through which some sort of communication can be made, one soul to another.

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

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.