Phil Klay
@PhilKlay
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Author of Redeployment, Missionaries, and Uncertain Ground: Citizenship in an Age of Endless, Invisible War. Teaches at Fairfield University MFA.
Joined September 2011
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I wrote about the folks still working on evacuating Afghans, on humor, and on secular and religious prayers in a world that often fails to answer either.
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The sad thing is that if we hadn’t expanded NATO, Putin would have tirelessly devoted himself to world peace and the brotherhood of man.
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"We’ve discovered a new way to defile the uniform. Today, we allow murderers to wear it while being lauded as heroes."
Superb, brutally honest piece from
@elliotackerman
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16. But it's only during frightening times when you get to find out if your country really deserves to call itself the 'home of the brave.'
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I just went to Mearsheimer’s website and I was not prepared for his homepage.
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“The machinery...had me killing them.”
This, from Obama’s memoir, is pretty pathetic from a president who, for example, slashed economic assistance to Iraq and then ramped up military involvement while lying about it.
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Anyone who wants to seriously grapple with war had better be prepared for far more shocking opinions than are found in this thoughtful essay by a translator and writer living in Israel. Shame on
@GuernicaMag
for pulling it down.
Archived link here:
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Margaret Thatcher: “There's no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families.”
Camus: “No longer were there individual destinies; only a collective destiny, made of plague and the emotions shared by all.”
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God forbid Biden, who opposed accepting Vietnamese refugees in the 70s, who slow walked changes to Trump’s refugee policies, who ignored pleas to better prepare to help vulnerable Afghans, face pressure regarding this crisis.
Must be a neoconservative plot.
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@GravitysRa1nbow
I’d rather be eating hamburgers in America than ruling one of the largest empires in the world, to be honest, so I’ll chalk this up as a Habsburg win.
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It's actually your duty as an American citizen to subject our military and political leadership to scrutiny. Because, you know, democracy.
.
@PressSec
: "If you want to get into a debate with a 4-star Marine general, I think that's something highly inappropriate"
In what country?
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“One of the many strange things about being an American citizen these days is that there’s a whole lot of killing done in our name that our government deliberately keeps secret.“
I wrote about secrecy and American wars for
@nytopinion
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1 This article reminds me that pure cynicism about our country is as naive, and as dangerous, as pure idealism.
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1. Tremendously upset by attempt to effectively close our borders to Syrian refugees by imposing impossible-to-implement screening standards
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Had Christopher Hitchens devoted his life to the poor, I’m sure he would have handled things so much better than Mother Teresa. Sadly, he had more important things to do, like writing essays about how women aren’t funny and the Global War on Terror was going to be awesome.
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“When people like West and Sean Hannity, who has also been one of Lorance’s most vociferous supporters, declare that Lorance is innocent, they are also leveling an insidious accusation at the nine American soldiers whose testimonies helped put him behind bars.”
Wondering who is Clint Lorance, the Army lieutenant who
@realDonaldTrump
just pardoned?
Read this from
@adam_linehan
, published in 2017:
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“The sky was dying. He did not believe in an autocratic God. He did believe, dimly, in a democracy of ghosts. The souls of the dead, perhaps, formed committees, and these, in continuous session, attended to the destinies of the quick.”
Don Delillo is a lot like Nabakov. A great craftsman of sentences and clever use of words but ultimately there is nothing there
You close the book and none of it sticks with you. A ride at Disney land for people with masters degrees.
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Watching the Great British Baking Show contestants trash talking “American” pies like pecan or pumpkin pie and I’m ready to refight the Revolutionary War.
This in an episode that devoted a whole segment to the pleasures of eel pie. Which...is not better than pumpkin.
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He also killed children, shot indiscriminately at civilians, in a pathetic and vile attempt to inflate his kill count so as to prove himself a warrior. It repulsed the SEALs under his command.
“For some, killing becomes an addiction, but I consider it a good addiction needed to win wars,” Eddie Gallagher writes in his book, released Monday. “For me, getting into firefights and killing the enemy was the biggest high I ever experienced.”
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5. You’re supposed to risk your life for American ideals as well.
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“It sickened me yesterday to see security personnel—including members of the National Guard—forcibly and violently clear a path through Lafayette Square to accommodate the president's visit outside St. John's Church.”
-Admiral Mike Mullen
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The idea that Eddie Gallagher's SEALs (one of whom went on to DEVGRU) only turned on him because they were cowards who didn't want to kill the enemy is so stupid I have difficulty thinking anyone is actually dumb enough to believe it.
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“These kids want to live that way, want to have a good time, have at it,” he said. “I’m happy about it because that is what I fought for, so they can do whatever the hell they want.”
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“And you talk to them almost every day?”
“Every evening at 7 pm.”
“And what do you say to them?”
“I listen.”
Every single night, Pope Francis says he calls to check in on the priest at the only Catholic Church in Gaza.
"The other day they were happy because they managed to eat some meat. The rest of the time they eat flour, things made of flour," says the pope.
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Promotional videos show Chief Gallagher shooting an AR-15. “In closed online forums, several of the SEALs from his old platoon whom he had accused of not being able to meet his high standards noted derisively that the holographic sight on his rifle had been put on backward.”
Navy SEAL Edward Gallagher is capitalizing on his post court-martial notoriety to become a conservative influencer. Come check out some of his products.
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“Peace is not made between angels and demons but between human beings, and the real hell of life, as Jean Renoir once noted, is that everybody has their
reasons.”
I wrote about the recent controversy at
@GuernicaMag
for
@TheAtlantic
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11. Millions of pilgrims are hurtling through the darkness, but it’s Germany that has recently been the beacon standing strong and true,
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2. When I swore my oath of office as a Marine officer, I swore to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States.”
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Teddy Roosevelt publicly humiliated Dr. Seuss when Suess was 14-years-old.
This changes my view of his presidency.
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4. You’re not supposed to risk your life just for the physical safety of American citizens
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“While America as a whole chooses to express its love for its military in gooey, substance-free displays, our military waits, perhaps hopelessly, for a coherent national policy that takes the country’s wars seriously.”
I have a new essay in
@TheAtlantic
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15. then we have to behave like that kind of nation. I get that people are scared.
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I am incredibly thrilled and honored to learn I’m the winner of the 2018 George W. Hunt, S.J., Prize for Journalism, Arts & Letters for outstanding work in the category Cultural & Historical Criticism.
As a Catholic writer, this means so much. Now, I gotta work on the speech.
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“I’m a veteran, I’m telling you, don’t rip off any signs.”
“I’m not Jewish, he’s not Jewish, I don’t know if he is or not, doesn’t fucking matter.”
My neighborhood.
Friday morning in Forest Hills, Queens. Seems like some good old New Yorkers are pissed.
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A note on Trump’s doubling down on his threat to bomb cultural sites.
These are photos I took of the remains of the al-Nuri Grand Mosque last month on a trip to Iraq with
@Refugees
. Built in 12th century, the mosque was a symbol of Mosul. It was destroyed by ISIS in 2017.
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3. The Marine hymn claims that Marines are the “first to fight for right and freedom and to keep our honor clean.”
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14. the kind of nation capable of forging strong links in the Muslim world against extremism,
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10. “for all the pilgrims from all the lost places who are hurtling through the darkness toward home."
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@MrHWM
Catholicism takes the body very seriously. It is a religion of sights and smells and touch and taste, of communal rituals physically enacted and not a mere intellectualizing in one’s head. So sex and art are the only God substitutes with any weight, and thus any threat.
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“On the outside he was the quintessential all-American guy. To the Afghans he spent time with, nothing about him felt foreign. His sense of humor matched ours, his sense of curiosity and adventure matched ours.”
@lithub
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An auto exec hired private military contractors to kill his mistress and her boyfriend for $900K, then left them a Google review under his own name:
"They get the job done in an expedited time. Couldn’t imagine using anyone else!!"
@JackMurphyRGR
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“If we are really in the midst of a 4th Industrial Revolution there is every reason to expect that the psychological mass manias that accompanied such episodes in the past will recur in some form with their essential character unchanged”
@Jacob__Siegel
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“A new soldier sent to Afghanistan tomorrow can’t recall an America at peace. He’s too young. It’s too far gone.”
@MattGallagher0
on
@cjchivers
The Fighters
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As an American Catholic, the past couple decades have been rough, but it’s so inspiring to have leaders who look on the wreckage and think: You know what the Church needs? More partisan politics.
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9. “And she's still a beacon; still a magnet for all who must have freedom,
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My wife got me a MISSIONARIES cake to celebrate my book launch (made by my oldest son’s former nursery teacher, the incredibly talented ). It was a delicious pumpkin spice cake.
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“What we were afraid of is that, eighteen months from now, you’ve got candidate Greitens, former Navy seal, running for President.”
I wrote about Eric Greitens for the
@NewYorker
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If we won't stand by those who risked their lives for us, then we become a nation of cowards. And cowardice, by the way, doesn't win wars.
"Hameed Khalid Darweesh, had worked on behalf of the United States government in Iraq for 10 years."
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13. If we want to be the kind of nation that others will follow,
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4 The other way is to look at history and see horribly flawed humans periodically lit by sparks of grace, moral purpose and heroism,
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8. "After 200 years, two centuries, she still stands strong and true on the granite ridge, and her glow has held steady no matter what storm
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6. This shouldn't be a left-right issue. Ronald Reagan, who believed that America was the exceptional nation,
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Given that David Sacks doesn’t believe in ISIS-K because they didn’t have much presence on google trends before 2021, I must admit to having a perverse fascination with how he’ll churn the latest, horrific news into a set of talking points.
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I have a novel coming out later this year.
.
@canongatebooks
is publishing an "astonishing" debut novel of “extraordinary suspense” from award-winning writer and US Marine Corps veteran
@PhilKlay
—more about Missionaries here:
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Had two arguments with friends over Israel’s war in Gaza, and I thought I’d walk through my understanding of the argument for Israel, and why I reject it.
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…allies behind on the battlefield because they’re foreigners and they look different, even though they’ve done more for this country than most Americans — if that’s the case, then we really need to do a gut check about whether we really are the people we say we are.”
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Given that Iraq has gone through recurring extremes of horror (civil war, ethnic cleansing, mass rape, slavery, genocide), if you accept the “but hey, we got rid of Saddam so it was ultimately a good thing” argument, then there’s really no level of suffering you won’t wave away.
Must read from Bret Stephens. Iraq is better off today without Saddam’s demonic crime family.
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7. the “Shining City on a Hill,” asked himself during his farewell address from the Oval Office how that Shining City fared, answering:
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Wow. Thank you,
@BarackObama
, very glad you liked MISSIONARIES and put it among these other great books.
As 2020 comes to a close, I wanted to share my annual lists of favorites. I’ll start by sharing my favorite books this year, deliberately omitting what I think is a pretty good book – A Promised Land – by a certain 44th president. I hope you enjoy reading these as much as I did.
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I generally find this sort of lame contempt directed at Americans pathetic. It seems even more so as every civilian health care worker I know is doing work that exposes them to risk.
Dear vets. It’s OK Americans are about to be inspired by the courage of people other than you.
This is why less than 1% of us fight. Imagine bringing you pussies to war...
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@thomaschattwill
I once heard Margaret Atwood say “Wanting to meet an author because you like his work is like wanting to meet a duck because you like pâté.”
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“It’s about courage and cowardice,” says Travis Weiner, a two-tour Army infantry veteran whose interpreter was killed in Iraq years after he’d applied for a visa. “If people’s emotions about immigration are such that they are willing to tolerate literally leaving our wartime…
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Today I turned 40. And then the three-year-old got ahold of the balloon and now I’m back to nothing.
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“If I have authority to speak about our military policy it’s because I’m a citizen responsible for participating in self-governance, not because I belonged to a warrior caste.“
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A bunch of writers deciding we no longer need to read the classics of war literature (Graves, Heller, Hemingway,
"I'd rather not get a drink with a person who's taking his cues from Vonnegut") is just a bit too perfect an encapsulation of the times.
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Look what arrived on my birthday!
My four year old was very excited to see his name in the dedication too, and asked me to read it to him as a bedtime story...
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Just read the opening 15 pages of this and goddamn it is extraordinary
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“In postwar America only certain versions of self-sacrifice began to count.”
I wrote an essay about immigration, war, and what it means to be an American.
@nytopinion
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‘It’s Almost as If They Support a Hypothetical War’
I wrote about why America shouldn’t be supporting Israel’s war in Gaza.
@TheAtlantic
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I really don’t understand the popularity of petulant rich guys talking out of their asses about current events.
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Is a Navy SEAL in my local priest’s parking spot? Or is a Navy SEAL my new local priest?
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Amazing to see MISSIONARIES on the cover of the book review.
Grateful to Juan Gabriel Vásquez for the deep engagement with my book, and to the folks at
@nytimesbooks
for giving this space to a book about war in the 21st century.
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My family got me a cake in the shape of my book. It is delicious and now we all have black tongues.
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“All of us have served and have gone to great pains, risked our life, risked the lives of our comrades to uphold the values of this country...And the idea that none of that matters at the end of the day is a slap in the face to all of us”
@elliotackerman
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Apparently as early as the 16th century books of etiquette had already weighed in against the Twitter practice of quote-tweeting.
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Vatican photographer must have been disappointed when Pope Francis and Martin Scorsese jumped in and photobombed this sweet shot he was trying to take of me.
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Zadie Smith doesn’t think politics should be separate from our evaluations of art, and she says this quite explicitly. She just objects when it’s thin, reductive, boring, or when the political objection is itself politically objectionable, as she felt in the Emmett Till painting
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The priest: Do this in memory of me.
One of my children, loudly: Ugh! He says that EVERY WEEK!
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Anti-anti-Putin talking points are getting progressively sillier
Step 1: NATO
Step 2: Zelenskyy’s trying to start World War III.
Step 3: Biolabs?
Step 4: The Kinzhal! It’s hypersonic! Hyper! Sonic!
Step 5: [Alec Guinness voice] Those are not the war aims Putin was looking for.
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Huh. Apparently my first book angered someone so much they got it pulled from a school library.
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I wish less of the folks driving activism in the literary community weren’t also apologists for mass rape and murder
For authors still wondering if your voices matter, $75,000 will now be donated to the
@ThePCRF
because of the dogged work of
@wawog_now
and the moral courage of dozens of writers of conscience who spoke out in solidarity with the people of Gaza.
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24 We ignore the best tools we have to fight for a more just country.
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Occasionally, someone will point out that Marines like Full Metal Jacket, finance guys like Wall Street, and some men like Fight Club more for the masculine fantasy than the critique, and then some teacher’s pet will sneer, “But that’s a misreading of the theme, you idiots!” No.
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“There’s always been something a little pathetic with how Eric Greitens publicizes himself.”
I wrote about Eric Greitens, Dan Crenshaw, and the trend of political ads fantasizing about violence toward fellow Americans.
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“I wish I could turn a blind eye but the messages I am getting are so utterly desperate and harrowing, but I know soon I will have to just tell people there is nothing more I can do.”
I wrote about Afghanistan and 9/11 for
@NewYorker
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Perhaps I should start a GoFundMe to send Rob O’Neill and Mike Pompeo to Kabul.
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“Buran, go home.
It's better to be a deserter than fertilizer”
This is remarkable.
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John “It is more important that innocence be protected than it is that guilt be punished” Adams probably would not be a fan of this particularly dumb form of demagoguery
Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) literally says Ketanji Brown Jackson might have defended Nazis at Nuremberg:
"The last Judge Jackson left the Supreme Court to go to Nuremberg and prosecute the case against the Nazis. This Judge Jackson might have gone there to defend them."
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“People in the national-security community sometimes refer to these sorts of raids as “mowing the grass,” which brings to mind the old infantryman’s riddle, “What makes the grass grow?” The answer: blood.”
I have a new essay in the Atlantic.
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“Who is Hieronymus Bosch? Who is Hugo van der Goes? Who is Hans Memling? Inform us of their addresses”
Interrogation of Czech artist Oldřich Kulhánek in 1971
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