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America’s Modern Wars – Forever Wars & Citizenship – Phil Klay
211 Plays2 years ago
Ep 030 – Nonfiction. What do America's modern wars say about us as a country, and how should we respond as citizens? Phil Klay joins me to discuss his incredible new book, "Uncertain Ground: Citizenship in an Age of Endless, Invisible War."
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Transcript
Pentagon's Combat Denial
00:00:00
Speaker
At one point, there's this sort of comical press conference, I believe it's with the Pentagon's spokesperson where one of these guys ends up in combat, right?
00:00:10
Speaker
And so there's a question, are we sending troops into combat? And the spokesperson is doing this sort of awkward dance with saying like, well, no, you know, like we're not sending up sending troops into combat, but sometimes they end up in combat situations. Right.
Skepticism on Ending Wars
00:00:25
Speaker
And by 2015, I'm at this event, there are, you know, there's a lot of three and four star generals in the audience. There are people from the NSC, I think Tony Blinken was there actually.
00:00:39
Speaker
And there's also about a dozen severely injured troops, right? You know, we're talking about guys who are missing multiple limbs, guys who have experienced severe burns. And then Ambassador Rice says, is talking about the topic of the panel, which is, you know, veterans issues. And she says, you know, this is important to us as an administration. One of our proudest accomplishments is ending the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
00:01:07
Speaker
And some of the audience, somebody in the audience goes, right? And it was just, this is a hard moment because it's like, who are you kidding? Like, are you trying to kid us or yourself?
Introducing Phil Clay
00:01:31
Speaker
Hello, everyone. This is AJ Woodhams, host of the War Books podcast, where I interview today's best authors writing about war related topics. Today, I am really excited to have on the show Phil Clay for his newest book, Uncertain Ground, Citizenship in an Age of Endless Invisible War. Phil Clay is a veteran of the U.S. Marine Corps and the author of Redeployment, which won the 2014 National Book Award for Fiction.
00:02:00
Speaker
He also wrote Missionaries, which was named one of the 10 best books of 2020 by The Wall Street Journal. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, and elsewhere. He teaches fiction at Fairfield University and is a council member for the Arts and the Armed Forces. Oh, I was. Not anymore. That organization no longer exists. Oh, no. Well, I'll cross that out in the back flap of the book then.
00:02:27
Speaker
Well, how are
Discovering Phil's Work
00:02:28
Speaker
you doing today, Phil? I'm doing great. Thank you so much for having me. Yeah. Thanks for being here. And, you know, I first came across your work in the best way. A few years ago, I was walking down a residential street in Washington, DC, and I saw a free little library and I, you know, like the tiny little boxes. Yeah. Yeah. So I opened it up and I saw what was in there and I saw redeployment and I, you know, I took it out.
00:02:57
Speaker
I read the copy, I saw the National Book Awards sticker that was on there and I took it home and I loved it and it's probably, you're the only author that I think that that is, that I've continued to like be a fan of your work after pulling you out of a little free library. That's amazing. Yeah. And I think too, so we were talking before the show, this is episode, I think this will be episode 30.
00:03:23
Speaker
You're the first author I think I've had on this show besides the debut authors where I've read all your books. Oh, wow. Yeah. So this is doubly cool for me. But Uncertain Ground.
00:03:36
Speaker
really a terrific book, a book of essays, very thought provoking. And when I was writing down questions for this interview, I think this is probably one of the more challenging interviews I've prepared for because these topics are so complex and there's such complicated issues, which is why you probably wrote about them as opposed to-
Essays on Post-Marine Life
00:04:00
Speaker
You know, doing it some other way. But maybe first to get us started here for the audience, a question I like to start off with, could you just tell us what is your book about? Yeah, so these are a series of essays that I wrote in between when I got out of the Marine Corps in 2009 and right after the fall of Afghanistan.
00:04:28
Speaker
Right? So the last essay in the book is about the fall of Kabul. And so it's my thinking through my own relationship to war. So I graduated from college in 2005 and went into the Marine Corps. And I was a public affairs officer in Iraq in 2007 to 2008. So during the surge, you know, there's this very politically contentious
00:04:55
Speaker
increase in troops and shift in strategy. Counterinsurgency was all the rage. We were doing population-centric warfare. And during the time that I was in Iraq, the violence level went down. We left Iraq feeling very good about what had happened. And then I left the Marine Corps, started writing about war, writing fiction about war, which, you know,
00:05:21
Speaker
tends to just muddy up the clean lines of your thinking in general. It's one of the benefits of writing fiction. And trying to work my way through what I was a part of what America looks like when you get back home, what the relationship is between, you know, Americans and the wars that they wage American citizens and veterans, and how you talk about
Themes of Phil's Book
00:05:46
Speaker
these things. And also,
00:05:49
Speaker
what consideration of war sort of tells you about sort of deeper values, I suppose, would be the four main buckets of subjects that I focused on. And the book is organized, not chronologically, but more thematically, you know, citizenship, soldiers, writing, art making, and faith, right? It's the final section.
00:06:16
Speaker
And so it's me thinking about modern war, how America shifted, how it wages war, and the kind of end point is the fall of Kabul and me reflecting on that and on the beginning of all these things, on the feeling that we had after 9-11 and what that led to.
00:06:37
Speaker
Yeah, well, before we kind of launch into some of the ideas that you discuss in your book, maybe we just start a little bit about your background. Sure. So of course, you mentioned you were in the Marine Corps, you were a public affairs officer, but you write that you didn't come from a military family. No.
00:07:02
Speaker
What kind of family did you come up with? Yes. My dad was in banking. He'd been in the Peace Corps, which is a little different from the Marine Corps. My mother worked in international medical aid for years. The family that was very interested in international affairs, my maternal grandfather had been a diplomat.
00:07:27
Speaker
grandfather on my dad's side, he had served in World War Two. So he was in the army, never really talked about it. But
00:07:36
Speaker
I had grown up being fascinated by international affairs. I thought I was going to become a diplomat when I was in high school. And I studied writing and history when I was at Dartmouth College. And then we were in two wars during that time. I went to college in September of 2001. 9-11 actually happened when I was in the woods on the Appalachian Trail.
00:08:05
Speaker
You know, so I didn't get that feeling that everybody else had of watching their televisions and horror and trying to figure out what was happening. We were in the woods and we heard rumors, you know, people would be like, Oh, somebody flew a plane into the world trade center. At first, we thought it was some sort of like weird joke that you tell people when they're away from civilization. And so when I emerged from the woods, the world was very different. We were very rapidly at war in Afghanistan.
00:08:36
Speaker
And then soon we were gearing up for war in Iraq. One of my older brothers had already made the decision to join the Marine Corps, which probably set me off thinking about it as an option. And I ultimately decided if I wanted to serve my country, I should join the military as well. And I picked the Marine Corps because they're sexier and better than all the other services.
00:09:00
Speaker
Well, what is your what is your parents? You know, your parents aren't military people. What does your family think when I guess your brother had already gone? So I guess like that softened the blow. But yeah, I mean, they were surprised. I don't think they expected it from any of us to be perfectly honest. You know, we we we weren't what that's not entirely true, because my one of my younger brothers was very interested in the army and he was in junior RTC. He was five years younger than me. So the fact that he went into the army was not super surprising.
00:09:30
Speaker
But they didn't, they didn't see it from, from me or my other older brother who, who went, I'm one of five boys. So there's, there's a bunch of us concerned, obviously, you know, you don't, as a parent, necessarily welcome the idea of your children joining the military in a time of war. And, you know, my older brother's job ended up being a lot more dangerous than mine, you know, as a public affairs officer, so it wasn't
00:09:59
Speaker
It's one of the safer jobs that you could do. But my second oldest brother, he was a combat engineer. He was in Ramadi in 06 attached to an infantry unit. So it was not the sort of thing that as a parent, you would welcome your child going into that circumstance, but nevertheless proud of us.
00:10:25
Speaker
my family very much believed in service. So I think that was always impressed on us, service in a broad sense. And as I said, there was a real interest in international affairs. So it wasn't a huge leap. And I'd gone to a Jesuit high school called Regis, where they very much focused on the idea of being men for others, on services being important. And so the idea that
00:10:52
Speaker
after college, we would want to do something that had some sort of service component. That was not surprising. I think just the fact that it was the Marine Corps was. Yeah, well, this is maybe a good segue then to talk about some of the stuff in your book, because one of the topics that you talk about is the reactions that people often have when they're told by somebody that they've joined the military.
Societal Views on Military Service
00:11:20
Speaker
specifically like if they're like an Ivy League grad and they're like, oh yeah, I just, you know, I joined the military. People kind of treat it as like, I don't know if an anomaly is the right way to put it, but maybe let's just like start talking about how some of the perceptions that the public has about the military. This is like a very
00:11:39
Speaker
It feels like a very Northeast-specific thing, right, where you'll encounter people. And I would sometimes encounter people. I was the first veteran they knowingly met, right? You know, this is after, you know, we'd already been at war for a decade.
00:11:58
Speaker
And there are people who would say to me directly like, oh, like you went to a good college, like that's amazing that you joined the military, you know, like, like, like you were somehow slumming it by joining the military or this, you know, that if you had any other options, this wasn't something that you would do rather than something that might be expected of someone during a time of war, right? The military is very,
00:12:28
Speaker
geographically defined. There are certain regions that send a lot of people to the military. It's also increasingly a family business. A lot of people who go into the military have military family. In fact, actually, there was a recent
00:12:46
Speaker
been keseling is a reporter at the Wall Street Journal has an article about how in the wake of unsuccessful wars, the military is finding a recruiting problem, because older family members are not
00:13:00
Speaker
sort of warning away some of the younger family members from joining the military for the fairly obvious reason that people who served in the past 20 years have less confidence in the leadership and the missions that they've been sent on.
00:13:17
Speaker
than in years past so Yeah, so there's this this weird thing where in certain pockets of the country Military service is like oh, it's like it's like oh, that's something for the peons, right? which is Something I react against or there's this idea that it's like oh, it's only what you would do if You have no other options. It must be only to get out of poverty or remember a friend of mine
00:13:46
Speaker
was, was talking at Venice and he's, he's black, right. And not from a wealthy family. And there were sort of these like people asking him sort of projecting on him that he had only joined the military because of, you know, the poverty draft or whatever. The certain point was like, no, no, no, I wanted to join the Marine Corps since I was four years old. Right. And there was a sort of weird and uncomfortable
00:14:16
Speaker
particular type of sort of racialized projection that was happening with, you know, this is what you look like and this is your background. Therefore, you joining the military must have been an act of desperation, not a choice or an act of patriotism or service.
00:14:35
Speaker
Yeah, you're so right when you talk about the geographic differences with the military. So I grew up in
Public's War Perception Disconnect
00:14:44
Speaker
a very rural, conservative part of Northern Indiana. Right. Yeah, and I grew up during the Iraq War. So I was born in 1992. So you're about 10 years older than me, I think. You write it in your book so I can bring it up, as you've given me permission to do. So when I was growing up,
00:15:04
Speaker
I was 10 years old when we invaded Iraq and in my community, to go into the military was this extremely honorable thing to do.
00:15:18
Speaker
idealized and it wasn't until later that I've lived in New York for a while and I'm in Washington DC now. It wasn't until later that I kind of got hip to some of these other perceptions of what it means to join the military and what service in the military to a lot of other people actually means. I talk a lot in the book about the sort of the civil military divide and this sort of sense of alienation that some people feel and the disconnect
00:15:48
Speaker
And a buddy of mine, a special forces veteran who lives in a rural town in Maine, reached out to me. He's like, I read your book. And he's like, I liked it, but I don't know what you're talking about. Like in my town, like everybody knows somebody who served. I was like, yeah, in your town. Exactly. Exactly. And it's just a radically different, you know, one of these essays, people got very annoyed by one thing that I quoted a friend of mine as saying,
00:16:18
Speaker
the journalist and Iraq and Afghan vet, Jacob Siegel, he admitted to me of having this kind of like instinctive recoil against men our age who didn't serve in the military and said, it's unfair, but I feel that. Who excused you, you know, or another way of putting it that would be, why did you think you had a choice? I know it's a volunteer army, but the volunteer army is a trick question, you know, you're supposed to say yes, if you have any honor. And that's one view.
00:16:48
Speaker
right that sub segments of the population feel and then there's this other view it's like the military is what you do if you're desperate or why would you join the military or there's something morally suspect in joining the military because look at what we've wrought look at the suffering and devastation overseas not only is it not something that you ought do but it's something
00:17:15
Speaker
that you should be judged for having done, right? If you supported the war, if you were enthusiastic, if you wanted to be a part of it, that's like a moral stain on your honor, you know? Well, let's talk about the Iraq War. So you write at the beginning of your book with Iraq and Afghanistan and kind of these forever wars. We've stopped paying attention.
00:17:40
Speaker
for the most part, as a country. And I think you're right on here with this too. I mean, the 20th anniversary of Iraq just passed and it really, there wasn't so much made about it.
00:17:53
Speaker
But talk a little bit about why you think we've stopped paying attention to- Yeah, and we're gearing up for different type of war. The military is going through a sort of doctrinal shift and acquisitions shift to prepare for peer-to-peer conflict, right? Back to what the military feels more comfortable doing, preparing for fighting Russia or China or what have you.
00:18:24
Speaker
But even during the wars, there was that sort of lack of attention. I remember talking with a journalist in, Oh God, this must've been 2016, 2017. And he said to me, he said, you know, I just caught myself talking about Afghanistan as if the war was over. And I was just there, right? Like done a reporting trip, like maybe like a couple months before.
00:18:51
Speaker
And so one of the things that the book talks about is this sort of shift in how we started waging the wars, right? Because they were very unpopular, but particularly, you know, and I was writing a lot of this during the Obama presidency and right afterwards, there's, you know, this hugely contentious troop surge in Iraq, right? Which people think of as successful, right? Certainly in the military.
00:19:20
Speaker
General john Allen once said to me was the closest we came to victory, right? That's how it's thought of. And then there's this idea that we're going to do what we did in Iraq in Afghanistan. And there's this sort of fight between the military and the Obama administration in the early days, the Obama presidency over
00:19:45
Speaker
the troop surge that Obama is planning, and then these troops go to Afghanistan as part of a sort of limited troop surge that is just doomed. I remember in 2009 being with a unit that was
00:20:02
Speaker
you know, getting ready for deployment to Afghanistan. And I talked to this, you know, Lance Corporal, like a young kid, you need talking like, I don't know, 1920 21 years old, something like that. And how are you going to be successful in Afghanistan? He tells me through cultural effectiveness, right? You know, which is obviously him just saying what he's been trained to say,
00:20:22
Speaker
because this is the idea. This is what we did in Iraq. This is what we're going to do in Afghanistan. And then that unit ends up going to Sengen and just being in a tremendous amount of violence.
00:20:38
Speaker
cultural and political and ethnic and religious and economic forces that you're supposed to take into account and impact as a battalion commander, platoon commander, squad leader, all of those just converging on murderous hostility to American troops. And a lot of those troops even at the time, no, as soon as we leave, this place is going right back, right back to the Taliban.
00:21:06
Speaker
Right? And so that style of attempting to win these wars is quickly going out of fashion. But there's this sort of disconnect in the American public where they don't like the wars. They understand that they're not going very well. They understand that repeatedly promises have
00:21:31
Speaker
just totally failed to materialize, right? The Iraq war was not over in six weeks, you know, or certainly not six months or whatever it was Donald Rumsfeld said. The initial insurgency in 2004 was not the last, you know, dying gasp of, you know, dead enders of the regime.
00:21:52
Speaker
The surge in Afghanistan did not ultimately succeed. You have the rise of ISIS later. It's a complex story. The surge in Afghanistan was a failure, a violent and bloody failure, ultimately. But at the same time, Americans, you know, there are reasons for this. Really don't like ISIS taking over a large swaths of Iraq.
00:22:22
Speaker
They are concerned about terrorism and all these other things. And so they want us killing the bad guys still. And what we start shifting to is an increase in use of drones, special operations forces, supervised training and assist forces who are working with local forces, giving them not just training support, but also
00:22:48
Speaker
Air support, you know, there's this highly sophisticated kind of kill capture program that gets developed. The stat that I use in the book is, you know, 2004.
00:23:03
Speaker
were joint special operations command, which is like the Navy SEALs, the other high-speed commando-type troops. They're doing about 12 raids a month. By 2006, mid-2006, they're doing about 300 a month, which is not because the Navy SEALs went to the gym and got on the treadmill and lowered their runtime and got faster. It's because the whole way that we integrated intelligence and direct action units totally changed.
00:23:31
Speaker
and became a much, much tighter loop. We're refusing intelligence and operations in a way that is, you know, Gates, a former defense secretary says, is unparalleled in modern warfare, right? And that style is something that we have applied to other places where, you know, the sort of intelligence targeting system is this incredibly lethal thing. And we're in Iraq and Afghanistan, special operations troops, American special operations troops are, you know,
00:24:00
Speaker
pulling the trigger at the end of that targeting system or dropping the bomb from a drone, there are places like Columbia where we're assisting them with the targeting apparatus and then it's Colombian troops that are dropping the bomb or pulling the trigger at the end of the day. And so there's a whole variety of ways in which we have been able to have a lot of lethal effects with a limited troop presence
00:24:26
Speaker
with a heavy reliance on technology, intelligence, special operations, troops, and also drones, which means that you have a lot less public exposure. You don't really have any embeds with special operations groups or with drones. A lot of the stuff is sort of draped in often more secrecy than is necessary.
00:24:56
Speaker
and it's relatively low cost compared to the sorts of way that we were fighting when I was in Iraq, right? But it's also much more distanced from the reality of what we're doing on the ground. And so I'm sort of tracing that shift and my sort of moral and also just kind of practical military concerns with
00:25:24
Speaker
what this means long-term for these regions and for what we're doing as a country in these places. And one of the things that concerns me is it's this thing where you're able to continue doing violence with low political cost and low public exposure, which means little accountability. And it's very easy for things to sort of take on a kind of, we continue doing this by inertia rather than because it's a good idea.
00:25:52
Speaker
or because it's part of a coherent integrated plan for a region.
00:25:58
Speaker
Yeah, and one of the things that really stuck out to me that's in one of your essays, so you write, so I mean, there's a lot of reasons
Forgetfulness in Modern War
00:26:08
Speaker
I think that you give for why people have forgotten or aren't paying much attention to these wars, but one of them that I thought was super interesting, you write, today we're still mobilized for war, though in a manner perfectly designed to ensure we don't think too much about it.
00:26:26
Speaker
And just thinking about how war now is designed almost for us to actually forget about, you know, Afghanistan and Iraq, that really struck me. Talk a little bit more about how that design is so prominent. We've been explicitly asked to, right? I mean, I was at a event in DC in 2015.
00:26:57
Speaker
where I was one of a group of people on a panel and we were introduced by, oh God, I think she was ambassador at the UN then, Susan Rice. And I tell this story in the book. And this is 2015, so this is well into
00:27:18
Speaker
the Obama administration's campaign against ISIS. Now sort of famously, Obama had ended the troop presence in Iraq. He ended the war in Iraq with great fanfare, right? And, and this was part of his, his sort of pitch as a candidate, right? That he was against dumb wars, right? You know, Iraq was the dumb war, Afghanistan was the more justifiable war because we'd been attacked. And he had a lot of backing from the anti-war movement within the Democratic Party. Okay.
00:27:48
Speaker
So he pulls troops out and also doesn't really pay much attention or exerts much influence in terms of things that are developing politically in Iraq that are pretty negative for the long-term future of the country. This is a sort of complex story to be told about how things unravel, but ultimately you have the rise of ISIS and this incredibly bloody
00:28:12
Speaker
evil, genocidal, slave-taking organization is just taking over city after city and going over large swaths of Iraq. And the Obama administration begins helping Iraq fight back against ISIS, which is something that I support, right?
00:28:35
Speaker
If ISIS is advancing on Yazidi population and it would be a good thing to drop some bombs and slow their advance and give the Peshmerga more time to move in, all for it because ISIS getting control of Yazidi population means they murder everybody except for the women who they take in slavery and rape.
00:29:01
Speaker
Yet, the Obama administration does not want to admit that the war has started again, the war that they had ended. And the Obama administration from the very beginning of the administration had argued that the president has really wide latitude in terms of the use of military force, that there's a global battlefield, that the president is pretty unconstrained.
00:29:30
Speaker
And when they start fighting back against ISIS instead of seeking for a new authorization for the use of military force, they argue that this is covered under previous congressional authorizations, right? The 2001 authorization, which was intended for Afghanistan and ISIS obviously didn't exist in its current form as an organization right then. It wasn't on anybody's radar.
00:30:01
Speaker
But because that authorization allows for fighting against Al-Qaeda and associated forces, that came to mean almost anything. It currently means groups in Africa that have a limited connection to the sort of terrorist movements that that authorization was intended for and which have never done any strikes outside of their region. So they argue that
00:30:27
Speaker
president has the authority to do this. And at the same time that they're waging this war, they're telling the American public that they're not at war, right? And as they start adding special operators, they're putting, you know, American special forces, American special operators on the ground in Iraq, but they're saying, well, you know, we're not putting boots on the ground, right? Because, you know, I guess special operators ride around on hoverboards. And they, you know, at one point, there's this sort of comical
00:30:55
Speaker
press conference, I believe it's with the Pentagon's spokesperson, where, you know, one of these guys ends up in combat, right? And so there's a question, are we sending troops into combat? And the spokesperson is doing this sort of awkward dance with saying like, well, no, you know, like, we're not sending up sending troops into combat, but sometimes they end up in combat situations, right? And by 2015, I'm at this event, there are, you know, there's a lot of
00:31:25
Speaker
three and four star generals in the audience. They're people from the NSC. I think Tony Blinken was there actually. And there's also about a dozen severely injured troops, right? You know, we're talking about guys who are missing multiple limbs, guys who have experienced severe burns.
00:31:43
Speaker
And then ambassador Rice says, he's talking about the topic of the panel, which is, you know, veterans issues. And she says, you know, this is important to us as an administration. One of our proudest accomplishments is ending the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. And some of the audience, somebody in the audience goes, right. And it was just, this is a horror moment because it's like, who are you kidding? Like, are you trying to kid us or yourself?
00:32:13
Speaker
And Obama said the same thing at a fundraiser not much later. So as we're radically amping up the amount of sort of military involvement of the United States in the war against ISIS, the Obama administration is trying to trot out this line that the wars are over. And that is, I think,
00:32:43
Speaker
politically made sense, right? You want to tell the American public the wars are over, but we're still killing the bad guys, right? Which is what Biden said when he brought troops home from Afghanistan, right? The war is over, but we retain over the horizon strike capability, right? So the war is over, but the killing will continue.
00:33:02
Speaker
And it's, I think, a very unsettling thing to have politicians realize the effectiveness of telling people that we're going to continue killing people, but you need not consider it war and you need not concern yourself with it as an American citizen. Yeah. Well, thinking about kind of the disconnect between leadership and soldiers and veterans,
Soldiers' Experience vs Leadership Accountability
00:33:28
Speaker
And I'm really sorry, actually, I meant to run this by you before we came on. So if you can't do this, that's fine. But I was going to ask you to read a passage from your book. Do you have the book? Oh, perfect. Well, it's on page 84. Yeah.
00:33:45
Speaker
And it starts with, you know, what is the saving idea of Iraq? Yep. Down just a little bit. And then just, um, reading until you get to the next paragraph, which says total mobilization. So all the way down until the next section, if you wouldn't mind. Oh, thank you. Sorry for springing this on you too. Pleasure.
00:34:03
Speaker
What is the saving idea of Iraq? In some ways, joining the military is an act of faith in one's country. An act of faith that the country will use your life well. What your peace of war will be, after all, is mostly a matter of chance. I have friends who join prior to 9-11, when machine gun instructors still taught recruits to depress the trigger as long as it takes to say, die, commie, die.
00:34:26
Speaker
I have friends who joined after 9-11, expecting to fight al-Qaeda only to invade Iraq. One friend protested the Iraq war, then signed up because he felt the war was unjust, and so we owed the Iraqis a humane, responsible occupation. The army sent him to Afghanistan twice. Another soldier I know, a reservist, had a unit slotted for one of two deployments, either to help with the Ebola crisis, a mission few would object to, or to man Guantanamo Bay. Depending on where they were sent,
00:34:56
Speaker
They knew they'd face radically different reactions when they came home. Of course, the praise or censure your average American civilian might dole out to those soldiers would in reality just be the dolling out of the praise or censure they themselves deserve for being part of a nation that does such things. The difference, though, is that it's impossible for the veteran to pretend he has clean hands.
00:35:15
Speaker
No number of film dramatizations of commandos killing bad guys can move us past the simple reality that Iraq is destroyed, there is untold suffering overseas, and we as a country have even abandoned most of the translators who risked their lives for us.
00:35:29
Speaker
Yet this fact seems not to have penetrated either the civilians we come home to or the government that sent us. How many American presidents or members of Congress have suffered from PTSD or taken their own lives rather than live any longer with the burden of having declared a war? Asked Humanities Professor Robert Emmett Meeker. None, of course. Yeah. Well, first of all, thank you so much for that.
00:35:55
Speaker
talk about those paragraphs and talk about what Iraq has revealed about us as a country and about our leadership and the disconnect between our leaders and our soldiers. Yeah, so that is... I started talking about that and the idea of the saving idea
00:36:22
Speaker
in relationship to an essay by Pat Hoi about Vietnam. And there's this thing that I've heard from a lot of soldiers, and you hear it from veterans of Vietnam. You hear it from veterans of our wars.
00:36:37
Speaker
we fought for each other, right? You sign up for whatever reasons, and then in the heat of combat, it's about the man or woman to the left or right of you, right? That you love the people that you're with, you feel tightly bonded to them as a unit, and that the meaning of what you did
00:37:03
Speaker
can be sort of set aside from the broader questions of the war because if you behaved honorably, if you looked after your colleagues, that's enough. And I think I understand that and especially I understand that in the wake of a war that failed, right? But nobody joins the military.
00:37:29
Speaker
purely to be in a situation where there's no broader goal than looking after the person to the left or the right of you, right? You wouldn't put yourself in that violent situation in the first place for that. We want what we have suffered and risked to mean something broader. And that has a real bite
00:37:55
Speaker
when the country is failing to provide you that mission. And I think that ultimately it is the country that's responsible, right? I mean, the burden of those experiences risks the physical cost, the mental cost, the moral cost of being in the morally bruising battlefield, right? Those are all borne by the soldier, but
00:38:22
Speaker
Ultimately, it's not up to the 19-year-old joining the military to ensure, while he's also trying to learn how to man a machine gun or perform basic fireteam capabilities, that his nation is
00:38:46
Speaker
Going to provide him with an adequate and moral and just and meaningful and achievable mission You know wherever they might send him. That's just That that that burden has to be a collective one, right? And yet when when the nation fails as a whole to provide that You know, it's really It's really
00:39:15
Speaker
only really felt very powerfully by the veterans in the audience. There was an event that I did with an Iraqi writer, and he felt very, I think, uncomfortable about being paired with me, which I understood. The publisher had asked him when he came to the United States to do an event with an American author because he wasn't well-known, and they picked me because I was a more well-known writer about the Iraq War, which he had also talked about.
00:39:46
Speaker
But as an Iraqi fiction writer, he had a very different response to an American Marine who served in his country, right? And at the event, he sort of, in the most genial way that you could, compared me to a Nazi, right? And asked me how I could possibly feel pride.
00:40:15
Speaker
for having served in Iraq, given what had happened to his country, which is a fair and pointed question. And I started to respond. He was like, oh, no, we can just talk about craft or whatever. And I was like, no, I'll give you a response. And I gave him a long response, which in some ways related to a lot of the things that I explore in that particular essay that I just read from, which is called Citizen Soldier.
00:40:41
Speaker
And after the event, we had a beer and talked about it. But it was interesting because in the audience of people in New York who are interested in coming out and listening to this Iraqi author talk about his art and his short stories and Iraq and also the war, I think a majority of the audience were veterans, right? This is in New York.
00:41:05
Speaker
And there was a discussion amongst us afterwards about his question and what it meant. And it's easy to dismiss that kind of question when it comes from an American anti-war activist. It's very different when you're facing that question from somebody like him.
00:41:34
Speaker
And yet, by that point in time, it wasn't, for the most part, American anti-war activists were in the audience because they'd moved on to the next political thing in American life. Well, first off,
00:41:55
Speaker
I don't envy you for being on stage and being compared to a Nazi. It was in the most genial way that you could possibly compare someone to a Nazi. Okay, okay. Because I was going to ask how you would feel just kind of being up there and in on the spot. But if it was, you know, if it was not like, you know, Phil, you are a Nazi, then I sort of expected a question of that sort. And I was glad to glad to do it, you know.
00:42:24
Speaker
I think it would have been, you know, there's a weird aspect of this where it's like, you know, go out and sell your book and oh, here, we'll connect you with an American Marine because that might help. But if you're going to do that, like you want to say your piece. And I think it was totally fair for him to say his piece and ask that question. And I think it would have been, the event would have felt much more false if we hadn't had that discussion.
00:42:54
Speaker
Well, initially, you were a supporter of the Iraq War. I don't know if that's... I'll let you use your own words. And we talked a little bit about this before we went on. But I'm just curious, what were your reasons for supporting the war and if that has changed? I assume it has.
Reevaluating Iraq War Support
00:43:16
Speaker
You did just say Iraq was a failure. So maybe you could just talk about that initial support you had for the war and how that's evolved.
00:43:25
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, so it's complicated to talk about where Iraqi is now. I mean, I think because it's different from Afghanistan, right? Which is sort of as straightforward a failure as, you know, the taking of Saigon, right? I was compelled by the sort of liberal internationalist
00:43:55
Speaker
responsibility to protect related argument for military intervention, where there's this horrible dictator who is violent to his own people, who is a source of instability and violence in the region. And yes, an invasion comes at the cost of human life, but the
00:44:25
Speaker
future trajectory of Iraq under this dictator is not one that avoids the loss of human life and ensures continued suffering. And so it will be worth it if we, you know, get rid of this horrible person and install a democracy that will in the long term, you know, be better for the people of Iraq. That was the sort of argument that I was compelled by. Right. If you think about the sort of
00:44:57
Speaker
vision of a kind of muscular liberal interventionist foreign policy. I think of somebody like Richard Holbrooke, right? That kind of image appealed to me, right? And as well as a kind of field of dreams, if you build it, they will come vision of democracy, right? And
00:45:22
Speaker
Yes, it would be fair to say that I don't subscribe to that view or justification of the Iraq War. Do you find a lot of veterans, sorry to interrupt you, but do you find a lot of veterans feel the same way as you? I think that a lot of veterans have a lot of cynicism about how the war was waged. It's interesting. People often ask about the invasion itself, right?
00:45:53
Speaker
and my views of the invasion itself. But the strange thing about is that my views on that and how I felt at the time, that was before I was in the military, right? And even by the time I joined the military, it was clear that the war was not going well, that the Bush administration's promises were false, that their hopes were false, that their
00:46:23
Speaker
claims about weapons of mass destruction, right, were false, which had never been a big component of why ultimately supported the war when I was 19 or 20. But so I joined a military where things weren't going well, and it was obvious that things weren't going well. And so a lot of the emphasis that I would
00:46:52
Speaker
put on the conversations that I've had with a lot of veterans were often about how the war was waged, right? They're just incredible failures. I mean, Donald Rumsfeld as a Secretary of Defense was
00:47:12
Speaker
It's not correct to call him incompetent because he was highly incompetent at achieving what he wanted to achieve. It's just that everything that he wanted to achieve was bad and disconnected from the reality on the ground. The war was waged very, very poorly.
00:47:31
Speaker
And then a lot of my concerns as a writer came after I'd left the military and were more about what the war was turning into, right, than with the questions of why we joined. And so I think there's a way in which, no, like we shouldn't have invaded Iraq, but for
00:47:55
Speaker
the entirety of the time that I've been a writer and that I've been in, and for the time that I was in the military, the question was not should we have invaded Iraq, which it seemed like was answered pretty quickly, that the answer was no. The question was, what should we do now? Right. And that's a much harder question. And I think that it's, you know, like I actually
00:48:23
Speaker
support a continued military presence, right, interact in this area for I think we're fairly straightforward regions. I mean, in 2019, I visited refugee camps and in
00:48:37
Speaker
northern Iraq of people who had sort of fled regions of Syria after we pulled some of the troops out there during the Trump sort of partial weird withdrawal of which there's like a whole host of complications that we could talk about and sort of
00:48:55
Speaker
civil military implications. But I met with people who'd survived genocide and slavery, visited the shattered center of the old town in Mosul. And I do see that there's a compelling reason to have troops there. So it's not a complete repudiation of American military presence overseas, right?
00:49:25
Speaker
But nonetheless, a lot of very, very serious moral and practical concerns about how we wage war, about the oversight of the wars that we're waging, and the extent to which they're actually an expression of the public will, and the extent to which we're forcing politicians to have to make a public case for war, which is, I think, important in democracy, because war is the most morally consequential thing that we do.
00:49:54
Speaker
And it shouldn't be sheltered from our public debate. People who want to shelter it from public debate often, it's like, well, public debate is fractious and partisan and cynical and ill-informed and all these other things. And yeah, I mean, that's all frequently true of public debate.
00:50:18
Speaker
But I think the history of warfare, particularly of American war, does not suggest that there are no deep-seated pathologies to unaccountable war run in the absence of public debate and public accountability. I wonder, given what has happened with Iraq and what you have seen personally and how
00:50:49
Speaker
Your feelings with the war have drastically changed as many people's feelings have. I wonder, someone like you who thinks deeply about citizenship and what it means to be an American, we're recording this just a few days after the 4th of July. Yeah. How do you celebrate 4th of July? What goes through your mind on a day like Independence Day?
00:51:17
Speaker
I'm incredibly proud to be an American. And I take great sustenance and nourishment from American history and American political traditions. But I think that those political traditions are diverse and interesting and offer us tools for moving forward and progressing in the future.
00:51:46
Speaker
a sort of tempered mix of cynicism and idealism is always, always helpful. I also love kitschy American stuff, to be perfectly honest, you know, and barbecues. Yeah. Barbecues, garden gnomes, waving American flags, you know, all that stuff. Didn't do it on the Fourth of July, but because, you know, sort of in the lead up to
00:52:13
Speaker
The fourth, it always stinks when it's like in the middle of the week, the fourth, like you went the long weekend, but yeah, I took my kids to like a minor league baseball game. And, and, um, so their team got to, you know, my two older kids, they're five and seven and their little league team.
00:52:34
Speaker
got to show up at the Brooklyn Cyclones Stadium. We went in advance and did some of the rides, the roller coasters at Coney Island and then went to the Brooklyn Cyclones game and their team got to go on the field as the national anthem was sung and they were at second base facing the flag. It was like a great, proud moment. I love that kind of stuff. That's great.
00:52:57
Speaker
Well, you talk about, so the concept of citizenship in your book, you talk about it at one point, it's very important to you in raising your kids. I'm also curious, you know, it's this thing where I think my
00:53:23
Speaker
relationship to patriotism is one of its very deep responsibility and duty, right? It's not like a sort of smugly triumphant
00:53:43
Speaker
love it or leave it sense. I mean, we're born out of a revolution and the revolution continues afterwards. I mean, think of somebody like Gordon Wood talking about the radicalism of the American Revolution and how the revolution sparks these broader social movements that are seeking to inculcate the values of the revolution in a society that is hierarchical and class bound and they're trying to break those things down.
00:54:10
Speaker
and that that kind of work as a sort of continuing process is part of the American experiment, the American tradition. And I think a relationship to immigration, I have an essay about that, is a part of that. You know, there's also this sort of way in which, you know, the philosopher, Alistair MacIntyre, has this speech that he gave his patriotism of virtue.
00:54:36
Speaker
where he talks about different sort of conceptions of morality and one in which patriotism is important. And he says,
00:55:06
Speaker
I think that those two components are really important, the crimes of my nation for which I am bound to make reparation and the benefits of my nation for which I'm bound to feel gratitude. I think it's important to feel both of those keenly. Well, because I know our time is winding down, I really want to talk to you about
00:55:34
Speaker
writing and war and pop culture, and specifically World War II. Because you write about that a lot, which you call the Good War. I'm writing a World War II novel myself. I don't call it the Good War, but yeah. Well, it's in your book. Yes, yes.
00:55:54
Speaker
Well, just talk about World War II. Why is it such a popular topic for American readers? What do you think it says about the general public? It's funny because I was always a big reader. If you read popular nonfiction of the 1990s in particular, this is like Steven Ambrose, this huge figure. War II is the good war and it's the greatest generation.
00:56:18
Speaker
it's America's entry into as the dominant superpower in the world, as a result of fighting a unquote as unquestionably just war against the epitome of evil, right? In Nazi Germany, right? And so that's like, this conception of war two that is, I feel like especially ascended in the 1990s, right? Where
00:56:48
Speaker
almost like a nostalgia for it because, you know, the Cold War is over.
Nostalgia for 'Just' Wars
00:56:52
Speaker
There's like a lot of material prosperity and no sense of, you know, I guess history ended. And then you contrast that with the fiction about World War II that I was writing. You know, you read books like Catch-22 or Gravity's Rainbow, which I actually read in Iraq.
00:57:18
Speaker
in 2007, which was an interesting experience, to put it mildly. Wars like this insane mass bureaucratic machine that obliterates human life, that's chaotic and absurd and evil. And these are two different
00:57:48
Speaker
Very different conceptions of the war and what war experience meant. And then I get my own taste of war when I go to Iraq and something that you would sometimes find is like,
00:58:08
Speaker
Marines or soldiers who came of age, the 90s, like I did, who talk about like, World War Two is almost like, like, I wish I could have that kind of a good war, right? Like, I wish I wish I had a war that I could wholeheartedly, you know, believe in. And one thing that's sort of interesting to me anyway, so
00:58:23
Speaker
Everybody's done some reporting trips to Ukraine. And so many veterans, including folks that I know, have shown up in Ukraine seeking to help in some way. Some veterans have joined the fight. And it's a sense of like, here it is. Here is
00:58:46
Speaker
a war with a clear front line against an evil, aggressive military power, right? That commits war crimes that is unjustly aggressing against a smaller neighbor trying to take territory and has to be fought back against, right? And that image of war has this deep, deep appeal, right? And it's, yeah, I think it,
00:59:17
Speaker
hangs over American popular culture and over the imaginations of veterans, right? Even if you know that the actual experience of World War II was totally radically complicated. I did an event, and I talk about this in one of the essays in the book, with this veteran who recently died, World War II veteran, Tony Bacara, was a wonderful photographer. He was a fashion photographer for years. He later told me that doing fashion photography saved his life because it taught him to look for beauty, right? That the world wasn't just ugly,
00:59:49
Speaker
And when he met me and he learned that I was a Iraq war veteran, he took me to a book of his photographs. His high school teacher taught him how to develop film. And he'd taken a camera with him to the front line in the Eastern theater of World War II. And he would take photos when they stopped into town. He'd collect the materials he needed and develop film and upturned helmets. And he has this amazing collection of imagery from World War II. And he shows me this photograph of a woman who is
01:00:16
Speaker
dressed up in nice gear and there's a Panzerfaust like a bazooka anti-tank weapon by her side and a knife as a corpse. And he explains that he came upon this woman who had been raped and killed. She'd gone out at the last day of the war, she'd gone out with a Panzerfaust seeking to die for her country, right? Since the war was ending. And soldiers had shot her in the gut and then raped her and then mutilated her body with a knife.
01:00:48
Speaker
That was the first thing that he wanted to tell me decades later, which wasn't his way of saying that we shouldn't have fought the war. But that was the memory that stayed with him when I asked him about the greatest generation. He was like, this BS. I met Tom Brokaw. He doesn't know what he's talking about. Yeah, I mean, you're right that there is no such thing as the greatest generation. Or maybe I'm paraphrasing.
01:01:16
Speaker
There's great events and then people who are thrown into them. Well, Phil, this has really been a great interview and thank you so much for joining me.
Communication in War Understanding
01:01:27
Speaker
My last kind of question here before we wrap up, you write towards the end of your book, you disagree with people who say war is beyond words. Why do you say that and why is this important? Right. Well, this is a sort of trope that you'll see
01:01:47
Speaker
where people say, you know, I could never understand what you've been through, right? Or on the other side, you know, there's a sort of, how many Vietnam veterans does it take to screw in a light bulb? You wouldn't know you weren't there, right? The sort of idea that war is this ineffable experience that can't be communicated and
01:02:15
Speaker
There's a kind of understandable reason for that, but it ultimately seems to me to be a real limit.
01:02:29
Speaker
on our ability to connect with other people, you know, a friend of mine who had been a lot of combat and did multiple tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, you know, he once said to me, really bothered him when people would say, you know, I can never understand what you've been through, right? Because you've been to war. And he would say, you know, if that's true, it means that my wife and children will never understand what I've been through, which means that I can never really truly come home. Right. And
01:02:57
Speaker
I want to believe that something important can be communicated, right? And the other thing that I think is that we often don't know what we've been through or what we make of it until we try to communicate it to other people. And other people often help us understand what we've been through. Other people who haven't been through the same thing but might offer a new way of looking at ourselves and our experiences and who we are.
01:03:24
Speaker
I was having this discussion with a woman who had responded to a piece that I've written an essay that's in the book about the experience of watching a Marine die in a combat hospital. And she was talking about the piece and how it moved her and then starts talking to me about her history of child abuse, which was quite severe. And she's talking about it and talking about some of the emotions that I talk about in my piece and some of the emotions that she felt reflecting on her own experience. And then she says, not that I'm comparing what I've been through to what you've been through. I can never imagine what you've been through.
01:03:54
Speaker
Which was a strange moment because, as I said, I was a public affairs officer. My deployment is not that hard to imagine. Imagine a lot of long hours at a plywood desk in the desert, right? And every once in a while going out on a patrol or something with an infantry unit that you're briefly attached to. Where she's talking about experiences that are hard to imagine as an adult, little on a child. And yet she didn't think that there was no communication was possible, but rather she'd read something that I had written and felt that articulated something.
01:04:24
Speaker
that she then wanted to communicate back to me in a new way. And that to me is the beauty of communication, the beauty to a sense of openness about experience across difference, right? That I think is really, really important, right? It's very easy. It's a temptation to sort of say, I have been through something intense. You cannot understand it. And therefore I can pontificate about it. I can speak with moral authority about it. I can shut down your attempt.
01:04:52
Speaker
to respond to it in moral or political ways because only I have the authority because I've been through it. But I think that's ultimately that sort of pedestal that we think we're on is ultimately a box. And the route towards seeking ways of genuine communication and genuine exchange is, I think,
01:05:19
Speaker
both individually important for the person who is like my friend wants to come home, right? Wants their children to be able to have some sense of what they've been through and how it shaped them. But it's also politically important because questions of war are much broader questions than the individual experience of soldiers and what they think it meant.
01:05:45
Speaker
Wow. Very powerful. Well, Phil, what are you working on next?
New Novel on 1970s Czechoslovakia
01:05:52
Speaker
Uh, I'm working on a novel set in Czechoslovakia in the 1970s because that's the obvious next step for me. Uh, no, my, so my maternal grandfather was the ambassador to Czechoslovakia from 76 to 78, uh, which was, uh, and he also accepted the Nobel peace prize on behalf of Henry Kissinger.
01:06:14
Speaker
He was the ambassador to Norway when Kissinger was awarded that. And so thinking about that time, moving from the end of the Vietnam war to representing America in the wake of that, I think, military and moral failure, to be perfectly honest. And then representing that country in Czechoslovakia at a time as the dissident movement is sort of gaining steam and
01:06:40
Speaker
and actually responding to American rhetoric about human rights and responding to the Helsinki Final Act. And all of these sort of things that wouldn't fit into a realist worldview as being important in terms of global affairs, but end up having sort of important repercussions throughout the society that you can start to see in the late seventies is all very interesting to me. And then also my grandmother at the time was asked to pass messages to the underground church.
01:07:11
Speaker
Yeah. So there's all sorts of interesting things. An interesting family. Yeah. So that feels resonant with a lot of my sort of more contemporary concerns for a whole variety of reasons. And so I'm writing a novel.
01:07:28
Speaker
based on all that history. Wonderful. Well, you will have a reader in me, definitely. Thank you so much. If there is worse stuff in it, I hope you will consider coming back on the War Books podcast. Yeah, yeah. Well, there will be, yeah. Philip, if people want to follow your work, if they want to stay in touch with what you're doing, are you on social media? Where can they stay in touch? Yeah. On social media, Phil Klyatt is my handle.
01:07:59
Speaker
I have a website, but every once in a while I write an article or something. Wonderful. Well, Phil Clay, Uncertain Grounds, terrific book. Go buy a copy. Go check it out from your library. Really some incredible essays. Phil, thank you again so much for your time today. Thank you.