All Wars Are Culture Wars
A Q&A with novelist and ex-Marine Phil Klay on the globalization of violence.
On a mission.
Photographer: Scott Nelson/Getty Images
We are living through a renaissance of veterans’ writing by the men and women who have fought in America’s wars since the Sept. 11 attacks. Among the very best of those writers is Phil Klay, a U.S. Marine Corps veteran whose short-story collection “Redeployment” won the 2014 National Book Award for Fiction and the National Book Critics' Circle John Leonard Prize for best debut work in any genre. His first novel, “Missionaries,” is about to be released. He discusses its themes with me below.
Kori Schake: Tell me about the title. It conjured for me soldiers (U.S., Colombian and even Emirati) almost as Jesuits, "advancing a global, interconnected system … that was civilization."