[You can listen to this episode of Another Life on Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, or wherever you get your podcasts.]
Transcript
Joy Marie Clarkson: Welcome to Another Life, a podcast of Plough magazine. I’m your host, Joy Clarkson. On this week’s episode, I had the pleasure of interviewing Phil Klay. Phil is an American writer whose fiction and nonfiction explore the moral complexities and spiritual pressures of the American military life. Amongst many other honors, Phil’s collection of short stories called Redeployment won the National Book Award in 2014.
He served in the United States Marine Corps from 2005 to 2009, and he teaches at the MFA program at Fairfield University. I found this conversation with Phil insightful, bracing, and heartening. One of the themes we kept circling around was the idea of honor, of fulfilling the roles that we take up in our lives with courage and bravery, and that this is something that we are called to do even when it will not always be straightforward or black and white or easy.
One of the moments that stood out to me near the end of the conversation was when I asked Phil how we can refrain from despair when many of the institutions we’ve trusted or given our lives to, be they churches or political systems, have failed us or showed themselves to be corrupt. He very kindly, but boldly said to me, something along the lines of the fact that many people have persisted in the pursuit of good and just life with far fewer resources and far less power than many of us have. And it would be cowardly of us to become discouraged and stop trying to live well. So how’s that for a call to action? In addition to this though, the whole conversation was thoughtful and interesting. I loved getting to pick Phil’s brain about the great authors of war that have shaped how he thinks and writes. I found this conversation encouraging and strengthening, and I hope you will too. So happy listening friends, and thanks for tuning in to Another Life.
Joy Marie Clarkson: It’s wonderful to have you here today. Why don’t you tell us just a bit about who you are and what you do from a day-to-day basis, and then I’ll dig into kind of how you came to where you are now. So, how do you spend your days and what are you working on?
Phil Klay: How I spend my days means mostly being a dad, honestly, that’s quite time consuming. But I’m a writer. I teach at Fairfield University in their low residency MFA program and in their undergraduate program. And I mostly have written about American Military affairs. My first book was a short story collection about the Iraq war. I served in the Iraq war as a marine public affairs officer in 2007, 2008. My second book, novel, Missionaries, takes place in Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen. Actually, it ends with us bombing Yemen, but mostly in Colombia. And yeah, I’ve written a lot of essays and op-eds about the military, about veterans affairs, but I also, one of the currents, I think, in my writing or something that I’m continually concerned with is faith – I’m a Roman Catholic myself. And for me, the literature that has spoken most deeply to me is literature that’s alive to not just kind of human beings’, moral, psychological, political struggles, but also their spiritual ones. Yeah, that’s what I try to do anyway.
Joy Marie Clarkson: That sounds like plenty to keep you busy. So I have two questions. One is, how did you come to serve in the military? Was that something that you dreamed about or wanted to do, or something you found yourself doing?
Phil Klay: When I was a little kid, I wanted to be a diplomat like my maternal grandfather. My mother’s father had served all over the world. He actually accepted the Nobel Peace Prize on behalf of Henry Kissinger, which is odd.
Joy Marie Clarkson: No!
Phil Klay: He was the ambassador to Norway at the time. It was a very contentious award. Lê Đức Thọ turned it down because such bourgeois sentimentalities were not for him. Kissinger was going to turn it down as well because they were being awarded the prize jointly, but then that was a diplomatic issue. My grandfather met with the head of the Nobel committee on a park bench in front of the Royal Palace in Norway. They worked out a compromise where Kissinger wouldn’t accept it himself, but my grandfather would.
And yeah, so he went – it was, you know, a hugely controversial award. They pelted the car that he came in with snowballs, which seems a delightfully Norwegian way of protesting. And yeah, so he, and then his next posting was to be Ambassador to Czechoslovakia. So he was there during Charter 77, this important protest movement. So I had grown up with all these stories and he actually came out of the labor movement. had, you know, taught Italians and Germans how to start labor unions after the war and I was fascinated with foreign affairs. So that’s what I thought I was gonna do. I was gonna be a diplomat and Then when I went to college in 2001, September 11th happened. I was actually in the woods when September 11th happened – I was hiking the Appalachian Trail as part of Dimensions of Dartmouth like you know, the sort of event thing that they do for incoming students. And we were very soon at war and service was very important to me, important to my family. And I thought that if I wanted to serve my country, then I should join the military because we were war.
Joy Marie Clarkson: And was that directly after you were out of university?
Phil Klay: Yeah, so I did my OCS, which is Officer Candidate School. It’s the part where they yell at you a lot. I did that during my junior summer. And then I went into the military, accepted my commission in 2005. So it was sort of interesting because I didn’t join up immediately. I didn’t enlist. I went through college and, so, you know, first we were in Afghanistan, then we were in Iraq, then it became very clear that the, you know, initial claims about Iraq were not true, both about weapons of mass destruction, but also about how easy it would be and how we would be greeted and how quick this particular war would wrap up. And so, by the time that I accepted my commission in May of 2005, you know, it was very clear that the war was not going well, that Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld was a disaster, that, you know – all sorts of things had gone awry.
Joy Marie Clarkson: How did you feel going into it, with that full knowledge?
Phil Klay: I felt good. I don’t know. It seems weird to say, but it felt like, not good but I felt like there was a clear purpose. A certain amount of chaos, we’d unleashed chaos, right? And also done, you know, certain things that I think morally blackened the United States, like the embrace of torture. And yet, you know, I had this sense that how well we did would be measured in human lives and I should do my part. And that my part would be a relatively small one, but hopefully beneficial in some way and I went overseas when the surge was happening so there’s this big debate about you know strategy and tactics in the Iraq war and I very much believed that the surge was a good idea or at the very least that we should commit to trying to bring down the level of violence in Iraq and restore some kind of order.
I went over to Anbar Province; I was doing a very safe job, but in the most violent place in Iraq, which was a sort of thing … when we first went there, it was very violent. And there was a truck bomb outside of [place name] in the first month, and we were bringing in horribly wounded men, women, and children, and that sort of thing. And then the violence just really plummeted during the thirteen months that I was there. And so I left feeling very good, actually, about the military strategy and what we had done and what I had been a part of. And I...kind of came back to the United States feeling like I had a license to pontificate about military affairs that I didn’t actually understand. Right. And then of course, you know, I got out of the military. Some of the Marines that I knew or I worked with went on to Afghanistan and there was this – very much this sense of – like, well, you know, we used this strategy in Iraq and now Iraq’s doing great and relatively, and now we’re going to do this in Afghanistan.
Joy Marie Clarkson: Thank you.
Phil Klay: I remember talking to this Lance Corporal from 2-8. I was like, “how are you going to be successful in Afghanistan?” he said, “through cultural effectiveness,” right? Which is not what you expect a Marine to tell you, a Marine infantryman to tell me. You expect them to say that they’re going to close with and destroy the enemy. But he’d been taught, you know... “we’re working with the people” etc. etc. and then he goes to an incredibly violent place in Afghanistan. That unit takes a lot of casualties and a lot of those Marines come back convinced that the second that we leave it’s gonna go right back to the Taliban, and as this is going on, some people that I know are getting pretty seriously injured over there and in one case, killed.
Iraq starts spiraling out of control. That sparked a lot of new thinking for me, to put it that way.
Joy Marie Clarkson: At what point in the course of your life did you start thinking that this was something that you would write about, that the military, experiences, soldiers …
Phil Klay: So, I didn’t go in thinking like I’m gonna go into the Marine Corps and then write about it. I had always written stories and I actually wrote stories when I was in Iraq. sort of like in my downtime I tried to write a little bit but not about the military actually. But when I came back from Iraq I started writing stories. Actually the first story in my first book, Redeployment, begins... we shot dogs, not by accident. We did it on purpose and we called it Operation Scooby. I’m a dog person. So I thought about that a lot. And I wrote that first sentence, we shot dogs not long after I got back from Iraq. And that story is actually, it’s not about my deployment. It’s not about anything I did. It takes place during the second battle of Fallujah. But it was sort of my entry point to begin thinking about this bizarre experience of war and homecoming because it’s not just that, you know, war is a strange experience and it’s also that America looks very different when you get back, right? And it looks different at different times. And, you know, writing fiction has always been for me the most serious way to think about the world. You take everything that you think you know and you put it into fiction and you come to understand how thin your ideas about the world actually are. Because you have to make the characters richer and more interesting. And that forces you to just reevaluate everything.
There is something quite morally serious, about writing. Or there can be at least. But I think that writing stories also makes you particularly aware of the power of stories and the power of stories that we ingest that kind of shape how we live our lives and how we understand our own actions. So to some extent, your decision to enlist is partially a part of a story about this particular war, but also about America and what its values can be – about what a good life looks like. And I think good literature helps us both interrogate our own stories, but also feel the force of a powerful story.
Joy Marie Clarkson: Were there any writers … so it sounds like you were in the space of kind of writing and caring about that before you enlisted. Were there any writers that particularly informed, have particularly informed how you write?
Phil Klay: So when I studied creative writing at Dartmouth and I worked my last year with this poet, Tom Sleigh, who’s just a brilliant poet and actually wonderful essayist. He has written about conflict areas. And when Tom found out that I was joining the military, he was like, you need to read the greatest books ever written about war. So he made me read, you know, War and Peace and Hemingway’s Short Stories and Céline’s Journey to the End of the Night and David Jones’s In Parenthesis, and, you know, a million other things. And Isaac Babel’s Red Cavalry, right? You know, so that was pretty important. When I was in training for the Marine Corps, I think this is one of the best things that I did for myself as a writer. Military training can be incredibly boring.
And at The Basic School – which is after I graduated as a lieutenant – you kind of learn all the basic stuff you need to know as a lieutenant at The Basic School. You know, you’d be in the woods freezing and I would print out poems to memorize to pass the time. You know, you couldn’t read a book cause then you’d be like totally out of it. But, uh, I’d print out poems, cut them up into index card size pieces and then laminate them and bring them out.
And so, you know, I’d have a little card in my hand while I’d be, you know, in the prone checking my, you know, sector or whatever in the defense. And I started out with smaller poems. Things that you can pretty easily memorize. But eventually it was like, you know, like there’s a lot of boredom to deal with in military training and poems that rhymed or had a too-regular meter were too easy to memorize and stick in your head. So I’d go through my poems too quickly. So I decided I was gonna memorize The Wasteland, which I did, which is a testament to the boredom that there is at The Basic School. But really getting all of those shifts of language in your head.
Joy Marie Clarkson: Wow!
Phil Klay: At that level, like when you memorize it, I think was really, really important for me thinking about language and voice. Reading Joseph Conrad when I came back was really important to me, right? Lord Jim because Conrad is somebody who – I have like this, and I think I have this like kind of analytical mind. But I also kind of think it’s a failure that I have an analytical mind, you know, like I infinitely prefer the Thomas Aquinas having the mystical vision and deciding that everything he’s written is mere straw in comparison to reading the summa itself.
Joy Marie Clarkson: Cool.
Phil Klay: Conrad is somebody who, know, if you read one of the kind of naturalist writers, right, they’ll kind of explain a character and all their, all the psychological forces around them, right, that shape what they do. And sometimes there’s a lot of insight in some of those writers, but there’s a kind of almost clockwork mechanism to the way that the plots bring out and their conception of the human being is a little bit more mechanical than we actually are. And Conrad is able to do that sort of rich understanding of all of the social forces buffeting an individual and shaping them unconsciously in ways that they themselves don’t understand. But there’s always this gap, right? He’s a writer who can be brilliantly analytical, but is attuned to something deeply mysterious at the heart of reality. And that was...really important for me and also reading Lord Jim about a guy who like you look at him and he seems like the kind of guy you can trust in a crisis and then a crisis comes and he fails and he dishonors himself – and what does that do and how does he respond going on was a you know just felt really really resonant for somebody who’d been in the military. And Dostoyevsky for me is like the top.
Joy Marie Clarkson: Well, yes, who can surpass Dostoyevsky? When you were just talking just now about that kind of question of how does one go on from dishonor, it reminds me oddly of, I don’t know, so this is a question of ignorance rather than, and it’s a comment more than a question of ignorance and then I have a follow-up question about honor.
Have you read about Sir Gawain and the Green Knight?
Phil Klay: I have read it. I don’t not care about it, but it’s been a while.
Joy Marie Clarkson: So all I was gonna say is that is an interesting story to me because it is also about someone who you think has all these principles and then he does this thing which he regards as not being honorable. And then the whole plot unfolds out of this kind of experience of stain or more out of honor. I think it’s a very weird, I really just liked actually the recent movie adaptation of it a few years ago. It wasn’t recent. That was like almost a decade ago, but I just liked it – because I felt like it didn’t lean into that kind of peculiar psychological struggle of staining one’s own honor. And I think it had a hard time doing that partially because honor is not a word I think we encounter, at least the ordinary person in everyday life encounters much.
Phil Klay: Yeah, I was about to say, it probably reads foreign or peculiar or outdated to a lot of people.
Joy Marie Clarkson: Yes, for which reason I think there’s many other reasons that know, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is weird. But one reason is that we don’t kind of have this concept of what honor is. But it’s something that I’ve noticed comes up a fair bit in your writing, both nonfiction and fiction. So, and I don’t know, is that some, I was curious to hear from you if you could kind of give a description of what honor is. But I was also curious, do you think that’s something that is a language that’s more common to those who have served in the military?
Phil Klay: It was very common in the military, right? And for obvious reasons. Yeah, I think one of the things is that in elite public discourse in the United States, The form in which we’re most comfortable talking about how one ought behave is from the perspective of a sort of disembodied abstracted morality, frequently kind of inflected with utilitarianism, We don’t think necessarily, you know, we think there should be like one common flattening code, right? And honor is not about that. Honor is about living up to one’s role, right? For one type of person, it would not be dishonorable to run from danger, right? But it would be for a Marine. You know, it might be one person’s job to face it and one person’s job to, you know, grab the kids and flee to safety. Because courage is the thing that is required of you as a Marine, which is not necessarily a moral failing in other people, but it would be felt as a stain or a moral failing if you accepted a role that demands it, and there is a way in which I think it is a term that we kind of really should recapture and obviously there are negative things about aggressive honor cultures, right? And I think it often gets associated with archaic social morality, in social views.
But for me, as I look at American public life, you know, it’s like, there is a way that a president ought to behave and the way that a secretary of defense ought to behave and a way that a congressman ought to behave that comports themselves with, you know, in allegiance to a certain view of correct conduct specific to the role and what is honorable for somebody in that role and that is separate from the thing that sort of has assumed public life, is does it please me or does it achieve the political outcome that I want, which feels increasingly how we judge everything in the public realm rather than in, you know, in terms of honorable conduct.
You know, even if it doesn’t necessarily always lead to the desired outcome.
Joy Marie Clarkson: So I think it’s the idea that it would be worse to behave in a way that was not honorable than to lose your own political fight sometimes, right? That there’s some sense in which what is more important is people acting in accordance with the kind of honorable way to be rather than seeing everything as a battle that has to be won. And that actually goes back to …
Phil Klay: It’s about virtues, There’s virtues that are important and what virtues are particularly required of you depends upon the role that you have accepted in society.
Joy Marie Clarkson: It’s not for us to choose and there’s always a... I’m sorry that my brain is fixated on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, but that is part of the tragedy in the story, is that he’s drawn between how to act honorably towards this woman and how to act honorably in battle. And so he feels like he can’t kind of succeed in both. And so there is always going to be a tension in acting honorably. And, you know...one of the things about this is like, it doesn’t always offer like a clean answer, right? There are these penitential codes from after the Battle of Hastings, Medieval penitential, like essentially a list of penances to give people who served in war.
Phil Klay: What is fascinating to me when you look at them is...they will give penances like somebody is supposed to if they killed somebody in war, if they injured somebody in war, they’re supposed to go and confess that they did it. And then they get a penance, right? If you killed somebody, this is what you get. If you maimed somebody, this is what you get. If you’re an archer and you have no idea if you killed somebody, but you probably could have, this is what you get. And it’s very detailed. And what’s fascinating to me about that is it’s not saying you fought in a bad war and therefore you must be punished. It’s “you fought in a war that we wanted you to fight in, that we needed you to fight in. And yet, having done what was required of you, what was honorable in that circumstance, now you also need to confess because you did evil.” Right? Because killing another human being made in the image of God is an evil thing. And that, a kind of utilitarian logic, seems insane. Right? Either it’s a good thing to have served a war or it’s not.
Either you’re in the black or in the red, right? In terms of your goodness ledger. But psychologically, and to me, spiritually, I think it’s a much more profound way of dealing with it. It may be the honorable thing and also the thing that you need to confess at the same time. And so, yeah, I think when you start talking about honor, when you talk about virtues, I think sometimes things can get messier, but I think that tracks more onto human life, than a kind of machine-like calculation that seeks to evade tragic outcomes, tragic choices and resolves things that are fundamentally mysterious into yes and no answers.
Joy Marie Clarkson: Amen. Yeah, it makes me think of a great chapter on After Virtue in the Greek tragedies and, at least in the Greek mindset, the unimpeachability of the good, which is, I think, experientially true. And I don’t think it’s intellectually or theologically true that there is often this sense that in the fallen world that we live in, we are always negotiating these things.
Phil Klay: Gabriel Marcel was director of a station in the Red Cross during World War I. And after a major battle, one of his responsibilities was – they’d get flooded with requests from families and he’d have to let people know – is my son, husband, father alive or dead, right? And he divided the work into, sort of psychologically divided the work into like...
problems and mysteries and the problem was the yes and no answer, right? where you have to gather data and you get information that can be put on an index card in a filing cabinet and once you hunt down the correct information you have a binary yes or no: alive or dead. But then when you deliver that that information – once you have solved the problem you deliver that information to the family. And now you are no longer in the realm of...binary, right? Because you telling them that does not solve a problem for them that brings closure. It opens up a mystery, an experience that will echo throughout their lives. Right? You’re in the realm of mystery. Anytime you’re dealing with, with love, death, life, family, you’re in the realm of mystery and …
Joy Marie Clarkson: Good.
Phil Klay: It is very easy, especially when you’re doing things at scale, to try and turn things simply into problems. Right? I deliver the yes or no information and then I’m out. And yet, what is actually important about human life and what is important about solving the reason that you’re trying to solve the problem in the first place is everything that is contained in that mystery.
He was concerned, and I think that this is a concern that goes throughout the twentieth century, and certainly now in the current age, it’s only more relevant that we were increasingly trying to, you know, take things that were fundamentally mysterious and turn them into problems. There is a kind of simple way in which I think this tracks onto military policy that I’ve sometimes written about, where, you know, it’s sort of bizarre to me that on the one hand, the past twenty to twenty-five years have been nothing but, or should have been nothing but a continuing education in how little can be achieved with simply the use of military force. A continuing education in the fact that even though we develop the most sophisticated targeting operation that the world has ever known, we’ve become very adept at basically targeted assassinations, right? We’ve created a capability that has never existed before, and that has failed to, you know, in Afghanistan it failed to achieve any benefits. And now, we’re doing targeted strikes on Venezuelan boats and so on. And it seems that on the one hand, like, how is it that we keep doubling down on this particular tactic?
Well, with a lot of these societies, the thing that is difficult is, well, the society, right? What does doing violence in a particular cultural, political, and economic context do, right? If you do a targeted strike in a rural region in Afghanistan or...to take the subject of my novel, if you kill a drug dealer, because America helps the Colombians do targeted assassination and then they use that technology and capability to target drug dealers. If you kill a drug dealer, does that stop the flow of drugs? Does it lead to more political stability in that region? Does it just simply lead to a reshuffling? What happens? The complex and very difficult thing to deal with is what happens socially, culturally, economically, politically in a region when you try and exert your will on it. That’s a very hard problem to solve and it’s also fundamentally out of our control, right? You can do things like the surge in Iraq that yield benefits, right? Where violence goes down and you think you’re being very successful, but a string of sort of and military, sort of political changes in the country, as well as military decisions made by your enemies might totally reverse that progress and a region that was relatively quiet when I left in 2008 and getting better can all of a sudden experience the rise of ISIS, right? And anything where you’re trying to deal with that –long-term slow changes that are sort of happening across societies and often across borders. Controlling that is impossible. You can’t control it. You can only try and influence it in positive or negative ways. But if you kill somebody, you have a yes or no answer. It’s a thing that you can do that you can chalk up as a win. I think that we, in terms of public policy, and our political rhetoric, there is continually that sort of thing where we want the thing that feels like a clear and definitive answer when what actually is concerning for us is something much broader and more difficult to dominate.
And as a civilian Something I wish, something I deeply believe, is that more people should realize how little we understand what’s happening often in the world.
This may seem a bit selfish, but what I want most of all is not to let the kinds of things that are happening and decisions that are being made and my feelings about them, to not let them to be something that makes me become less virtuous. Now I know that may sound a bit self-centered, but what I mean by that is when you get into this mentality of it’s just a game that needs to be won and we’ve won another point, then as a civilian you’re kind of made to say, is it good or is it bad? But it might keep you from being able to just have the human response of concern for killing. And someone will be like, “well, no, but this is what the military has to do.” And maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. I don’t actually know. But what I do know is that I’ve seen a lot of people even just in my everyday life, who’ve kind of become inured to the idea that great suffering or great violence is just a necessary part of the game you have to play. And I guess something I’d want to say is even if it is, even if suffering, even if these difficult decisions that you need to go back and do penance for afterwards are necessary, for ordinary people we shouldn’t become...it’s not helpful or good for us to become kind of inculcated in that mentality of a win is a win and not to think of other countries and other places as human beings. That sounds very basic, but I think it’s become not basic in public life and discourse.
Yes, and it’s also one of the reasons why you need people in positions of power with a sense of honor, right? Because look, at the end of the day, you know, I’ve been arguing about military policy in public for my entire life and adult life. And, you know, when I got out of the military, there were these sort of like, everybody should know about this, right? But one of the problems with being a citizen of a massive country like America that is involved all over the place is who are honorable. We go back to the honor – that there’s no end of extremely morally significant issues for somebody to become exercised by that are all intensely complicated. Healthcare policy, intensely complicated. Refugee, immigrant, like all of these things are very, very complicated if you want to actually get in the weeds and have an idea about where can we intervene usefully, right?
And...I no longer have the sort of chip on my shoulder necessarily about certain types of ignorance about American military affairs. I do think that every citizen should be engaged with what we’re doing militarily because it is, I think it’s the most morally significant thing that a nation does, right? Killing overseas. But, nonetheless at a certain point, that’s why you have representative government. You have to have people who will actually make those decisions, who will get into the nitty-gritty for you. And if they don’t have that sense, then that will very quickly lead us astray as a nation. Because there are a lot of things that you can do using the military in sort of near-term that might look like wins or satisfy a certain urge or that might just have no particular public benefit to doing them, right? For a while I’ve been harping on the authorization for the use of military force – which is an issue that when I start talking about people’s eyes glaze over.
Joy Marie Clarkson: Peace.
Phil Klay: It’s actually really important, but at end of the day, probably, there’s not going to be massive protests in the streets to try and change how much authority we’ve ceded to the executive. But over the long term, it’s going to be really, really dangerous if we don’t reverse that. And you need legislators who will actually put some degree of political capital into fixing things, even if it doesn’t immediately benefit them.
Joy Marie Clarkson: Thanks. Yes, which goes back again to the sense of what role we are given in inhabiting that honorably.
This leads to another question that I wanted to ask you, which is that I think we’ve started jumping that gun. We’ve started jumping the “don’t do it because it’s good for your soul. don’t act in that way because it’s dishonorable.” Because we’ve begun to see the world as a place of winners and losers, and we’re afraid of losing.
I think that is on some level, something that I see in a lot of places, and it’s really this kind of, so it’s this sense that if I act like the little goody two shoes who doesn’t do things because it’s the honorable thing to do, then I’m going to get the wool pulled over me and I’ll find out that I was, that it was actually pointless for me to try to be good because somebody else wasn’t going to be good and they were going to trick me. And this relates to something that I saw you write about again earlier this year about the ways of thinking about those who entered the military somewhat under, let’s say to some degree false pretenses, right? And there’s a sense of were those people who entered into the military thinking “I want to support a vision of American justice throughout the world or be a good citizen.” And you gave a number of quotes from current politicians talking about them as, losers or suckers, things like that. And you said, I’ll let you say it because you’ll say it better than me, but they’re not because there is still this sense that it is worth it to believe in good and the right things even if it’s... Say a bit about that.
Phil Klay: You know, I was at an event once, this is during the rise of ISIS, right? So ISIS is rampaging through Iraq and taking slaves and committing genocide and just unbelievable horrors are happening. And I was at this documentary in New York and there’s a Q&A period afterwards, was a documentary about veterans and this guy stood up, that...must have been just like the perfect image of a Marine Sergeant in dress blues. And he says, “you know, I’m a Marine veteran of Iraq. That used to be something I was incredibly proud of. You know, if you asked me to make a resume for my life, not like a resume for a job, but a accounting of who I was, what I was. All the biggest bullet points would have been, you know, Marine Sergeant, combat veteran, lead Marines in Iraq. Right? But now I’m looking at what’s happening in Iraq and I’m wondering, was I part of an evil thing? Because if I was, I don’t know what my identity is. I don’t know who I am anymore.”
And that’s a very painful question, right? I think he can be proud of what he did, but not uncomplicatedly so, right? I think, you know...if you even set it aside from things you personally did, right? Because we’re talking about honor as being part of a role that you play. One of the roles that, you know, I’m an American citizen, right? So when I go to the, I forget the name of it, the Museum of the American War in Vietnam, in Saigon, Ho Chi Minh City. You go through and there’s all of these photographs of... the horrors that happened to Vietnamese people. If you don’t feel a certain sense of shame, Personal shame. Even though it happened in a war that ended before I was born, I think there’s something wrong with you, right? I think that being able to feel shame over things your country has done goes hand in hand with being able to feel pride around your country, right? Both of which I think are important.
And that gets magnified, obviously, when it’s something that you were a part of, that you suffered for, right? That you went over, you know, maybe that guy lost people, right? Or knew people who were horribly injured overseas because he thought this was going to be the good thing to do. And then he’s looking at it and wondering, was it even good? And I think there is a kind of...or should be a kind of moral burden-sharing, right? The shame attached to our failures is not located in the young kid who signs up at 18, right? It’s a collective burden or should be. I think the signing up is an honorable thing at the end of the day. Yet, having been part of a war that failed certainly marks you, and makes you reevaluate your country and your relationship to it in a very different way.
Joy Marie Clarkson: How does one not take that marking and never lose the capacity to be proud of one’s country or lose the capacity to trust oneself that one will have things worth living for and worth fighting for.
Because I think – I know it’s a different thing, but I also see that in people, for instance, who have worked for an organization or a church or something that they have thrown their whole lives into and then found that there was some corruption at the heart of it. And I think that totally crushing. And it crushes whole lives. It crushes lives of families of priests who have been in the church. And I think it can really wound one’s – I mean the sexual abuse scandal in the Catholic Church – I think, is just crushing, you know, to trust oneself to know that something is worth living for.
Phil Klay: There’s a bit in the ethics of ambiguity where Simone de Beauvoir is talking about Heidegger and saying, you know, man is always more than the sum of what he is. That to be a human being is to be a projection towards the future. And I think that’s true with our country as well. But I think it’s always been true of our country and explicitly true of our country, right? Like our country was spoken into existence with words of great hypocrisy, right? And thank God it was not spoken into existence with words of naked, cruel honesty, right? That would not have pushed us in a better direction. It is towards a more perfect union is the thing that we need to be heading to. And if you look back at American history, you see that the notion of what America is, is always a disputed thing. It is a mongrel nation, half people and land and half idea. And so the sense of...shame and bitterness and disappointment when you look at some of the things that the country has done. It just seems sheer cowardice to let that overwhelm you. When you’re aware of the history of the country and how people with far less reason to hope struggled far harder, certainly than I have, to push America towards the good and succeeded in doing so. And so I don’t think that that is a viable option for one’s relationship to one’s country and certainly not towards one’s relationship to oneself. I mean, for my, part, I think one of the things that is deeply important to me as a Catholic is the sacrament of reconciliation, right? The notion of forgiveness is a pretty big deal and the possibility of redemption.
Joy Marie Clarkson: Yes, the possibility of another life being possible. That there is a life beyond the mistake. Yes.
Phil Klay: Yeah. Yeah. And you know you’re gonna fail again. That’s the other thing. You know? It’s not one and done.
Joy Marie Clarkson: No, it’s not one and done, but there is a path still open before you, and there’s a place you can always return.
That is an excellent note, nearly, I think, to end on. Thank you for that slightly bracing call not only of hope, but also of the reminder that, as you said, many people in much worse circumstances, with many fewer resources, have pushed forward before us. And so it would be cowardice. It would be dishonorable in a way not to step into the roles that we have and continue to strain towards the more perfect union. Whether one, and that applies to our American listeners, but also I think that is a more generally something we can think about in other countries as well. It reminds me of, gives me a little hope, reminds me of, don’t, I’ve got Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Alasdair MacIntyre are in my brain today. The other bit is where he talks about, what is still a living institution? Because institutions can die. And he says, a living institution is one which is an embodied argument about the good. And I guess one thing that I still feel hopeful about America is it’s certainly embodied and it’s certainly still arguing. So it must still be. So Phil, I want to end with a question I ask all of our guests, which is what is one thing, it can be a practice, a person, a piece of art that helps you remember that another life is possible.
Phil Klay: OK. This is gonna be a podcast so people can’t see it. I’m holding a bat where you can pull a string and its wings flap. It’s made out of paper. I made this with my five-year-old yesterday. I have three sons and you want to talk about sort of the projection towards the future. It’s having kids that very much situates you within the generations, you know, having kids, reinforces your sense of yourself as a child of parents, you know, as a grandchild, and now as a father and, in terms of what we talking about before, the sort of illusion of control, right? That we want to turn everything into a problem with a yes or no answer. Kids, it’s just, it’s just not even, it’s so comical to try and do that with children, you know? It’s not...It’s surprising, it’s constantly changing, it’s really hard and really just wonderful. So yeah, having kids keeps me, keeps you grounded too, because they just, know, school you all the time. So yeah, playing with my kids, trying to get them to do their homework.
Joy Marie Clarkson: Another life is possible because it has to be. Well, thank you so much for joining us and we’ll put some links in to Phil’s books and articles which are really well worth your time. And I might have you take a picture of the little bat which is very cheerfully waving at me. And it seems mechanically impressive to me.
Phil Klay: Yeah. It’s very simple. yeah, you tape a string. You tape two strings, one to each wing, and then you thread them through a straw. And then when you pull, pull the, I actually used a glue gun, hot, if you are a parent, this is my one bit of practical advice. If you’re a parent and you don’t have a hot glue gun, yeah, you should get on that. It’s gonna make your life easier.
Joy Marie Clarkson: Hmm. Get on it. Although, be forewarned, I do have many memories. For some reason as a child, I really enjoyed getting the glue gun and waiting until it was a little bit cool and then attaching it to my finger, which I think exactly my mother had. There are worse past times. Thank you so much, Phil, for joining us. This has been so wonderful.
Phil Klay: Yeah. Thank you.