Phil Klay Quotes

When I came back from Vietnam in 1965, I just had the greatest brainwashing anybody could get…

It's very strange getting out of the military, when you've lived in Iraq, and people you know are going overseas again and again. Some of them are getting injured.

You know, veterans come home and they may not be bipolar, but after they've been through a war with PTSD or a head injury, their families have a handful when they come home.

World War II affected the male population in a very detrimental way. They were happy to be home, happy to be alive, happy they won, but they could not express to anybody the horror they had been through.

The Vietnam War totally turned my life around. Some people's lives were eliminated or destroyed by the experience. I was one of the fortunate few who came out better off.

If you are a real soldier, you never get over the war.

I think sometimes you go through an experience, and you don't feel the impact, especially in a war experience, until way past it.

We are at war, and it's ongoing, and there's no end in sight. More and more guys are coming back from it, and the transition back to civilian life is almost too big a mountain to climb.

Please God, I'll never be in a war zone, but everything I sort of know about people who come back is that it's a hard transition to make. I mean, even if you've not been in a war, even if you've just been in the Forces, you come back and probably have more fights in civilian life.

You come back from war, and you have a certain authority to talk about war.

That's driven by any number of factors, the most prominent of which have been the combat experience of two major campaigns - one in Afghanistan and the other in Iraq - and the ongoing demands of the global war on terrorism.

The notion that war forever separates veterans from the rest of mankind has been long embedded in our collective consciousness.

Obviously all of us have thought about Vietnam, particularly in my generation in Australia that were part of conscription and fought there. Our friends came back, forever changed. So there were a lot of questions.

I was interested in the war part of 'Star Wars,' so I started reading about what it's like to go to war, what that does to you psychically, about the adrenaline and the rush.

I understood that 'The Yellow Birds' would be a peculiar representation of the experience of being at war. I intended it to be so.

Vietnam was my nightmare for a good ten years.

Combat stress isn't the only problem for soldiers isolated in Iraq - there are family issues, re-integration issues when soldiers go home on leave, loneliness.

When I read the script of 'The Wall,' I saw how much different the war looks from the point of view of a soldier fighting it.

As we began to read more and more journals of men who had been in the Civil War and then been in the Indian Wars, we realized there was a whole universe of men whose souls had been shattered, whose lives had been utterly destroyed by what they had to do.

Ministers regularly meet soldiers that have returned from operational tours to hear about their experiences, including those who have recovered from their injuries.

The idea that somebody who has done something horrible in a war is not willing to talk about it for 32 years is hardly a shocking idea. Quite the contrary.

I learned a lot from Vietnam veterans, especially as some of them turned against their own war.

Trauma is not the sole province of victims. If that were true, soldiers returning from Afghanistan wouldn't suffer from PTSD.

I think there's a tremendous split between people who've been through a war and people who haven't.

The lives of prisoners of war after they are returned is almost never discussed, never explored.