I'd been in college studying English creative writing and history when I made the decision to join the Marines in the runup to the Iraq war.

And that was my homecoming. It was fine, I guess. Getting back feels like your first breath after nearly drowning. Even if it hurts, it's good.

I didn't want to write a 'this is how it is' Iraq book, because the Iraq War is an intensely complicated variety of things.

There's a tendency to look at anybody who joined the military as if they underwrote everything that happened policy-wise. That's not really the case. I have a friend who both protested the Iraq War and joined the military, and ended up serving two deployments in Afghanistan.

I was an English major in college, took a ton of creative writing courses, and was a newspaper reporter for 10 years.

The Iraq war was not necessary.