Phil Klay on the Invisibility of Endless War

“War remains a large part of who we are as Americans,” writes Phil Klay, who notes that almost a sixth of our federal budget goes to defense, supporting a military that now wages counterterrorism campaigns in 85 countries. But those overseas wars are invisible to most Americans because they’re fought by so few and because of political and strategic choices that shield them from public view. We’ll talk to Klay, an award-winning fiction writer and veteran of the U.S. Marine Corps, about the chasm between the military and civilian experience and what our wars say about us as Americans.