corps and then started writing about the war, fiction and nonfiction. at first i thought my job was to make sense of the past. there was major testimony before congress and ambassador ryan crocker and a real, aggressive debate about military strategy and if it was working and what we were doing there and if it was sustainable. so i thought it was an important time in looking back on it would be a significant portion of what i was doing as a writer. but the were cap going on in the way we waged war changed. -- but the war kept going on and the way we waged war changed. it is deeply important complex in many ways. then society, you are reintegrating. how do you make sense of what happened overseas and how to make sense of the society at home, because it looks different than when you left for war. that process, people i know kept going overseas. sometimes they were shot, blown up, killed. and so grappling with what it meant to be a citizen in relationship to the wars became a moral question for me in this book is my attempt to try to work through both sides. the challenges and difficulties i see and my concerns about the direction of american wars, and also my concern about what it says about american citizenship. it touches so many aspects of american life. our relationship to firearms, our relationship to immigration debates. so essays go through history and the present day and concerns with the philosophical, moral, and spiritual questions that war bring about. susan: how did you decide on the title "uncertain ground." phil: in many ways, i think it is a somewhat forbidden title. at the same time, my approach when i go into right an essay is even if i am extremely morally exercised about something, is that i never want to feel as if i am pontificating authority that worked it out. i am making arguments of the book but hopefully also inviting readers to navigate uncertainty -- uncertain territory filled with doubts as we filled out how to go forward as a nation and how to go about with these issues. susan: the essays are not chronological. how did you structure this? phil: there are four different sections. essays concerned with military policy and experiences of soldiers overseas and what binds people together when they serve. essays about citizenship, coming home and thinking to yourself, who was i fighting for? what commitment -- what is this commitment i swore to my nation and what does it mean about my responsibility to american civic life and how should i think about those in relationship [indiscernible] and then there is a section on art, which sounds-looting -- sounds high saluting -- faluting. but it is not about high culture. it is the question concerning me in that question is about depictions and conversations about war and how to talk about this. when you come home, you have been part of an experience that is very important but it is difficult to communicate. it is not like everyday experience and you might still be trying to parse out what you went through yourself and try to make sense of things that happened to you. and communication is very important for that and the past centuries of war literature offers some tools and i situate that within american political debates. the final section is faith. i think service in war brings to mind not simply moral and clinical questions, but spiritual ones. on that section delves deeply into those personal questions. susan: you are not only a fiction writer but you teach writing at fairfield university. i am wondering, as a writer having both formats available to you, when you choose to use one versus the other to convey things that are similar. phil: fiction, you are inviting someone to experience from the inside. you are inviting them into situations that you want them to respond to with their creative imagination as well. and in essays, it is not so dissimilar, but you are bringing them into a line of argument, as well. and also it is a way for me to work through things that have happened directly in my own life. in some of the men were type essays, there is -- memoir type essays, i am excavating memories and ideas. susan: you are a product of jesuit education. do i recognize in your essays the method of asking questions of your readers? phil: absolutely. [laughter] discernment and emphasis on the particularity of things. i am deeply interested in the human experience, the ways in which individual experience will not neatly map onto broader mythologies around soldiers and combat. and fairfield university, in the mfa program we provide assistance for veterans and one third of the program is veterans. one of the wonderful things there is not just the experience of teaching, but also encountering other student and veteran stories. susan: we are taping this conversation right before memorial day. in one essay you wrote that memorial day is not particularly happy for you and you also wrote about visiting arlington cemetery over the holiday, calling it a holiday best suited for healing wounds of past wars. what is on your mind this memorial day? phil: the people i knew who died, first and foremost. i think that is common for veterans. it becomes very specific as a holiday. and more than that, i think it is a time for me to think very seriously about what that sacrifice demands of us. there are a lot of ideals that americans say we are about. ideals that need idealistic men and women to join the military. and the course of american history is always a struggle. it brings us closer to the ideals, or we fall away from them. so i think hopefully at the end of each memorial day, i come through it with a renewed sense of dedication to the purpose of engaging in that struggle. susan: we are unfortunately talking on the heels of the mass shootings in buffalo, new york and uvalde, texas. you have an essay about american society and guns, entitled a history of violence. what do you explore and that and what do you want people to know about the relationship with guns in this country? phil: it began as a straightforward history of ballistics. the development of more efficient and devastating ways to kill people. i began with america's first convicted murderer, who came forward on the mayflower and his weapon of choice was a gun. but it was rudimentary. almost prehistoric era of ballistics. he shot and struck his target and if he did not come up that guy probably would have gotten away. there was a whole process to reload. charge the gun and shove in the bullet and these other things. we look at present day, the shootings that just happened. you have unimaginable firepower compared to that. not just in terms of the rate of fire. the las vegas shooter fired over 1100 rounds in 10 minutes. it would've taken that first convicted murderer something like six hours to fire that many bullets with the weapon he had at the time. but also the bullets have greater wounding power. they cause more damage to human tissue then the projectiles at the time. they go very fast and create a wake, a temporary cavity in the human body. i go through how precisely we wound flesh so devastatingly. i quoted a report on wounds ballistics by the surgeon general of the army, who noted that the importance of studying this is that people will not encounter these in times of peace. and it is not true. we have multiple accounts of this. and it is important to understand the development not of the hardware of the gun itself, but the way it is marketed. despite our mythologies about the prevalence of guns and the gun culture of early american times, it was not a civilian market. this was a big problem for gun marketers -- manufacturers like samuel colt. they knew they needed a civilian market. he wants saturated the texas market. it's crazy to think about now. one thing he did was not just invent new types of firearms, but new types of marketing for firearms. he was a showman and had previously performed in london and new york and did shows. and he used that flair for advertising. he hired artists to show someone under threat and they are using a gun to show it off. gun -- a gun was how you secured your passage through this dangerous world. he amped up the threat. after the civil war as other gun manufacturers like winchester was cap -- were catching up, that mythology got tied closely to american ideals. one slogan was abraham lincoln freed the slaves but samuel colt made all men free. the idea that your security and aspects of who you are as an american are dependent on having this weapon. that is what advertising continues to do when you trace it through to the present day with the types of weaponry we have now and the ways the mythology has grown and changed. gun manufacturers had a good time during the crime wave of the 1980's but as crime went off and the fear was not driving sales the way it did, war on terror helps them. fears have always been good for gun manufacturers. there were advertisements that thrived on the sense that it is a chaotic world but the gun will be the way you can secure yourself, your family, who you are, and your liberty. last year we had 20 million gun sales in this country. susan: the boom was predicated on the thought that there would be gun restrictions and people were afraid their guns would be taken away from them. in a country with more guns than citizens and in the wake of these two events, what questions do you think society should be asking itself? phil: it should be asking about the need for the weapons and the social cost of having so many of them. it is clear that the level of gun violence in america is not at all comparable to similar societies. the main different ingredients is the prevalence of guns. susan: and the essays, the overall -- they overall explorer american citizens -- citizenship, you said war fighting has changed over the past 20 years. can you explain how and why? phil: sure. when i was in iraq, the main effort of the american military was done with conventional troops and they had journalists with them. it was not necessarily a golden age of transparency for military operations but there is more than today. we had another surge of troops in afghanistan under obama. then he moved troops out of iraq and then they got drawn back into the country and america has had a schizophrenic mood about the wars we are engaged in. they do not like long-running wars but when bad guys pop up, they really want us to be able to strike them. when isis emerged in iraq, president obama started reintroducing troops and for a while they were cagey about it and said they were not putting boots on the ground, just special operators who were assisting missions. then troops would end up in combat and in combat situations. the obama administration did not feel when they decided to engage in the war against isis that they needed to go to congress. they argued they could still use the authorization from 2001. they also used that to strike a variety of other groups. earlier this month, president biden signed the order to send troops into somalia for an ongoing campaign of killing the leader of a terrorist group. congress did not vote on that. because we are using the same authorization from 2001 from military force that was intended to go after the taliban, al qaeda, and those in afghanistan. so we have this sprawling justification for the use of force and well -- and if they were doing large ground deployment, there would be more debate that they are relying heavily on special ops, mercenaries, drones, airstrikes, and working through proxy forces. so it is a style of warfare which is not very transparent. there is not a lot of congressional accountability. and also it is a style of warfare with limited engagement with a lot of the countries. long-term, that is a problem in terms of accountability and military policy. susan: to clarify, do you see isis and affiliates as a threat to the united states? is your concern over communication to the public and buy-in from the public rather than identifying them as a threat or not? phil: i agree with some of the missions. i am skeptical of others. somalia is a debatable prospect. i think it is a good thing that we help fight against isis. i have traveled through some of the regions that were devastated by them in iraq. i have spoken with people who survived the genocide and topped with women who were held as slaves by isis. i am glad we helped in that fight. but i think we need democratic accountability for making war and we are in a dangerous drift. i find it troubling to have a situation when biden announced we were pulling troops out of afghanistan, he announced the war was over but then said we will continue to fight terrorists using over the horizon strikes. so the war is over but the killing continues. and i think that if we are going to be killing people, we should not be telling ourselves we are not at war and it should be something we are engaged in politically. is using our military to kill people the most moral thing we can do as a country? i think we should all debate it. if we are going to have troops do this overseas, the president needs to regularly come before congress and explain why we are doing it, what is the cost, what are the benchmarks of success, and each member of congress should vote on it. susan: you have explained what we should ask of our president. you write in the book that they have become accustomed to lien casually about war. -- liana -- lying casually about war. what are our responsibilities as citizens? phil: we should not just accept the state of affairs. i think we should demand more from our elected leaders. i think it should be deeply troubling to all of us that the department of defense has not allowed journalists to be with troops for a long time. the lack of democratic accountability and the secrecy is something politicians should be punished for. and i think those politicians who are working to create more accountability and transparency, and there are those on both sides of the aisle, those should be embraced. susan: what should we be asking of the news media? phil: thoughtful informed coverage. there has been fantastic journalism over the past 20 years and some superb reporting. more of that. susan: do you think the interest or resources devoted to coverage diminished when active troop movements moved into counterinsurgency? you referenced some of the journalist you worked with over there but once the big troop movements move, reporting diminishes as well. phil: there was diminishing in reporting and american people are less interested in the stories. if it is not being actively debated, it passes out of consciousness because there are so many other things in life to be discussed. at the same time, there has been some phenomenal reporting. the new york times analyzed u.s. airstrikes and civilian casualties and that militaries report about civilian casualties in finding a lack of accountability and lack of responding to problems that led to civilians being killed and finding that the numbers of the dead were higher than the military told. that is valuable reporting. it is morally important. it is dangerous if one of our branches of government is lying about what it is doing. it makes it less effective as a force in the world. susan: what would you like to see happen in the congressional election as a result of the issues you raised? phil: all the things i mentioned, i would like to see those as things american voters are concerned about and they are asking their representatives to represent them on their behalf. susan: let's go into your stories so people understand your perspective. you graduated from dartmouth and join the marine corps in 2005. how many members of your class joined that your? phil: there were two other marines. i am not sure the total number of military. susan: you write that your friends and families -- you write that your friends and family were surprised. why did you sign up? phil: when i was in high school i wanted to join the state department. but we were at war when i was in college. i went to college in september of 2001. we were in afghanistan and pretty soon, iraq. if you wanted to serve the country, that was the way to do it. susan: since only 1% of the population has served in the past 20 years, what are the greatest misperceptions by the public about those who choose to serve in those who don't? phil: some veterans complain about a dichotomy in terms of how veterans are perceived as either the hero or broken soldier. whereas the sense of being in the military is just doing a job. and performing as a professional . in the complex array of things people can do. there is an essay in the book about the perception of veterans as being broken and i have encountered this. in one way it emerged out of a positive thing, the issue of mental health. i started encountering this thing where people would assume not that i had the symptoms of ptsd, but that i had a particular psychological wound, but more a general sense that i was kind of messed up. one person told me that all iraq vets would snap after 10 years. i had been home for three so i had seven left and i should enjoy them. it was a way in which the discussion could sometimes be used to taper over the more difficult things. i got the sense of, are you angry, are you bitter,? maybe it is ptsd and hopefully one day there will be a pill for that. there was this sense of are you not angry and feeling betrayed when you survey military policy and how we have abused the lives of men and women entreated the people of iraq? if you are not, maybe there is something wrong frio and one day it may be there will be a pill for that. -- if you are not, maybe there is something wrong with you and one day there may be a pill for that. but they can go the other way around. there is a way in which the veteran coming back from work and have a chip on their shoulder. it is common to feel alienated and frustrated with civilian society that does not see the issues the way you are. i felt that deeply in the years i got back. one thing marines used to say is we are at war and america is at the mall. we are doing the important stuff and americans are at the mall. it is a way of putting down civilians. i thought of it years later because i was at the mall when america was still at war. i was looking at baby clothes. and i thought to myself, ok, america is at war and i am at the mall but this is the way it is supposed to be. i am getting baby clothes for my son. the contempt i saw for civilian life, in a way it is crazy. the whole point of joining is that civilian life is worth defending. that it is something beautiful and we should deplete respect and appreciate the work of every day americans who respond in their own way to obligations of civic life. so that is another piece of the puzzle in terms of the gulf between the two. susan: you referenced the phrase, there are no atheists in foxholes. and yet you mentioned that being at war made you question your faith and relationship with god. phil: there are certainly atheists in foxholes and some who are atheists because of what they experience there. i quote a vietnam veteran who says that war can sometimes force a moment of choosing. that you either have to believe in god or cannot believe in a god. for me, when i was in iraq, it was different. in some ways, my deployment was relatively easy. i was in a violent place but i was mostly safe. i saw the after effects, particularly in the surgical platoon that was part of our unit. but by the end of my deployment, i felt very good about what we had done because the violence had gone down. i felt justified and smug and it caused me to walk away from faith for a while. then as i started writing about the wars and undermining that smugness i felt and asking myself more difficult questions about my experience and what it meant, i started rely