More on: Phil Klay

I’m drawn to the extremes, and my religious sensibility is shaped by the shattering encounter not just with beauty but also suffering and guilt. How to reconcile these?

For if there were a heavenly recorder, then Frank could be assured that someone would make sense of his life, that it would not be lost to memory but would always be an object of significance.

Phil Klay was born in Westchester, New York, in 1983. He studied creative writing and literature at Dartmouth College and graduated in 2005. That spring he was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the United States Marine Corps and in 2007 was deployed to Iraq during the troop surge. He served as a public affairs…