In your story “Pig Lab,” a Special Forces troop is doing live-tissue training (which they refer to as “pig lab”)—a test in which they must assess and treat anesthetized pigs that have been wounded in ways that soldiers might be in combat. (This form of training was recently phased out.) You underwent similar training. What inspired you to build a story around L.T.T.?

The inspiration came out of the genuine affection that both my troop and our trainers felt toward the pigs. As a result, this training seemed like some kind of communion. Trying to save the injured pigs brought to mind the men we’d lost, and the likelihood of losing more. It was impossible to undergo any of it without feeling that no lives—human or pig—should be wasted.

The story is set in 2009. Some members of the troop have already been deployed, and seriously injured, in Afghanistan. Why would they be taking this training for a second time and returning to active duty?

There were never enough of us to go around, so multiple deployments were the norm. Soldiers who suffered combat injuries were sometimes rehabilitated and returned to the war. Deployments were cyclical and frequent. During our training phases, it seemed like we never had enough time to update ourselves on changes in rules of engagement, technology, weaponry, threats, friendly tactics, etc. Even if none of those things had changed, we needed to maintain proficiency in critical areas.

“Pig Lab” interweaves the training session with scenes from the narrator’s home life: his wife, Allison, has been having flashbacks to trauma she suffered as a child at the hands of her father. Why did you choose to juxtapose these two forms of trauma in one narrative?

It seemed less about trauma than about survival. I saw a link between how Allison, as a child, trained herself to survive her father’s abuse, and the training that the narrator and his boys undergo. I also thought a lot about cycles while writing this story. Allison is reliving abuse that she experienced decades earlier. Simultaneously, the narrator and his troop relive the war again and again. The narrator would like to break these cycles, but he doesn’t know how. I want to believe that his heart is in the right place.

Although you give a few details about Allison’s childhood, you don’t name or describe the trauma she experienced or is reliving in her flashbacks. Why did you decide to keep that unspoken?

I think the fear that Allison exhibits, her transformation while in the throes of a flashback, and the lengths that she goes to hide herself, all speak for the trauma. But then, my decision not to detail what Allison went through as a child reflects something that I do in real life. When I meet another veteran, I try not to talk about the war. I suppose that I’m more comfortable having it be this unspoken thing that we need to work around to establish some normalcy. And I think Allison is on a similar path.

The premise of the story—the pig lab—seems absurdist or surreal but is actually grounded in reality. Do you want readers to pick up on that sense of surreality, which inflects other elements of the story as well, or to see this as a straight depiction of real life?

The reality is that my memory of intense events becomes more surreal every day. The nuts and bolts are still there; however, they are turning into something Andy Warhol might have done with actual nuts and bolts.

You and I sometimes joke about the fact that your stories in the magazine, which revolve around the war in Afghanistan after 9/11, always involve animals, often goats. This time it’s pigs. Perhaps there’s a reason for that beyond your own interests? I think we civilians don’t always register the fact that combat takes place on land, amid settlements, homes, farms, and that battlefields are often exactly that—fields. Did being deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan take you closer to rural and wild environments than you expected?

I had zero experience with barnyard animals prior to my deployments. Once I was downrange, however, they were omnipresent. Goats were by far the most numerous and strange of the lot. The way they stood on their hind legs and stuck their tongues out at us kind of summed up the whole misadventure. ♦