After the publication of “Red Flags,” Juris spoke about the reality of war versus the literature of war: “The ugly truth is that most of the time it’s boring as hell. Your biggest decision is what you’re going to have for lunch: the thousand-year-old omelet or the powdered eggs. And then it’s just like chores around the house. You know, you go out to put out the garbage and and then somebody stands up out of the garbage can and tries to kill you. And suddenly you have twenty-eight seconds you’re going to tremble over for the next day or more. It bursts out very quickly. But the rest of it’s very ordinary.
“I had to add fiction in – about ten percent – so that nobody would get arrested, and to try and dramatize it. Because the real truth is that most war fiction is incredibly romanticized. There’s almost a pornography of war literature, which I unfortunately refer to as Dick Lit. I’ve been advised not to call it that…. In the war literature, and especially in films, you can always see everything, even at night, everything’s visible. But really, you’re in total blackness. If something happens, about all you see is nothing. And you pull the trigger. And then people ask you, ‘What was it like to kill somebody’ – who? You’re just blasting away.”