Speaker 1: The Team House with your host Jack Murphy.
Speaker 2: Hey, David Bark, Hey, everyone, this is episode three hundred
Speaker 2: and seventy six of The Team House. I am Jack
Speaker 2: Murphy here with tonight's guest Ivan Ingram. He is the
Speaker 2: author of Once We Pledged Forever, which we're going to
Speaker 2: talk to about tonight. We had him on the show
Speaker 2: back on episode three hundred and forty two, talking about
Speaker 2: his career in the Marine Corps, MARSK some other interesting assignments.
Speaker 2: I hope you guys will go and check it out.
Speaker 2: So Ivan, welcome back to the show. It is great
Speaker 2: to be back, love, and we should point out tonight
Speaker 2: we are smoking the nineteen sixty four anniversary edition of
Speaker 2: the Padrones, in my opinions, is their best cigar.
Speaker 1: This is the Maduro No.
Speaker 2: Complaints, paired with Diplomatico, a little bit of Vene Will
Speaker 2: and rum.
Speaker 1: It goes well, pairs well.
Speaker 2: So, I mean, I'm not sure exactly where to pick
Speaker 2: it up, but I read your book. I actually read
Speaker 2: you know, obviously it's available in hardcover right now. I
Speaker 2: read it on that dang Fangled kindle and it was
Speaker 2: really good on there. I mean, people should check it out.
Speaker 2: But the book is how would you describe it?
Speaker 1: Like?
Speaker 2: You know, you told me a little bit earlier that
Speaker 2: it's kind of like defies the norms of any given genre.
Speaker 2: And it's also like very autobiographical in many ways.
Speaker 1: Right, it is, and it does or it does and
Speaker 1: it is the book. It is available on Kindle, both
Speaker 1: hard and soft cover, and then of course any platform
Speaker 1: in which you publish it, someone's gonna want something more.
Speaker 1: You know, is it audible, We haven't gotten there yet,
Speaker 1: I know it. Is it available and polish? Yeah? Is
Speaker 1: it a movie? No, but we're looking for a black
Speaker 1: so please. When I went to start pitching it, I
Speaker 1: had a hard time conveying to potential agents just exactly
Speaker 1: what it would would be. And they, because they very
Speaker 1: much want to have something they can say, Okay, this
Speaker 1: is a military thriller, this is a military action book.
Speaker 1: It's a romance. So whatever it happens the genre they
Speaker 1: want to be able to be in that pretty directly
Speaker 1: or or exactly. So then when they go to talk
Speaker 1: to publishers, they don't have any problems. Right, The book
Speaker 1: itself covers quite a bunch of different tones. It is
Speaker 1: indeed an action book to a military action book, but
Speaker 1: there's also a book of redemption reconciliation. And as I
Speaker 1: talked with my publisher and he read it, he's like,
Speaker 1: you know, really, this book is a love story. It
Speaker 1: is about not only the love of the main character,
Speaker 1: Steve Keller, and his relationship to his family and his wife,
Speaker 1: but also that's the same relationship and fraternity that he
Speaker 1: has with his men, and sometimes how those two relationships
Speaker 1: are at odds, at very big odds. So to your
Speaker 1: question about autobiography, that is indeed how the book started
Speaker 1: out more as a record for my family, just as
Speaker 1: something for me to get down on paper and say, okay,
Speaker 1: over the course of my career, this is what I did.
Speaker 2: And is it a novel because you didn't want to
Speaker 2: put people's real names in it, Well, there are some.
Speaker 1: People with real names in there, but for very specific reasons,
Speaker 1: a couple of reasons for that. As I talk to
Speaker 1: more agents, people said, military memoirs do indeed sell, but
Speaker 1: really to a niche crowd. Sure people were into kind
Speaker 1: of what we like to read. What probably a large
Speaker 1: number of the fans of this podcast and other military
Speaker 1: based podcast they very much will enjoy the book. But
Speaker 1: those one of the agents gave me a good piece
Speaker 1: of advice and said, unless you've got a lot of
Speaker 1: followers and people kind of know who you are, you're
Speaker 1: like McRaven or Charles beckw With or something, you know what,
Speaker 1: people who can immediately recognize your name, and you're going
Speaker 1: to have a brand that comes along with it because
Speaker 1: of that recognition. It'll just be a book that gets published.
Speaker 1: And it's yet another one that's kind of on the
Speaker 1: on the shelves about someone's military experience. And that is
Speaker 1: not to diminish anybody who's published books in that in
Speaker 1: that genre, in that vein, and there's some very good
Speaker 1: ones out there. But the other thing is that as
Speaker 1: I started talking with people, it's particularly my friend Scott Hughesing,
Speaker 1: who wrote Echo and Ramadi and is actually is my
Speaker 1: agent now. He read the initial manuscript and said, if
Speaker 1: you look at this from the perspective of writing it
Speaker 1: as a fiction or a piece of fiction, you will
Speaker 1: have a lot more latitude to actually explore the themes
Speaker 1: that you want to look at in this book. And
Speaker 1: I hadn't thought of it that way at all, And
Speaker 1: of course it's very much I don't want to betray
Speaker 1: my own authenticity in these people. And he's like, no,
Speaker 1: not at all. Be you can still have all of that,
Speaker 1: but you'll have a lot more. The aperture is going
Speaker 1: to drive the point home exactly, and you'll be able
Speaker 1: to kind of weave things together because, as I say
Speaker 1: in the book, they all happen in some capacity. Not
Speaker 1: all of them happened to me exactly, and you know,
Speaker 1: as it's listed, but I could take those pieces and
Speaker 1: then create the story right. And once I embraced that,
Speaker 1: he was right and opened up a larger creative valve.
Speaker 2: The only piece of any kind of media that I
Speaker 2: would compare this book to as far as like what
Speaker 2: you were able to achieve with it. And I mean
Speaker 2: this as a compliment. Have you ever seen the play
Speaker 2: Last Out, Scott Man's play?
Speaker 1: I have seen it online. I've never seen it. Okay, Okay,
Speaker 1: so you know what it's about. So Scott, Yeah, Scott
Speaker 1: and I have been We've been in communication with each other. Yeah,
Speaker 1: not since I wrote the book. So I like his
Speaker 1: work a lot of respect, respect a lot of the
Speaker 1: things that he's done. It's great.
Speaker 2: I think that you know, your book kind of rose
Speaker 2: to that level that you know, I really respected that
Speaker 2: play that they put together because it's the first time
Speaker 2: I had ever seen in any piece of media, book, movie, whatever,
Speaker 2: TV show that really told like the story of a
Speaker 2: Special Forces soldier kind of from the beginning literally to
Speaker 2: the end, and all the like highs and lows and
Speaker 2: everything in between, some of the darker things that happened
Speaker 2: in the job, the difficult decisions, like your book is
Speaker 2: in that same vein, except you did that for a
Speaker 2: marsk Raider, and I really appreciated that about the.
Speaker 1: Book, Thank you. The Tenor certainly is a heavy, heavy
Speaker 1: book in my It's published by the Sager Group. Mike
Speaker 1: Sager is my publisher, and he's been around in the
Speaker 1: business for quite a while. He wrote for Esquire and
Speaker 1: Rolling Stone. Actually hung out with Hunter S. Thompson. He's
Speaker 1: interesting in his own vein because of that his own right.
Speaker 1: But he gave me a lot of good steering. One
Speaker 1: of the great things that he did not put any
Speaker 1: limitations on the creative process. In fact, he said he
Speaker 1: didn't want to change it. He really liked the story.
Speaker 1: He said, we really made it unique was that it
Speaker 1: did indeed come from a different perspective. It's not so
Speaker 1: much a chest thumping oh rah book of just tales
Speaker 1: of Let's go Boys adventure. It's more that the protagonist,
Speaker 1: Steve Keller, is he wrestles with his decisions and he
Speaker 1: has a lot of doubt. Some of the reviews so
Speaker 1: far on Amazon, people say they really like it because
Speaker 1: the character has a lot, All the characters have depth,
Speaker 1: and they're not they're not not only not one dimensional,
Speaker 1: but they're flawed. Yeah, and so people then are kind
Speaker 1: of like, well, do I like this guy? Do I
Speaker 1: do I support what he's saying? And it is meant
Speaker 1: to make people think because there was a lot of
Speaker 1: ambiguity obviously in combat and then the way I approached
Speaker 1: it also is that it's sort of a nonlinear narrative
Speaker 1: with a little bit of supernatural undertone. And that's what
Speaker 1: I'm saying, so that the uh, these established agents were
Speaker 1: just like what am I going to do with this?
Speaker 1: Like how am I gonna sell this book?
Speaker 2: So I mean I have to say we did interview
Speaker 2: someone on this podcast who he was in such a
Speaker 2: bad way.
Speaker 1: He would talk about getting.
Speaker 2: Drunk in his living room and having full blown conversations
Speaker 2: with one of his teammates that have been killed. So,
Speaker 2: which is the supernatural element in your book? I mean,
Speaker 2: it's to me, did not ring is you know, supernatural?
Speaker 2: It's actually something that some people have experienced, you know,
Speaker 2: and when they're in a bad way.
Speaker 1: I think so, and I think those the past has
Speaker 1: an interesting way of reaching out at times, and you
Speaker 1: don't always get to decide, at least for veterans, and
Speaker 1: this could be anyone from doing with post traumatic when
Speaker 1: it hits you. Sure you don't necessarily get to decide
Speaker 1: when that happens. It's in the book. It's it's very clean,
Speaker 1: if you will you know, well, the actual interactions between
Speaker 1: the ghost and Keller are clean when when the conversations happened,
Speaker 1: But when Keller first encounters him, there's just freak that
Speaker 1: holy what what am I seeing here? Even though he
Speaker 1: knows what's going on, and he's looking for that that
Speaker 1: ability to converse and unload. And I think a lot
Speaker 1: of people are. I think they want that depending on
Speaker 1: what they what they've gone through in their lives. In
Speaker 1: our line of work, with what we were doing in
Speaker 1: the military, particularly high end kinetic combat, you've made decisions
Speaker 1: so quickly that when you come back around to really
Speaker 1: decide or look at that decision process. You may second
Speaker 1: guess yourself for quite a long time, and I think
Speaker 1: I wrestled with that myself and my own career, and
Speaker 1: that comes through in the book. Yeah.
Speaker 2: I mean, I don't necessarily want to like go through
Speaker 2: the entire plot of the book blow by blow, because well,
Speaker 2: partly because I think people should just read it to
Speaker 2: get that kind of information, but also because we kind
Speaker 2: of went through your own career blow by blow in
Speaker 2: the last episode. But I would like to at least
Speaker 2: zero in on a couple different themes and issues and
Speaker 2: things that come up in the book. Some of it
Speaker 2: pretty controversial, I think. And you had mentioned you got
Speaker 2: some blowback already from this book.
Speaker 1: Right, Yeah, I have. Some people have not necessarily liked
Speaker 1: the method in which it conveys certain things. Uh. Some
Speaker 1: people have said that it presents Marine Corps and MARSOC
Speaker 1: and a bad light. I don't. I don't believe. So.
Speaker 1: I think that that the narrative is a vehicle, that
Speaker 1: the backdrop is indeed the unit that I was in,
Speaker 1: but there are multiple units and things that that these
Speaker 1: types of things that happened in the book have occurred,
Speaker 1: and there are there are items within you know, the
Speaker 1: history of of both the Marine Corps and Marsac in
Speaker 1: which they are are illustrated in there, and people have
Speaker 1: not particularly they have not that has not been met
Speaker 1: particularly positive. So yeah, fraternally, there are some people who
Speaker 1: just want, like, I'm I don't like Ivans work and
Speaker 1: I'm not endorsing it, and I won't so because it
Speaker 1: makes the brand look bad and that that's not something
Speaker 1: I sent out to do, right. I mean, I'm very
Speaker 1: proud of service. I'm obviously a plank owner in Marsak
Speaker 1: and that's not out there banging a drum trying to
Speaker 1: make that sound.
Speaker 2: But some of these things which I think maybe you
Speaker 2: may reference it in the book, but it's not talked
Speaker 2: about explicitly. As you know Fred Galvin's experience in his book,
Speaker 2: you know, select he was exonerated, to be clear, and
Speaker 2: his guys did apparently did nothing wrong. But I mean,
Speaker 2: still there's this controversy and this terrible journey that him
Speaker 2: and his guys went through, which is you know, has
Speaker 2: some similarities to the protagonist of the book.
Speaker 1: There is, and Fred and I have not specifically spoken
Speaker 1: about his book, but we spoke. I certainly knew Fred
Speaker 1: at the time that that was going down, and it
Speaker 1: does factor into some of the difficult parts of trying
Speaker 1: to remain a loyal to your people, where there's a
Speaker 1: lot of things swirling around you, your own command to
Speaker 1: sort of turned their back on you. I tried to
Speaker 1: put myself kind of in Fred's position and say what
Speaker 1: might that have felt like, and it sort of I
Speaker 1: wouldn't say naturally fed to that, but it was just
Speaker 1: a way going back to what Scott had said. Hey,
Speaker 1: if you write this as a piece of fiction, it
Speaker 1: didn't exactly happen to you, but you can look at
Speaker 1: it from its composite, right, amalgamation of experiences. And truthfully,
Speaker 1: you know in the book, I do mention that the
Speaker 1: special Forces units that were attached or working with us
Speaker 1: in many words, were there to keep tabs on us
Speaker 1: as a result of what happened with Fred and his guys,
Speaker 1: because they just so calm, large and use of socc
Speaker 1: in particular, did not trust Marstock and that was a
Speaker 1: tough thing to operate under at that point in time.
Speaker 1: And so again this is in no way to diminish
Speaker 1: anything of Fred and his guys. And I knew many
Speaker 1: of them and still speak to some of them, think
Speaker 1: well of their service. But they were in a very
Speaker 1: difficult spot that we all sort of lived in the
Speaker 1: shadow of regardless of how it ended up being solved,
Speaker 1: as you said, adjudicated, But at that point in time,
Speaker 1: it was all happening in parallel in real time as
Speaker 1: I was experiencing kind of what gets illustrated.
Speaker 2: And is there also sort of like a split in
Speaker 2: the command of like people who are in support of
Speaker 2: and others who are like throwing the dude under the bus.
Speaker 1: This seems to happen inevitably that there'll be a split,
Speaker 1: and there's something to be said for everyone gets their due,
Speaker 1: let the legal process take its course. Everyone's innoc until
Speaker 1: proven guilty. But there'll be a lot of well I
Speaker 1: think they're guilty, and you're either on board of this
Speaker 1: or not. And early in my career I had just
Speaker 1: on a nominal level, I was an investigating officer for
Speaker 1: a because a piece of equipment, satellite communications equipment, got broken.
Speaker 1: And what happened is a bunch of guys who were
Speaker 1: offloading a truck just grab the ruck and just threw
Speaker 1: it off the back as one does. Yeah, just unloading
Speaker 1: at two o'clock in the morning, not knowing what was
Speaker 1: in it, and as a very expensive piece of equipment,
Speaker 1: it broke. And as I was brought in and after
Speaker 1: I did, I was brought in after I did the investigation,
Speaker 1: and I said, okay, this is what I found. Literally,
Speaker 1: it is no one's fault. It is something that just happened. Yes,
Speaker 1: the people who responsible are these people. However, they wouldn't
Speaker 1: have done that if the right to say this person
Speaker 1: broke this or this person is you know, directly responsible
Speaker 1: you check their pay. That was just not possible. And
Speaker 1: the officer above me, who I was giving that to,
Speaker 1: is like, someone will be blamed for this, go find
Speaker 1: I was like, I can't go do that. Okay, who
Speaker 1: shall I pick you? In support? You'll see a trend
Speaker 1: in there. You know that I getting poked in the
Speaker 1: chest about that. So that something can happen on that
Speaker 1: kind of smaller level when you get into laws of
Speaker 1: armed conflict and some serious decision making in you know,
Speaker 1: split second decision making and difficult circumstances, that just takes
Speaker 1: it to another.
Speaker 2: When when you described that, it reminds me of somebody
Speaker 2: who was on this show. But I won't I won't
Speaker 2: say his name. I don't think he would want me
Speaker 2: to attach him to this story particularly, but in the
Speaker 2: Special Operations community, and he was a leader. Some of
Speaker 2: his guys were out training. One of them got killed
Speaker 2: totally an accident. It was there weren't even firearms. The
Speaker 2: guy fell, and they wanted him to blame the subordinate
Speaker 2: that that soldier's team leader, you know, throw him under
Speaker 2: the bus, fry him, like hey, we've looked at this
Speaker 2: whole thing, like they didn't do anything wrong. And so
Speaker 2: the chain of command fired that dude and the guy
Speaker 2: who is the team leader, and so so he got
Speaker 2: fired because he wouldn't fire the team. I mean, it's like, yeah,
Speaker 2: what the hell.
Speaker 1: They can absolutely go scorched earth. And and I do
Speaker 1: remember with Fred and his guys, you know, there was
Speaker 1: this there's kind of this Paul hanging over the Yeah,
Speaker 1: when they came back.
Speaker 2: Yeah, like I said, I don't think you directly referenced
Speaker 2: it in the book, but like, there's.
Speaker 1: This Paul hanging over the unit. And I knew what
Speaker 1: you were talking about it. And so as you see
Speaker 1: in the you know, in the book, it's there's in
Speaker 1: microcosm that's kind of what happened to people take upsides.
Speaker 1: Hey guys, it's your pal Jack.
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Speaker 2: were talking a little bit about earlier how like these
Speaker 2: units form little cliques inside them, and this is like
Speaker 2: one of the big I don't want to say like
Speaker 2: there isn't brotherhood in the military or in special operations.
Speaker 2: There absolutely is, but like when you talk to civilians
Speaker 2: or like when you talk to your parents, they have
Speaker 2: this like impression that it's like the band of brothers
Speaker 2: and everyone's like, I got your back, brother, and you know,
Speaker 2: all this.
Speaker 1: Sort of stuff, and there's some of that.
Speaker 2: Sure, there's there's support, absolutely, but as these like splits
Speaker 2: happen that you talk about, they're form, like these little
Speaker 2: friend groups, pure groups form, and you know, what your
Speaker 2: future looks like in the military sometimes depends on which
Speaker 2: of those groups you're aligned with or friends with.
Speaker 1: I think that that lens itself to people also in
Speaker 1: the sense of self preservation. If it's loyalty to a fault,
Speaker 1: and that's up and down the chain of command. Well,
Speaker 1: and you're going down with whatever happens. And if you
Speaker 1: distance yourself from that to some degree, then you can
Speaker 1: be you can have a bigger standoff. And by not
Speaker 1: getting involved, you're you're you're you're better off not taking
Speaker 1: up sides. But those loyalties go deep, and as are
Speaker 1: right in the beginning of the book, you know, we
Speaker 1: once pledge forever to the other and now we never
Speaker 1: talk right like that. That's how a lot of this works.
Speaker 1: And in the book, certainly it centers around an officer,
Speaker 1: Steve Keller, who is by all means my my avatar,
Speaker 1: if you will, because as I said, it started out
Speaker 1: as a as a biography. Although I developed Keller to
Speaker 1: be a little bit different than me. I mean, he's
Speaker 1: just got he's more interesting than I am, a little
Speaker 1: more depth. But the biggest thing is that the the
Speaker 1: typical memoir, the typical story, particularly the officer Johnah not
Speaker 1: told from his perspective, and too the officer Hollywood has
Speaker 1: done a huge disservice because the officer is either incompetent
Speaker 1: or in a complete you know, self righteous prick. And
Speaker 1: there are indeed some you know, type cast guys in
Speaker 1: this book. But in the main, decision making is hard,
Speaker 1: and combat decision making is hard. And maintaining cohesion while
Speaker 1: you're having your guys being involved in high end kinetic
Speaker 1: combat and maintain their humanity such as you can in
Speaker 1: those environments is unlike anything out there. There's corporate can't
Speaker 1: envision that they think on the layoff.
Speaker 2: There's also this portrayal I think there has been, uh
Speaker 2: also the military, of course itself advances this this idea
Speaker 2: of like, you know, the zero body fat general that
Speaker 2: runs ten miles every morning, and is this like a
Speaker 2: must still want to think that, Yeah, we still want
Speaker 2: to think that. But I think over the last ten
Speaker 2: years there have been enough high ranking officers showing their
Speaker 2: ass in public that like that kind of perception has
Speaker 2: starting to wear off. And I think you can see
Speaker 2: that and how this how the public relates to the
Speaker 2: military and everything going on right now.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and I think the book tries to, uh, all right,
Speaker 1: attempt in the book to address the larger gap between
Speaker 1: the public and those of us are served, because that's
Speaker 1: getting that that's widening yet more. And at one point
Speaker 1: we were all, you know, thank thank you for your service,
Speaker 1: and we were serving in the fronts and people kind
Speaker 1: of understood or knew somebody that was going to war
Speaker 1: or was at war. And then as that started to
Speaker 1: wind down and diminish, you just a fewer and few
Speaker 1: people have that kind of exposure. And so because of that,
Speaker 1: those areas that you're talking about where it becomes yet
Speaker 1: more sensational. I was like, oh, gosh, has this been
Speaker 1: going on the whole time? Yes?
Speaker 2: Maybe you know, hey, some of us tried to warn
Speaker 2: you well, and this is not it's not a confession
Speaker 2: or I promise. So there's a specific example in the
Speaker 2: book I want to get into. But before we go
Speaker 2: into that, we should probably back up a little bit.
Speaker 2: You know, you start off, you know, your protagonist in
Speaker 2: the book, Steve Keller, he goes through Marsk's selection, gets
Speaker 2: to his unit, and like pretty quickly kind of falls
Speaker 2: under his superior who kind of becomes his mentor.
Speaker 1: It was a choice in the book, right, And.
Speaker 2: I mean, was that like a that's obviously like I'm
Speaker 2: reading this, I'm like, this is something that he actually experienced.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And out of respect for the family of who
Speaker 1: that guy is based upon, I have to leave his
Speaker 1: real name out of that, even though you loved him.
Speaker 1: Loved him, yeah, yes, uh, and he he was unlike
Speaker 1: any person I've ever met. He's unlike any person anyone
Speaker 1: anyone probably has ever met. And uh, you know the
Speaker 1: basis for for who he is. And honestly, some of
Speaker 1: the interactions that happened within that book have indeed have
Speaker 1: indeed happened to me. So I have to I have
Speaker 1: him to think for me getting involved in the way
Speaker 1: that I did. But I that just rarely happens that
Speaker 1: you get to have someone like that who's literally gonna
Speaker 1: take you under their wing and take you on their
Speaker 1: journey with them. Yeah.
Speaker 2: And I mean I think Steve Keller in the book
Speaker 2: is like kind of like beside himself, like why does
Speaker 2: this guy even want anything to do with me?
Speaker 1: And I was he what he is? He? You know,
Speaker 1: and and then you know, the the tragedy.
Speaker 2: I feel like as I'm reading the book, Steve Keller, uh,
Speaker 2: you know, things start to come unraveled for him. I
Speaker 2: feel like, if you're going to point to a certain thing,
Speaker 2: is when Joyce dies, when Joyce is killed in combat,
Speaker 2: and you know, do you want to talk a little
Speaker 2: bit about like kind of what happened there.
Speaker 1: Well, you you're friends with people, close friends with somebody,
Speaker 1: and then they have a friendship set that you kind
Speaker 1: of get brought into, particularly if they've got a larger
Speaker 1: group of people with whom that they interact, and that
Speaker 1: may make you periphery in some ways. Although he did
Speaker 1: not make me feel that I was a periphery. I
Speaker 1: was actively involved, and I knew and he was the
Speaker 1: thing that made him really really great was that he
Speaker 1: just he was friends with all kinds of you. He
Speaker 1: didn't really care your mos or where you You didn't
Speaker 1: have to be a commando. And he just knew so
Speaker 1: many people and touched so many people that by his
Speaker 1: presence you just felt good around him. And and and
Speaker 1: so I was involved in that. And then when you know,
Speaker 1: in the book, when when he dies and Keller has
Speaker 1: to sort of come to terms with now he's very alone,
Speaker 1: or at least feels abandoned By's Joyce's abandoned by Joyce
Speaker 1: because of his death. He then comes to find that
Speaker 1: he was not necessarily in the club or in that circle.
Speaker 1: And it wasn't that it wasn't that the Joyce is
Speaker 1: lying to Keller it's just like this is just how
Speaker 1: he made people feel. And without that central figure to
Speaker 1: be the great they bind it together. Yeah, to be
Speaker 1: the centrifugal pull that was you know, the centric would
Speaker 1: be putting it out, but to be that that central
Speaker 1: focal point, that magnet, then people kind of dissipate. And
Speaker 1: that was that was a really hard thing for me
Speaker 1: to deal with personally when that happened. But also you know,
Speaker 1: certainly it's conveyed in the book, that feeling of loneliness
Speaker 1: and alienation. That's another tone that's that's kind of captured
Speaker 1: in there. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, it's it's kind of heart
Speaker 1: wrenching to read.
Speaker 2: And it's this very like you can empathiz it's I
Speaker 2: could empathize with the protagonist, and that there's this sense
Speaker 2: of like you're an insider, but you're still outside.
Speaker 1: Or you believe yourself to be an insider, right yeah,
Speaker 1: and you're like, wait a second, the doors closing, I
Speaker 1: want to come wait, why is why am I still
Speaker 1: sitting out here? And that that kinda.
Speaker 2: And that is when at the at the funeral, and
Speaker 2: like Steve Keller is one of the pall bearers for
Speaker 2: his commander, but like these other guys are looking at
Speaker 2: him like, wow, why are.
Speaker 1: You what are you doing here? Yeah? Who? How do you?
Speaker 1: How do you rate being here?
Speaker 2: And you'd think being in combat with him when he
Speaker 2: died would be you know, you kind.
Speaker 1: Of you would you would hold I hope that that's
Speaker 1: how that all put that kind of matter and to
Speaker 1: to to be fair in the in the in the
Speaker 1: in the actual world, he the guy on whom choice
Speaker 1: is based, uh, was killed out outside of me. He
Speaker 1: died elsewhere.
Speaker 2: So I kind of okay because in the book, like you,
Speaker 2: guys are on opposite sides of the objective right.
Speaker 1: Right, and in this case we're on OPTI size of
Speaker 1: the world in the real world. But this just made it.
Speaker 1: It's an imagined idea of kind of what got you.
Speaker 1: How I might have been when you when I was there,
Speaker 1: if i'd been there when that happened. And that goes
Speaker 1: back to we're talking about. You know, once you have
Speaker 1: the artistic space, the palette, you've got your palette, and
Speaker 1: then you've got this big canvas in front of you, Well,
Speaker 1: then you can string it together and say something and
Speaker 1: it makes the point you will. And I also say this,
Speaker 1: the book is it's meant to be a story that
Speaker 1: people can relate to based upon, as I said, relationships.
Speaker 1: And my primary editor ahead of sending you know, to
Speaker 1: really finish the manuscript is a woman named Kyitie Keating
Speaker 1: and she she gave two passes developmental passes on my manuscript.
Speaker 1: She's not a military person and she is not not
Speaker 1: really familiar at all with military stuff. So once she
Speaker 1: helped me like, hey, I shouldn't need a gloss or
Speaker 1: read to read this book, like if we some of
Speaker 1: this jargon that you've got. But on the other part,
Speaker 1: like she's like, you need to hone in on feelings
Speaker 1: and how people are reacting instead of being expository in
Speaker 1: the description, Like people need to be able to read
Speaker 1: that in a different method. Again, this is helping me
Speaker 1: develop as a writer. I moved my selector from say
Speaker 1: the fire exactly, and then if I product placed the gun,
Speaker 1: then it becomes you know something else, right, then it's
Speaker 1: a soldier of fortune advertisement And I didn't I didn't
Speaker 1: want to do that either, But ultimately eighty five percent
Speaker 1: of the people who consume books and read them are
Speaker 1: are women. And I wrote a book I hope will
Speaker 1: be appealing to a wide range of people of readers,
Speaker 1: even though I will not it's undeniable. It's there's a
Speaker 1: military flavored book. But I've had other people read it.
Speaker 1: I've had female readers. I had female better readers read it,
Speaker 1: and they were like, this is this is this is great.
Speaker 1: This is something very very different. I mean, going back
Speaker 1: to what we're talking about with the relationship with cal.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, and I mean to kind of go a
Speaker 2: little deeper into that. One of the things your book
Speaker 2: talks about is the relationship with the family, with the children,
Speaker 2: with the wives. In Keller's relationship with his wife, which
Speaker 2: like they love each other, but also there's this separation
Speaker 2: and like the more you pursue your marine career, the
Speaker 2: further away she kind of becomes, and she feels this
Speaker 2: jealousy of it and all of this. I mean, it
Speaker 2: was very like, yeah, that's the part I don't usually
Speaker 2: show you in the movies.
Speaker 1: If so, it's done in sort of a sickly sweet
Speaker 1: yeah kind of way. I wanted to have gravitas. I
Speaker 1: wanted to capture that's sort of like it's not just
Speaker 1: the crossing of the arms, like you love these guys
Speaker 1: more than me it's more of like you're slipping away
Speaker 1: from me because you're you're making this choice right, And
Speaker 1: I'd be remiss and saying that that that did happen,
Speaker 1: or denying that that that didn't happen. It absolutely happened.
Speaker 1: And I talk about compartment compartmentalization in the book particularly,
Speaker 1: it's just as pertains to the military member going overseas
Speaker 1: and saying, Okay, I have to be very focused on
Speaker 1: all of this. But a friend of mine made it
Speaker 1: a pretty great observation that all you're doing is pressing
Speaker 1: pause like on a DVD or VHS or something. Right,
Speaker 1: that energy hasn't gone anywhere. That the problem of that conflict,
Speaker 1: that friction is still there. You're just putting it somewhere
Speaker 1: else for a moment. Now, how that comes to a
Speaker 1: head alcohol abuse, drug abuse, god for big family abuse, divorce,
Speaker 1: all of these horrible things that can happen as a result,
Speaker 1: generally stems from you don't understand me because dot well
Speaker 1: you haven't allowed me in to understand, right that, and
Speaker 1: so that becomes that family dynamic was something I didn't
Speaker 1: think it had been captured particularly particularly well.
Speaker 2: I've had wives tell me over the years about you know,
Speaker 2: when their husband is repeatedly deployed for long periods of time,
Speaker 2: and when the husband has gone, the rest of the family,
Speaker 2: the wife and the kids get into this new routine
Speaker 2: of going to school and doing things, and the mother
Speaker 2: plays both the mother and the father role and all
Speaker 2: these things right, and then when the husband comes back
Speaker 2: from deployment and they'll say things like yeah, after he's
Speaker 2: home for like three or four weeks, I'm like, can
Speaker 2: you just deploy again? Like you get out of here,
Speaker 2: because you're ruining the routine.
Speaker 1: I was the fun dad like, but I mean, it's
Speaker 1: a real thing.
Speaker 2: It's a real dynamic that exists to try to like
Speaker 2: find this balance, which is I mean, it hats off
Speaker 2: to any couple that finds it.
Speaker 1: I'm not sure I would say that I ever achieved
Speaker 1: the balance. We found a way to balance it, but
Speaker 1: I don't think I ever found the I couldn't say, well,
Speaker 1: well here's the secret, guys, like you just just do this,
Speaker 1: like it's different for everybody.
Speaker 2: It takes Yeah, Well, I mean, what do you think
Speaker 2: if if there's like a a key point to put
Speaker 2: your finger on.
Speaker 1: To make it through all of that? What what what
Speaker 1: makes the difference. Well, I will say the compartmentalization for
Speaker 1: me did. And there's also an acknowledgment when you get
Speaker 1: back that you have to re enter the world that
Speaker 1: is there, not the one you want it to be,
Speaker 1: and you can't reasonably expect them to come into your
Speaker 1: world again and understand it right. And I will say,
Speaker 1: particularly in the special operations community, like the levels of
Speaker 1: divorce are absolutely astronomical, and you know, maybe it takes
Speaker 1: a while for a husband and wife too, or a
Speaker 1: guy as he's this will sound bad, but making his
Speaker 1: way through wives finding that person who's finally going to
Speaker 1: understand him, or maybe it's just put up with your
Speaker 1: lame shit. I don't know, but ultimately there has to
Speaker 1: be a meeting in the middle of that bridge and
Speaker 1: you have to understand, you have to understand, you know,
Speaker 1: you can't go back, and you have to be able
Speaker 1: to progress forward together, and there has to be an
Speaker 1: acknowledgment and perhaps give yourself some grace for God's fake
Speaker 1: that you went through something terrible.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and you can't you can't come back with this
Speaker 2: attitude of like, you don't know what I've been.
Speaker 1: Through because it's not their fault. How could they and
Speaker 1: are you really going to lay that out for them? Yeah?
Speaker 1: Are you going to tell them? Yeah? Yeah? How could
Speaker 1: they know if you're not telling them? And I think
Speaker 1: a lot of a lot of ways, you know, the
Speaker 1: writing that I've done in my novels or novella's, the
Speaker 1: smaller books that I've written up to this point, which
Speaker 1: were literally things that didn't fit in this book and
Speaker 1: kind of became their own stories, as well as my
Speaker 1: own writing substack and some of the other nonfiction commentary pieces.
Speaker 1: All of that has to do with a little bit
Speaker 1: of cleansing Catharsis. I'm not sure that you can call
Speaker 1: it closure, because you're never going to really close that out.
Speaker 1: But I think that you for me anyway that allows
Speaker 1: me to unpack those compartments and press play on those
Speaker 1: those tapes and and get it out. And there's still
Speaker 1: plenty more maybe to write. But I feel like I'm
Speaker 1: in a good space at this point. I'm actually giving
Speaker 1: myself a little bit of creative pause, even though every
Speaker 1: day I'm like, God, I should be writing more. I
Speaker 1: need to be doing more. I need to be, you know,
Speaker 1: creating more. I wrote this whole last novel, and it's
Speaker 1: taken me a long time to do it, and I'm
Speaker 1: really proud of it, and I love talking about it.
Speaker 1: I love talking about the writing process. I'm really happy
Speaker 1: to be on the show tonight to do that. But
Speaker 1: this is the first time I've actually allowed myself to
Speaker 1: sit back and go, you know what, man, he did
Speaker 1: something cool. Maybe it's time to just basking that a
Speaker 1: little bit. You know. Yeah, for whatever it is.
Speaker 2: Well, it goes back to finding the balance between like
Speaker 2: some of the bitterness or the decisions you wish you
Speaker 2: had made differently with you know, I'm really proud of
Speaker 2: what I did.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I've got seventeen reviews. I wish i'd had seventeen hundred.
Speaker 1: I'd love to be sitting here right now. You know,
Speaker 1: with any number of accolades, who doesn't want to be
Speaker 1: thought of well right that you wrote something great or
Speaker 1: you wrote something that people think are great. I'm not
Speaker 1: afraid of success. I just don't really know what it
Speaker 1: looks like at the moment, and you know, you hope
Speaker 1: that that that's going to somehow materialize. But on the
Speaker 1: other side, you know, I wrote it. People say, well,
Speaker 1: who's your audience for this? And I wrote it for me,
Speaker 1: and I did write it for my family, and I
Speaker 1: wrote it for people that I know, and I think
Speaker 1: I wrote it for other veterans who might be struggling,
Speaker 1: and I wrote it for families, and I wrote it.
Speaker 1: You know, there's all these things that kind of just
Speaker 1: blossomed as a result of this that I hadn't necessarily considered,
Speaker 1: as it wasn't like I was set out look at
Speaker 1: this exactly. I'm want to put this together.
Speaker 2: And another aspect of it to if we haven't ratcheted
Speaker 2: up the tension enough on this protagonist is that his
Speaker 2: wife has cancer, that she's having bouts of going into remission,
Speaker 2: it's coming back.
Speaker 1: And I mean, again, that's.
Speaker 2: Like I had a teammate whose wife went exactly through that.
Speaker 1: I mean, and you're somehow got to stay focused on
Speaker 1: the mission mission and especially as an officer. And this
Speaker 1: is the crazy thing, is you want to do your job,
Speaker 1: or at least at that point it's on we did.
Speaker 1: I wanted. I want to get out there. I want
Speaker 1: to I got to lead my guys. This is what
Speaker 1: I joined to do. As Keller's told in this you
Speaker 1: were born to do this job, and I believed it.
Speaker 1: And now maybe I'm not doing that anymore, Like, well,
Speaker 1: now what am I born to do? I guess it's
Speaker 1: a writer or talker. I don't know, But at that
Speaker 1: point in time, it was like, okay, yeah, I firmly
Speaker 1: grasp hold of this. And then you've got this whole
Speaker 1: other distractor on the other side. And I wouldn't call
Speaker 1: it a distractor necessarily, that's not the right work. But
Speaker 1: you've got something that is pulling it at you, that
Speaker 1: divides your attention and divides it really does divide your loyalty,
Speaker 1: and if you spend too much time thinking about it,
Speaker 1: no matter how important is to you, it can get
Speaker 1: you killed and you or as an officer, you can't
Speaker 1: make the right decisions, and that's a that's a difficult
Speaker 1: place to be. It.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I had Again, I won't mention the gentleman's name
Speaker 2: because I'm not trying to skyline somebody doesn't want to
Speaker 2: be out there. But this officer that I had, you know,
Speaker 2: his wife had cancer and he didn't tell any of
Speaker 2: us about it, just private business.
Speaker 1: He doesn't have owe us at any of those explanations.
Speaker 2: But it got to the point where he was like
Speaker 2: he finally, I guess you could say put his foot
Speaker 2: down and made the call like, hey, I have to
Speaker 2: go home early now, like we're probably a little bit
Speaker 2: more than halfway through the deployment. I totally respect it.
Speaker 2: He's like, my wife is now at this point with
Speaker 2: this disease. I have to go home and deal with
Speaker 2: this because for I think he made the right decision
Speaker 2: exactly for the reasons you lay out, like your loyalties
Speaker 2: are being divided, you know, whether you like it or not.
Speaker 1: I had a good friend of mine as I was
Speaker 1: joining in the Marine Corps. He told me, you know,
Speaker 1: whether you're in the Marine Corps for four years or
Speaker 1: you make a forty year career of it, at one
Speaker 1: point it will end and you will have great memories
Speaker 1: and great experiences that you can look back upon. But
Speaker 1: you need to ensure that your family is there at
Speaker 1: the end as well, and you have to figure out
Speaker 1: what that looks like for you. In you you may
Speaker 1: have to make some decisions to your point that that
Speaker 1: are juxtaposed against your sense of duty.
Speaker 2: It's, you know, kind of ironical. I guess in one
Speaker 2: way that you know, while you're a marine or a
Speaker 2: soldier whoever, you're out there pursuing this this dream of yours.
Speaker 2: But like the family structure really is the support system
Speaker 2: even as you leave them behind. And when you see
Speaker 2: that support structure start to collapse, the divorce and families
Speaker 2: splitting up, that's like an indicator, right that things are
Speaker 2: not going right.
Speaker 1: And I think people are quick to blame the veteran,
Speaker 1: or blame perhaps even the spouse for not sticking around.
Speaker 1: And some could say who could blame them? Especially if
Speaker 1: it's violent, especially if they're dealing with alcohol stuff abuse,
Speaker 1: They're wrestling with things psychologically and they you know, I
Speaker 1: don't need any help. One of the best things we
Speaker 1: ever did was, especially especially in the special operations community,
Speaker 1: was not only get more psychologists, but deploy them forward
Speaker 1: to actually start talking to people, so you have someone
Speaker 1: to talk to you and the psychologist and quite frankly,
Speaker 1: you know the padre, the priest, whoever, someone with whom
Speaker 1: you could just express these things with, because it's not natural.
Speaker 1: Warfare is a human endeavor and it's also very unnatural,
Speaker 1: and so as allude to in the book, write about
Speaker 1: it in the book you can't be good at war
Speaker 1: and also revel in it. I don't think perhaps there's
Speaker 1: sociopaths and people like that or just just don't care.
Speaker 1: But I think if you're thinking, and we want thinking
Speaker 1: soldiers and we want thinking people who will make correct analysis,
Speaker 1: not enough to just stump your chin and say it's
Speaker 1: warrior ethos, we're lethal and we're going to fuck all
Speaker 1: that noise. You need to be able to have people
Speaker 1: who can make the right decisions. I mean, this is
Speaker 1: for God's sake. We came up with the Laws of
Speaker 1: Armed Conflict after World War One because it was so
Speaker 1: freaking bad that there had to be some method to
Speaker 1: harne it or to like put limits on this shit.
Speaker 1: Now it's a lot for a German soldier to say
Speaker 1: that using shotguns are inhumane when they were burning people
Speaker 1: to flame throwers and using poison gas. But somewhere in there,
Speaker 1: we have to be able to go, all right, he's
Speaker 1: got a point, you've got a point, and how are
Speaker 1: we going to conduct ourselves? Because this is freaking terrible.
Speaker 1: And when you fight a war for twenty years and
Speaker 1: you do it a volunteer force, and you send people
Speaker 1: back from multiple deployments, and there were guys who had
Speaker 1: way more deployments than me and other units and saw
Speaker 1: much more protracted combat and very difficult situations. I know
Speaker 1: a guy who killed someone in hand to hand combat
Speaker 1: with his helmet. Now you don't you don't just go
Speaker 1: down to home depot and get a job after that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean it's an ugly thing, right, and so how
Speaker 1: do you deal with that? And how do you come
Speaker 1: to terms with that? Never mind the fact that you
Speaker 1: might have done something that you know, in the heat
Speaker 1: of the moment was one thing, but then you had
Speaker 1: a pre medication because you were so angry that someone
Speaker 1: else got killed on your buddies. I mean, there's a
Speaker 1: psychology there that just is hard to wrap your head around.
Speaker 1: It was one of the reasons my father spent so
Speaker 1: much time studying unicohesion and how people, how soldiers in particular,
Speaker 1: deal with stuff like that.
Speaker 2: What was he trying to kind of grapple with his
Speaker 2: own experiences.
Speaker 1: Well, my dad was a Vietnam era soldier, but he
Speaker 1: did not serve in Vietnam. But he did help with
Speaker 1: the organizational psychology in the study of the United States
Speaker 1: Army in the post Vietnam era, in particular staff corps.
Speaker 1: In trying to get around why morale was so bad
Speaker 1: in the army, not only in the Vietnam period, but
Speaker 1: then post war, really the military was bad all the
Speaker 1: way around, the Marine Corps include, and that took a
Speaker 1: long time to rebuild. And so he spent a lot
Speaker 1: of time talking with people, guys in the brig people
Speaker 1: who were in trouble for solding their officers, fragging their office,
Speaker 1: for people who did drug dealers, et cetera. And it's
Speaker 1: like what and they just really it came down to
Speaker 1: they felt, you know, these people felt that their their
Speaker 1: leadership did not care about them and that they were
Speaker 1: just commodities. And if we start, you know, in the
Speaker 1: modern military, you cannot look at the people that you've
Speaker 1: got to something can be easily bought or traded or
Speaker 1: just done done with you. They have to be looked
Speaker 1: at first as human beings and treated with dignity and respect.
Speaker 1: And I think that's what we're really trying to capture
Speaker 1: in the book, is that the people in their matter
Speaker 1: and what they're going through matters, even if they're bad.
Speaker 2: That's this really had this interesting phenomena that I've seen
Speaker 2: now of dudes looking back at the eighties with rose
Speaker 2: tinted glasses and you know, everything that came after that.
Speaker 2: It's political correctness and so on. Man, the nineteen eighties
Speaker 2: army was in a bad, bad way, Like there was
Speaker 2: shit going on that the American public just doesn't understand,
Speaker 2: like fragging your squad leader if he tells you to
Speaker 2: do something you don't want to do kind of stuff,
Speaker 2: especially like over in Germany the guys are stationed over there.
Speaker 2: I mean, I remember a general of that era telling me,
Speaker 2: He's like, if we had to go to war with
Speaker 2: the Soviets, it would have been ugly, Like he was saying,
Speaker 2: like we were unprepared and not ready with that military.
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Speaker 1: My father told me a story of It's called Campbell
Speaker 1: Barracks and Heidelberg, Germany, and they had a giant parade
Speaker 1: deck parade field that was flanked on all sides by
Speaker 1: the barracks, and during the wintertime, inevitably they would find
Speaker 1: blood in the snow and drag marks from people who'd
Speaker 1: been beat up. And so they started parking tanks on
Speaker 1: all four sides and putting these giant searchlights on to
Speaker 1: illuminate the parade deck. And then there were barracks in
Speaker 1: which the officer of the day who was armed, would
Speaker 1: not go above the first floor because the rancor inside
Speaker 1: of the barracks was so bad that if they did.
Speaker 1: And this happened, one of the officers of the day
Speaker 1: went upstairs and tried to tell everybody, you know, hey,
Speaker 1: it's time to go to bed. They turned off the
Speaker 1: lights and put him in a stand up WallWalker and
Speaker 1: threw him out of the window. While he was in he
Speaker 1: jacked him up pretty bad. So my father told me
Speaker 1: about this captain in Vietnam. He is a silver star
Speaker 1: and he was od I was offered of the day,
Speaker 1: and he turned to the staff sergeant and he was
Speaker 1: on duty with at the desk, and he said, I'm
Speaker 1: going upstairs because the boys were playing all this music whatever,
Speaker 1: those smoking reefer smoking that Devil's lettuce, and oh yeah,
Speaker 1: it was probably just an absolute shit show. And he
Speaker 1: unfastened his pistol belt and he left. He said, I'm
Speaker 1: gonna leave this here and sort of like, you're out
Speaker 1: of your mind. One going upstairs. Two unarmed, You're again
Speaker 1: out of your mind. He goes, I only got seven
Speaker 1: bullets in this thing. What am I gonna do? So
Speaker 1: he went upstairs and as he went upstairs, as my
Speaker 1: dad related this story, the lights went off and to
Speaker 1: hear this, Hey lifeer, what are you doing up here?
Speaker 1: And he said, my dad told me that. The captain said, well,
Speaker 1: we got two choices. You can beat me up, which
Speaker 1: is probably what you're fixing to do, but really I
Speaker 1: just came up here to see how you are, and
Speaker 1: I just want to know what's going on. So we
Speaker 1: can either fight in the dark, or you can turn
Speaker 1: the lights on and we can talk like men. And
Speaker 1: then the light came on. Tough guy comes on around,
Speaker 1: So are you serious? The captain said, yeah, I'm not
Speaker 1: up here. I mean what am I gonna do? Pick
Speaker 1: a hole in your high fi. I can't fight you.
Speaker 1: And then sure enough, that's what happened. People just sat
Speaker 1: down and they just like, lot, no one's listened to us,
Speaker 1: like we were stuck here in Germany, like we feel
Speaker 1: like nobody's treating us like men. And that started to
Speaker 1: cycle where they started slowly writing the morale in that unit,
Speaker 1: and then the blood in the snow stopped and things
Speaker 1: started coming around. Now, it's not like he was like,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna leave a trash bag out and put all
Speaker 1: your reefer in here and we'll we'll, we'll, you know,
Speaker 1: Amnesty Box, uh, no, hard feelings like he you know,
Speaker 1: obviously had a lot to work with, but that was
Speaker 1: the first time anybody had tried to have any sort
Speaker 1: of legitimate conversation with them. And so, you know, as
Speaker 1: I was coming up as a leader and talking with him,
Speaker 1: it was like, you got to remember that you've got
Speaker 1: a lot of people who can think, and they may
Speaker 1: not seem like they're the most intelligent, but they absolutely
Speaker 1: know what's going on, and you ain't gonna fool right. Well,
Speaker 1: like I said, well Joe does know, And like I said,
Speaker 1: my first you know, my first appearance here, what I
Speaker 1: asked for?
Speaker 2: Who? Who?
Speaker 1: Who all my criminals were? Who can hot wire cars?
Speaker 1: And who can get me stuff? Because when the ship
Speaker 1: hits the fan and I'm in a really bad place,
Speaker 1: I need guys who can get stuff done. And I'm
Speaker 1: not gonna be too worried about your education, if you
Speaker 1: will about doing so. And so those relationships, the human relationships,
Speaker 1: the relationships between staff, encos and officers in particular, as
Speaker 1: it goes down to the lowest level, that is the ladder.
Speaker 1: That's the glue of of of any organization, I think.
Speaker 1: And if you really want a good example of where
Speaker 1: that hasn't been working, Russia right now. With that Ukraine
Speaker 1: is a fantastic perfect example. They just don't have any
Speaker 1: sort of professionalism inside of their staff and zeo and
Speaker 1: officer corps to be able to translate that to the people.
Speaker 2: Yeah, when you're having took a bit of a tangent there,
Speaker 2: but you're going to push North Koreans up to the front.
Speaker 2: I've heard they're actually pushing a lot of African soldiers
Speaker 2: up to the front. Now yeah. Uh. Anyway, So back
Speaker 2: to the book, Joyce is killed, The funeral happens now.
Speaker 2: Steve Keller is being deployed, but with a new commander.
Speaker 2: And this is like kind of you know, the meat
Speaker 2: of the book is this and some regards it's like
Speaker 2: the dream deployment, right, it's it's the epic Marsok deployment
Speaker 2: where you guys get to go and stick it to
Speaker 2: the Taliban, get to.
Speaker 1: Call it heaven and hell.
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah, and uh, but there's all this other stuff
Speaker 2: going on at the same time. Steve Keller is what
Speaker 2: we'll start with the first one here. Steve Keller is
Speaker 2: struggling with the anger he is carrying around over joyce
Speaker 2: being killed, and it like leads him. There's this interesting
Speaker 2: scene in your book where it leads him to almost
Speaker 2: crossing the line and like one of his like sergeants
Speaker 2: like kind of like real, I think it's the medic
Speaker 2: maybe like reels them in a little bit.
Speaker 1: It's a platoon sergeant. Okay, yeah, yeah, without spoiling it,
Speaker 1: but yeah, it's absolutely he's like, hold on, what do
Speaker 1: you what are you doing? Like you're you're losing it, dude,
Speaker 1: no matter how righteous you may feel in all of
Speaker 1: this at that moment. Yeah, and you would, I think
Speaker 1: you'd hope that you'd have a good enough relationship with
Speaker 1: your staff and s fields they tell you totally well,
Speaker 1: and that they wouldn't be formulated that they would be like, yeah, okay,
Speaker 1: we're gonna do this. Jesus well. I mean, but that's
Speaker 1: the worst. But we've seen plenty of examples of that
Speaker 1: in real in real, real world situations. And I think
Speaker 1: that's kind of what what lends lent to that vignette.
Speaker 1: I did indeed find you know that that facility, but
Speaker 1: that's not what happened there. But I kind of looked
Speaker 1: at like the psychology of like how do you get
Speaker 1: to what it was a book where I think it's
Speaker 1: called Black Hearts, which is about a army unit in
Speaker 1: Iraq that commits a war crime that that's a real
Speaker 1: one there. There's also the Marines at Hiditha, which cost
Speaker 1: a lot of people their their careers. You know, there's
Speaker 1: there's many. I hate to say it, but I started
Speaker 1: just kind of looking at these rights. And that's why
Speaker 1: I say in the book, like these things happened in
Speaker 1: some capacity, not everything happened to me in the career.
Speaker 1: Was able to amalgamate, compile, and then just sort of
Speaker 1: in my mind as a writer and as a chronicler, say, Okay,
Speaker 1: what is what would this look like if it was
Speaker 1: happening to him, to them in a small, small vignette,
Speaker 1: and you know, how would that be handled? And I
Speaker 1: think I think there's that's really where it's effective, as
Speaker 1: you've got checks and balances and they don't lose faith.
Speaker 1: Faith Like everybody can make a mistake, but you didn't.
Speaker 1: You didn't cross that long right, right?
Speaker 2: Have you ever seen something like that where a junior
Speaker 2: soldier kind of stands up and does the right thing
Speaker 2: like that? Like it makes me think of like the
Speaker 2: Eddie Gallagher trial, whereas all these young seals that we're like, no,
Speaker 2: this isn't okay, and the chain of command was telling
Speaker 2: them like are you sure? They were like trying to
Speaker 2: paper it over, but it was like the it was
Speaker 2: the most junior soldiers in the unit that were like, hey,
Speaker 2: like this isn't cool.
Speaker 1: But that's probably who your audience is, right, Like it's
Speaker 1: even worse if it's happening with a guy who's got
Speaker 1: a combat reputation, he's decorated, and then well shit, man,
Speaker 1: he's got to know what's going on. Here, it's got
Speaker 1: to be okay, especially if you spin them up, you've
Speaker 1: taken some casualties, you're pissed off, and now it's like, okay,
Speaker 1: well we're gonna wat and they admire, they admire their leader.
Speaker 1: They're like, this guy is the ship. Yeah, it's the
Speaker 1: cult of personality and goes back to what we're talking
Speaker 1: about when you now you have these camps in there.
Speaker 1: But I think that that stuff generally does manifest themself
Speaker 1: from the from the junior level, because they do you
Speaker 1: have the conscience, you know, whether whether or not they've
Speaker 1: been exposed to everything that the that the person who's
Speaker 1: trying to have been is institutionalized, uh and convinced that
Speaker 1: what they're doing is is sacrosanct. Right right, We'll be fine,
Speaker 1: don't worry about it. You know, we actually should be
Speaker 1: really concerned about this, and and and there should be
Speaker 1: ethics courses. That's why ethics and combat training for ethics
Speaker 1: is very important. I believe talking with people about it,
Speaker 1: and I write about that in the book. You know,
Speaker 1: I think I think the line I write is, you know,
Speaker 1: I thought we all saw things the same way, But
Speaker 1: there comes a time when the fabric of an organization
Speaker 1: will be tested, and that's where your leadership will truly
Speaker 1: be designed or tested. The design of your leadership will
Speaker 1: be tested.
Speaker 2: And so Steve Keller's new commander in the book is
Speaker 2: quite the character.
Speaker 1: He's amazing, he's quite the colorful character. Had a good
Speaker 1: time writing him.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you, I mean, he's a pretty reprehensible person. But
Speaker 2: I thought it was interesting that you like kind of
Speaker 2: found a way even to humanize him and to try
Speaker 2: to like find an insight of like, Okay, why is
Speaker 2: this guy like this? And it's coming out of from
Speaker 2: my interpretation of the book, it's coming out of a
Speaker 2: massive insecurity of somebody who grew up in poverty, and
Speaker 2: you know, the lack of self confidence. You know, all
Speaker 2: of those things are kind of coming out in this
Speaker 2: in this way, to the point that he's even like
Speaker 2: making up stories about past lives he lived where he
Speaker 2: was a warrior in the Roman Empire. Yeah, can you
Speaker 2: talk a little bit about that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, So I wanted to create I wanted to create
Speaker 1: this so it if Keller is based upon me, and
Speaker 1: you know, the traits of officers that I saw that
Speaker 1: I admired, and I also look at you know, flaws
Speaker 1: within people that I knew and also myself as I
Speaker 1: captured that. Brian Garrity is his counterbalance, It's Keller's counterbearit
Speaker 1: balance his his his platoon sergeant. And I made him
Speaker 1: like this. And Brian's not clean, as you know, but
Speaker 1: he is. I made him sort of the super sea,
Speaker 1: the super senior listed advisor that of these great guys
Speaker 1: that I served with, I based him off of one guy,
Speaker 1: and then I grabbed these other traits. And I was like,
Speaker 1: what if I just stacked this and made this this
Speaker 1: guy that just he's just got got laser focus and
Speaker 1: he knows what's going on, and he's and he's Steve's
Speaker 1: right hand manned and in many ways his conscience or
Speaker 1: at least can can help him think consciously. I wanted
Speaker 1: Balatine to be the complete opposite of that, and while
Speaker 1: at the same time also in charge. And so you're
Speaker 1: you're like, well, shit, he does have the rank, he
Speaker 1: does have the position. Technically, he's not doing anything unethically,
Speaker 1: He's not. He may be evil, but he is not
Speaker 1: doing anything ill illegal. He may be shady, but he's
Speaker 1: not necessarily a bad dude, so to speak. And so
Speaker 1: he became really an interesting guy to to become to
Speaker 1: write and as I wrote about him, and he is
Speaker 1: based upon several different people. I just made this mashup
Speaker 1: guy that I was like, the wow archetypical toxic leader. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and unfortunately they're not hard to find and they're and
Speaker 1: they're out there. Maybe it's also cautionary tale, like hey,
Speaker 1: maybe people would read this and be like, am I
Speaker 1: that way? I should? I? Is it the mission at
Speaker 1: all costs? You know? Where am I as a person?
Speaker 1: Some people are never going to have that epiphany. They're
Speaker 1: just they're programmed that way. You can see that. You
Speaker 1: can see that across where it's military, corporate environments. It's
Speaker 1: the other thing about the book. I wanted people to
Speaker 1: be able to look at it from a leadership perspective,
Speaker 1: in that toxicity and people making decisions that are just
Speaker 1: frustrating to their subordinates is not Germane to the military.
Speaker 1: It exists everywhere, whether you're working in a grocery store, corporation,
Speaker 1: an intelligent you know, organization, whatever, there's a human aspect
Speaker 1: to all of this. And you hope in our line
Speaker 1: of work and particularly in work places that have screenings
Speaker 1: and polygraphs and all other stuff and somehow you're going
Speaker 1: to read out all of this stuff. But well it's
Speaker 1: not a failsafe.
Speaker 2: Well, one of the facets of this commander is that
Speaker 2: he didn't go through selection and kind of like found
Speaker 2: a way to get grandfathered in.
Speaker 1: And that's a huge chip on his shoulder right right
Speaker 1: talking to his insecurity, did you ever.
Speaker 2: Come across a leader like that that makes decisions based
Speaker 2: on completely irrational bullshity?
Speaker 1: Like did say that too quick?
Speaker 3: Yeah?
Speaker 2: Like this this guy is like making tactical decisions based
Speaker 2: on like his gut feeling, based on when he served
Speaker 2: in like the Legion, you know, back with the Roman Empire.
Speaker 1: Now, to be fair, I never actually saw that. I
Speaker 1: just thought it would be really fantastic to to to
Speaker 1: put that out there. But I think there are guys
Speaker 1: out there who really do believe, like somehow they've got
Speaker 1: this you know, sixth sense or they developed it, you know,
Speaker 1: and like as I mean, Sympathy for the Devil, great
Speaker 1: song by the Rolling Stones, and you know, if you
Speaker 1: listen to the entire song, it's just a guy that
Speaker 1: it's the perspective obviously of the devil, but he's literally
Speaker 1: like I've been in through all this stuff and I've
Speaker 1: seen it all. I wrote a tank in the general's ranks,
Speaker 1: you know, I've with a blitzkreek rage like I've I've
Speaker 1: been in the chaos, and I helped manufacture it. And
Speaker 1: there's nothing you guys can do about it. And wouldn't
Speaker 1: that be a terrifying thing? Is to have someone actually
Speaker 1: believe that.
Speaker 2: I mean, there is a pretty this isn't totally irrational
Speaker 2: or as extreme as the you know, the case in
Speaker 2: the book, but there is a direct connection with the
Speaker 2: way soldiers have related to and taken the symbols of
Speaker 2: Spartan warriors, templar knights, crusaders, these sorts of things. And
Speaker 2: I always saw it as like an attempt to fill
Speaker 2: the moral void that existed in the war that we
Speaker 2: were fighting. That like, we didn't understand what we were
Speaker 2: there for, and at a certain point we all knew
Speaker 2: that we didn't know.
Speaker 1: Why we were I think it gives you some absolution
Speaker 1: and the feeling of righteousness and what you're doing. And
Speaker 1: I would be remiss lying even to say that I
Speaker 1: didn't feel that in some regards, particularly you know, in
Speaker 1: the early stages of the war. And if you look
Speaker 1: at the book and the way it's structured, you've got
Speaker 1: three phases. You've got kind of the first phase of naivete,
Speaker 1: the second phase of you know, you're sort of learning
Speaker 1: and getting mature. In the third one you just kind
Speaker 1: of surrendered yourself to the defeat of it all. You
Speaker 1: could even look at it as three phases of Afghanistan,
Speaker 1: which I didn't deliberately right as that, But that's kind
Speaker 1: of how it's. It's as I've gone to look at
Speaker 1: it has has occurred. But going back to what you
Speaker 1: were asking about, you know, commanders or people just doing
Speaker 1: completely irrational stuff are coming up with things. You know,
Speaker 1: when I when I saw some of the some of
Speaker 1: the plans that we had enacted and they were saying, Okay,
Speaker 1: this is what we're gonna go and execute, it was like,
Speaker 1: have we thought this through? Okay, so let's say we
Speaker 1: pull this off, then what are we gonna do? I
Speaker 1: don't worry about that. Well, no, I'm very concerned about
Speaker 1: that because.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I've seen that with like units and other theaters,
Speaker 2: like okay, we can get in there and do this objective,
Speaker 2: how the fuck are we gonna get out?
Speaker 1: You know? Those kinds of questions or what's the point
Speaker 1: after the fact? Right? And and you know I write
Speaker 1: about this in my book The Patrol, where you know,
Speaker 1: it's it's a day in the life of this unit,
Speaker 1: and as they get done with it, it's sort of like, okay, well,
Speaker 1: what did we really accomplish? And that's not laid out directly,
Speaker 1: you know, spoon feeding the reader, but that's really the
Speaker 1: lesson at the end. It's sort of like, well, you know,
Speaker 1: came he did this thing, it resulted in in these
Speaker 1: these things, this this activity, and what was the plan
Speaker 1: after the fact. And I've also seen commanders brief hire
Speaker 1: commanders like, hey, this is a situation on the ground
Speaker 1: and we're doing great. What not doing great? We can't
Speaker 1: get the IDs to stop on this part of the road.
Speaker 1: We've been in contact every day since we've been here. Oh,
Speaker 1: I've inflected this many casualties on the enemy? Well we
Speaker 1: think we've affected that many casualties on the enemy. I
Speaker 1: know the casualties that we've incurred. So is that you
Speaker 1: know the balance is that the metric And that goes
Speaker 1: back to Vietnam where you know McKinsey and in some
Speaker 1: of those Analytical Corporations came and Rand came and said, well,
Speaker 1: if we dropped this many bombs and results in this
Speaker 1: much and this is what you know, victory looks like. Well,
Speaker 1: nobody told the Vietnamese that that's what was supposed to be.
Speaker 1: And I think the Afghanist, you know, kind of.
Speaker 2: Well, there's that study I always bring up, and I
Speaker 2: probably brought it up in our last interview, Lenny Wong's
Speaker 2: study Lying to Ourselves Dishonesty in the Army Profession, about
Speaker 2: how we basically groomed an entire generation of officers on
Speaker 2: this idea that it's okay to send up false reports,
Speaker 2: it's okay to lie. And so every one of these units,
Speaker 2: when they got into theater, the unit was amber. When
Speaker 2: they left, it was green. When the next unit came,
Speaker 2: it was amber again, and it went back to green
Speaker 2: by the end. And that repeated itself for twenty years.
Speaker 1: And I said that in another podcast that that interview
Speaker 1: that I did. I I don't believe there was any
Speaker 1: sort of plan for handoff as to like, Okay, this
Speaker 1: is what it's going to look like it's and then
Speaker 1: when you received, if not only here's what we've accomplished.
Speaker 1: But here's what we didn't get done, and here's what
Speaker 1: you need to get done to move this forward.
Speaker 2: There's never like a ten year campaign plan of like, okay,
Speaker 2: you're here for six months, you're getting this part of
Speaker 2: the plan done and it goes out this long. Because
Speaker 2: we always and we were telling the public too, it
Speaker 2: seemed like our government was that we're six months away
Speaker 2: from victory.
Speaker 1: If you uncover that Senate to me, that ten year plan, Yeah,
Speaker 1: that doesn't exist. Okay, by the way, okay, I just
Speaker 1: you know, just to be clear, I still have hope,
Speaker 1: you know, once in a while. But it's but it's
Speaker 1: but it is true. And this is what this is
Speaker 1: where the real juxtaposition comes down, is because like right
Speaker 1: about in the book and then my other my other
Speaker 1: writings and as of late, some of my frustrations in
Speaker 1: my and my sub stack, it's hard to be proud
Speaker 1: of your service and balance that against the larger picture. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and with my own children serving in the military and
Speaker 1: my my oldest daughter being married to marine v twin
Speaker 1: to pilot, I'm extremely proud of their service. I'm proud
Speaker 1: of the military structure, and I believe that it is
Speaker 1: valuable and service is valuable. But what I have found
Speaker 1: after all of this is that our country needs to
Speaker 1: be really damn sure of what it is we're doing
Speaker 1: when we employ our troops. And I don't believe that
Speaker 1: that has been clear since Vietnam. I don't believe that
Speaker 1: across the board. And it you know, that's not to
Speaker 1: diminish the bravery of people fighting in Mogadishu in the nineties,
Speaker 1: that's not to diminish any of the you know, small
Speaker 1: wars quote unquote, you know, peace time conflicts that we're
Speaker 1: involved in the nineties up to about two thousand and one,
Speaker 1: it was certainly dangerous. People died, never mind Central America, etc.
Speaker 1: People serving on the sharp end are doing their jobs
Speaker 1: as the best of their ability. But in the political
Speaker 1: side of that, it has got to be better, better defined,
Speaker 1: and it cannot be just tied to a military industrial
Speaker 1: drive to keep profits rolling. And that you know, I'm
Speaker 1: not going to get two conspiratory hill as we're sitting here,
Speaker 1: but it is absolutely inextricable. It may not be the
Speaker 1: driving force, but it's inextricable that we're selling M sixteen. Well,
Speaker 1: we got to be you know, we are Our major
Speaker 1: export in this country is warfare, and we we're good
Speaker 1: at it to a degree, but without those plans, without
Speaker 1: the sexist strategies, without talking about exactly what victory is
Speaker 1: going to look like, we just get hammed up in
Speaker 1: these things.
Speaker 2: I think it's it's great that you mentioned that that
Speaker 2: you know, trying to trying to juxtappose, you know, being
Speaker 2: proud of your service with the bigger picture, right And
Speaker 2: I think we're at a point right now where a
Speaker 2: lot of like kind of our peer group, I guess
Speaker 2: you could say, are going through exactly that, trying to
Speaker 2: reconcile that because.
Speaker 1: The war is ended.
Speaker 2: The guys that stayed in through the War on Terror,
Speaker 2: they're retiring right about now, and they're all coming out
Speaker 2: on City Street and they're realizing, like they used to
Speaker 2: be part of a team and they fought as a team.
Speaker 2: Now they're by themselves and they're having to think about
Speaker 2: this stuff. And you know, back what we were saying
Speaker 2: a little bit earlier about you know, the past and
Speaker 2: what we believed in the past. I mean, if you
Speaker 2: went and went to the FOB in two thousand and
Speaker 2: four and talked to me when I was twenty one. Yeah,
Speaker 2: I bet I had some pretty crazy ideas rattling around my.
Speaker 1: Head at that time. Met me as a captain for sure.
Speaker 2: But I see people today sometimes not everybody. I see
Speaker 2: some people today and it feels like they're still on
Speaker 2: the fob in two thousand and four. And that's some
Speaker 2: of that like warrior talk that we've been talking about, you.
Speaker 1: Know, Spartan warriors and warrior ethos and this kind of stuff.
Speaker 2: And it's like, as hard as it is, like at
Speaker 2: some point you have to take the l as hard
Speaker 2: as it is, if for no other reason at all,
Speaker 2: so that you can move on with your own life
Speaker 2: and have a happy life.
Speaker 1: There's no reason why I should. Absolutely one of the
Speaker 1: bigger ten of the book is reconciliation, and kind of
Speaker 1: goes back to what you're talking about with the Balanine characters.
Speaker 1: That all that war is all he knows, and that's
Speaker 1: the only thing that gives him purpose in value, and
Speaker 1: he has to look good doing it right. His his image,
Speaker 1: his his entire reason for being is tied to this,
Speaker 1: and he cannot be seen as being inadequate, cowardly. He
Speaker 1: has his own issues and and I think I think
Speaker 1: that messes with Keller because he's like, maybe I'm a
Speaker 1: little like this guy, and I don't want to be
Speaker 1: and mh.
Speaker 2: So we start to get into this whole scenario with
Speaker 2: the unit going after high value their their high value
Speaker 2: target number one is the guy that they think killed Choice.
Speaker 2: But at the same time, I mean, you know, you
Speaker 2: do you also as they're kind of prosecuting those targets,
Speaker 2: and I think I'd be remiss if I didn't mention this,
Speaker 2: and you didn't, you know, get to talk about it
Speaker 2: a little bit. There is also this big section of
Speaker 2: the book where you're talking about, you know, Marines executing
Speaker 2: highly professional operations, tactically competent operations and kicking some ass
Speaker 2: out there, and that's a part of the book also.
Speaker 1: And there's a futility to that as well. And you know,
Speaker 1: night after night or objective after objective, and you're you're
Speaker 1: supposedly moving the war forward and performing incredibly well as
Speaker 1: units and as individuals, I mean the units I served
Speaker 1: in the huge litany of battlefield valor wars, and the
Speaker 1: Marine Corps doesn't give out the rewards cheaply at all.
Speaker 1: And that's not to diminish anybody who's gotten something elsewhere.
Speaker 1: But there's stuff that Marine gut Navy commendation medals with
Speaker 1: v's that we get you bronze star, silverstars somewhere else, depending.
Speaker 2: On Yeah, you mentioned it, like the Steve Keller character
Speaker 2: gets hurt at one point in a Firefighter's just like
Speaker 2: that fucking whatever.
Speaker 1: Like I don't I don't need a purple heart for
Speaker 1: that ship. Not when you've got guys on ventilators. No, exactly, Yeah,
Speaker 1: even though you rate it, I never had an ear
Speaker 1: ring in this year.
Speaker 2: But by anyway, yeah, maybe maybe maybe maybe twenty years later,
Speaker 2: you need that purple heart license plate after all, if.
Speaker 1: My D two four teams rolling around on my car
Speaker 1: then or yeah, my truck and then perhaps, But there's
Speaker 1: plenty of people with vinyl stickers that take pulled that
Speaker 1: slack up from you, I think, But but yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean again, it's it is a uh, it's a paradox.
Speaker 1: You don't want to be thought of as a coward.
Speaker 1: You don't want to be thought of not pulling your weight.
Speaker 1: You don't want to be No one wants to be
Speaker 1: not part of the team. Everyone wants to feel that
Speaker 1: they're contributing and doing something. And then it's sort of like, well,
Speaker 1: what is this all about? And as the casualties mount
Speaker 1: and you're still haven't gotten your guy, and you you
Speaker 1: just start to look around, going what are we doing?
Speaker 1: And that that actually is what brains the mind. The
Speaker 1: combat stressed notwithstanding, but that is all compounding because during
Speaker 1: the moment people will execute you, you will go to
Speaker 1: your your training. You will go to the people that
Speaker 1: you've been around in the units that I served in
Speaker 1: where you very aggressively trained or obviously do that automatically
Speaker 1: as the Marines, but then after that, with resourcing and
Speaker 1: equipment and being able to just train not only realistically,
Speaker 1: but in ways that other units just don't get that
Speaker 1: kind of exposure, don't get those opportunities to grab somebody
Speaker 1: from an SMU and have them come to you how
Speaker 1: to do some of the stuff that they do, and
Speaker 1: it just increases your ability, builds your confidence in being
Speaker 1: able to do stuff. It's it's then when you're actually
Speaker 1: fighting and you apply that and it works, you're like, damn, man,
Speaker 1: I'm actually good at this shit, and you feel good
Speaker 1: about it. Then you come back and you're like, but
Speaker 1: we lost you guys tonight, and we still didn't get
Speaker 1: our guy and I got months of this to go right,
Speaker 1: or we're supposed to go home in two days and
Speaker 1: we just we just had somebody die. That draint that
Speaker 1: just takes takes the wind right out of you, demoralizing
Speaker 1: for a unit.
Speaker 2: I don't know like how deep I want to or
Speaker 2: you want to get into with kind of the plot
Speaker 2: of the book. But there's a conspiracy that gets hatched
Speaker 2: between this commander and is he a squad leader in
Speaker 2: the platoon, he's a team leader, team leader, and it's
Speaker 2: essentially to go and commit a war crime, to go
Speaker 2: after h VT Number one or your HVT number one
Speaker 2: and you know, commit an extra judicial killing. And I
Speaker 2: say it's a conspiracy because at least in the in
Speaker 2: the book, Steve Keller is kept intentionally kept in the
Speaker 2: dark about this this plot that they come up with.
Speaker 1: You want to talk what would you like to say
Speaker 1: about that? Well, for Balentine, it's it's about the win.
Speaker 1: So he doesn't care how he gets it right, and
Speaker 1: he knows what it will do, you know, for his career,
Speaker 1: to get h HVT Number one off the battlefield. And
Speaker 1: he also has a bit of deniability because if it
Speaker 1: doesn't go the way that he thinks. You blame the
Speaker 1: team leader, well, and then he can also blame Keller,
Speaker 1: who was also his arche nemesis. Right, we'll get too
Speaker 1: deep into you know what what they do. Please read
Speaker 1: the book. But the big, the big thing is that yes,
Speaker 1: it is enough of a conspiracy, but there's also enough
Speaker 1: plausibility in denying it. And I think that's what really
Speaker 1: rubs people the wrong way, is like sort of like,
Speaker 1: we don't do this, we don't come up with this
Speaker 1: kind of stuff. Well, necessarily no, but we know that
Speaker 1: it occurs. I mean, as you said about Gallagher and others.
Speaker 1: You know, there's the vignettes are all out there, and
Speaker 1: so to compound all of that into you know, and
Speaker 1: the one thing Keller wants more than anything is to
Speaker 1: get this guy, the guy that killed Joyce. Yeah, so
Speaker 1: because that is something that it just gets denied him
Speaker 1: and the way that it happens, and then it's subsequent
Speaker 1: fallout that becomes like its own. Now he's got to
Speaker 1: fight for something else, and what it is is his reputation,
Speaker 1: which again juxtaposed it's balance on that's all he's concerned about.
Speaker 1: And son Sue wrote beware of the man who worries
Speaker 1: about only his reputation because he worries about nothing else. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's person's hell to work for. Argument tates life.
Speaker 2: So the so c ID rolls in and there's an investigation.
Speaker 2: I mean, yeah, okay, in some sense, this guy survives
Speaker 2: the investigation, but like you said, his reputation is basically
Speaker 2: inextricably tarnished by these events that he ostensibly had no
Speaker 2: control over. But hey, you're the officer, You're you're the guy. Yeah,
Speaker 2: you're responsible. And you know, in the book you talk
Speaker 2: a lot about or you describe a lot about like
Speaker 2: this character is feeling like ostracized from his own organization
Speaker 2: that like it's a brotherhood, but now not so much anymore.
Speaker 1: Everyone's kind of looking at you like, oh, you know,
Speaker 1: you a sellout or do this or do that.
Speaker 2: And I mean it's kind of relatable for some of
Speaker 2: us at least that you know, and maybe not.
Speaker 1: The typical military experience.
Speaker 2: But sometimes you try to do the right thing and
Speaker 2: it blows up in your face.
Speaker 1: Well, I mean, I think you could probably call it
Speaker 1: a Jerry Maguire moment, right if you've seen the film
Speaker 1: or at the beginning Tom Cruise as a sports agent,
Speaker 1: and he finally decides like, I can't do this anymore,
Speaker 1: and he writes this big manifesto treatise about, you know,
Speaker 1: how everything's wrong with the sports world and how absolutely
Speaker 1: exploitative it is, and his own group of people are like,
Speaker 1: he publishes this far and wide, and his own group
Speaker 1: of people are like, yeah, Jerry, I stand behind you.
Speaker 1: I'm not with you, but I love what you said.
Speaker 1: And then he gets fired and he has to pick
Speaker 1: himself up from the ashes of what he ostensibly was doing,
Speaker 1: you know, correctly, and he's sort of he becomes this
Speaker 1: anti hero in this cutthroat world in which he lives.
Speaker 1: So the Marine Corps could be looked at as a
Speaker 1: large corporation. You could look at what happens here is
Speaker 1: in a corporate sense as well, where there are people saying,
Speaker 1: you know, I don't agree with the way we're doing,
Speaker 1: as well as personal management or fiscal decisions, et cetera.
Speaker 1: And we talk a lot about and preach it. You
Speaker 1: need to have integrity. You need to come forward when
Speaker 1: you know something wrong is happening. But there's a risk
Speaker 1: with that, and when you do that, there's that will
Speaker 1: automatically get people to be WHOA. I don't know if
Speaker 1: I want to get dragged down with that, I don't
Speaker 1: want to. We'd go back to what we were talking
Speaker 1: about earlier, with people speaking up or people deciding, you know,
Speaker 1: he's my guy no matter what. I'm standing behind him.
Speaker 1: And I think I think Fred and his own guys
Speaker 1: ran into that as well, feeling very distanced. You know,
Speaker 1: once the smoke cleared, if you will, it's like, oh,
Speaker 1: you're still friend, We're still friends.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but there's some words you can't take back or
Speaker 2: actions even Yeah, and uh.
Speaker 1: I remember picking Fred up from the airport. He called
Speaker 1: me and said, hey, man, I don't have anyone else
Speaker 1: to get me. Can you come pick me up from
Speaker 1: Wilmington too? In the morning. I was like, all right,
Speaker 1: on my way And it wasn't like, oh, jeez, Red,
Speaker 1: you're saying a lot of bad shit about you. But
Speaker 1: some people are like that, well, a lot of people
Speaker 1: are like that. Yeah, And so I I went and
Speaker 1: grabbed him and that it was like we were driving along.
Speaker 1: I was like, so, anything you want to talk about, like,
Speaker 1: you know, we were just like, you know, you didn't
Speaker 1: have to say anything, you already knew what was going
Speaker 1: on and I had mine. These are great. I'm glad
Speaker 1: you like him. He had enough going on, and I
Speaker 1: think at some point you just want somebody to be like,
Speaker 1: you know what, man, whatever happens, it's okay between you
Speaker 1: and me. And the difficulty inside of units that are
Speaker 1: really close insular, well, that's exactly where it's going with this,
Speaker 1: is that they get very close as long as everything's
Speaker 1: going well, everybody's really happy, but that that that insular
Speaker 1: nature will actually become insulation because people start to move
Speaker 1: to things that make them feel more comfortable. And for
Speaker 1: a leader, particularly an officer, that kind of situation that's
Speaker 1: a very lonely place.
Speaker 2: And then mostly more extreme side of it is, you know,
Speaker 2: between this commander and this team leader. It's also an
Speaker 2: example of where a brotherhood starts to become more like
Speaker 2: a mafia, and it's like everyone kind of has dirt
Speaker 2: on each other, you know, and they're kind of like
Speaker 2: now tied into one another in this case through crime
Speaker 2: and being elevated through the command structure in unison right
Speaker 2: as partners almost.
Speaker 1: And that becomes kind of confusing, doesn't it, because you're
Speaker 1: just like a second how could anybody, How does that work?
Speaker 1: How any back in this who? That's not how we're
Speaker 1: supposed to be. He's a good guy. He's a good guy,
Speaker 1: but good guy and I would have him in a firefight.
Speaker 1: It's terrible if we take him out of it, you know,
Speaker 1: to a bar. But it's a great guy to have around. Well, Well,
Speaker 1: how much character do you weigh on that?
Speaker 2: I mean, I think the way I would describe some
Speaker 2: of these organizations is more like an organism in the
Speaker 2: sense that it like defends itself. If the texts of Contagion,
Speaker 2: it starts deploying white blood cells, like we're going to
Speaker 2: destroy that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it looking for the military acronym, but it's you know,
Speaker 1: it's isolate and bypass. Yeah. Yeah, I just let that
Speaker 1: thing die out there. And and that's kind of what
Speaker 1: you feel like.
Speaker 2: So yeah, I don't know how much we want to
Speaker 2: give away about the book, because we do hope people
Speaker 2: will go out and buy it and read it, and
Speaker 2: I hope they do. It's worth it, uh linked down
Speaker 2: the description. Is there anything else you want to say
Speaker 2: about like Steve Keller's redemption and sort of like that
Speaker 2: sort of like journey coming back from.
Speaker 1: Some of these terrible experiences somewhere in everyone's journey. And
Speaker 1: I'll use the military side of it, just because that's
Speaker 1: that's my perspective. And I or twenty four years of
Speaker 1: my adult life in military, particularly special operations, and I
Speaker 1: was enamored of it. I look around at your bookshelves
Speaker 1: and we've had these conversations before. You know, whether it
Speaker 1: was SOG or in the early stage. I love your book.
Speaker 1: You know about the early stages of pre Delta. You
Speaker 1: know Army, Army Special operations. Somewhere in all of that,
Speaker 1: you make a decision to commit to this type of thing,
Speaker 1: or at least I did, and I think most of
Speaker 1: us involved in this for any period of time, you
Speaker 1: just say, Okay, this is this is my vocation, this
Speaker 1: is what I pursue. I'm going to read about it.
Speaker 1: I'm going to understand it, I'm going to apply it.
Speaker 1: I'm going to learn to your point of your organization,
Speaker 1: your organization should be a learning organization, and you know
Speaker 1: your debriefs lend towards getting better and not repeating mistakes,
Speaker 1: and you're looking for flawlessness and ways, which is also unattainable.
Speaker 1: And because of that impossibility, you put a lot of
Speaker 1: pressure on yourself to be that, and when that doesn't happen,
Speaker 1: the guilt that comes with it, particularly if you've lost people,
Speaker 1: or or you've you've destroyed relationships, or you've just not
Speaker 1: performed as you'd hoped. There has to be a way
Speaker 1: to come to terms with that. And I keep saying
Speaker 1: that closure is not the right word, because you're not
Speaker 1: going to close that out. You need to be able
Speaker 1: to address it. And that's really the message in this
Speaker 1: book is that your past is something you have to
Speaker 1: not only live with, but make peace with for its
Speaker 1: blemishes and it's good stuff. It'd be too easy to
Speaker 1: just be like, oh, I did it all great, and
Speaker 1: you know, here's all the reasons why I e. Balancine,
Speaker 1: he's never going to have that idea of self come
Speaker 1: up and where he just finally has a breakdown. That's
Speaker 1: just not how he's programmed. But in Keller's case, is
Speaker 1: very much bothered by everything that has occurred and has
Speaker 1: struggled with that for a really long time. And the
Speaker 1: whole reason that Joy shows up into his life is
Speaker 1: to be like, look, man, it is time for you
Speaker 1: to come to terms with this, and you have to
Speaker 1: let go and that doesn't mean released to the point
Speaker 1: of complete distance, but by doing so and really examining that,
Speaker 1: you can become a whole again. And it is indeed
Speaker 1: a novel of healing, and I believe at the end
Speaker 1: that's really the message because he's he is flawed. He's
Speaker 1: got a lot of things going on in there, that
Speaker 1: particular relationship with his family, his children in his later
Speaker 1: years and kind of how he looks back on them,
Speaker 1: that he was trying to be the best man that
Speaker 1: he could be and the best leader he could be.
Speaker 1: He's trying to be everything to everyone and he has
Speaker 1: to forgive himself for all the stuff that he just
Speaker 1: wasn't able to meet. And I think that's really what
Speaker 1: it comes down to, is somewhere in there, you've got
Speaker 1: to be able to just take a moment for yourself
Speaker 1: and go, it's okay for me to feel this way.
Speaker 1: Maybe explore that.
Speaker 2: You know you're saying this, or reminds me of someone
Speaker 2: else we had on this show. I think de correct
Speaker 2: me if I'm wrong with Greg Daly Marine Office or
Speaker 2: Marine NCO.
Speaker 1: Last name was Daily, John d John Ruckgdbatterers. Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: great book, and he's very good.
Speaker 2: And he writes in his book about you know, some
Speaker 2: of the friends that he lost and so on on,
Speaker 2: and he's makes it very it's it's we don't often
Speaker 2: talk like this because it sounds selfish, but there's a
Speaker 2: truth to it too. It's like, hey, there's some advantages
Speaker 2: to dying young. You know, they died heroes. You know,
Speaker 2: when you live. When you live and you grow into
Speaker 2: old age, you start to have these questions of like
Speaker 2: was I an adequate father? Was I a good teammate?
Speaker 2: Was I a good husband? You know, all these things
Speaker 2: sort of sit on your.
Speaker 1: Face and in a firefight, you know you're not also
Speaker 1: going is Jesus alive? Should I perhaps convert to like
Speaker 1: you're not having these moments like you know, of self reflection, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, epiphany type stuff. And you know, I actually
Speaker 1: quoted Keith Richards in the book. You know, so it's
Speaker 1: nobody wants to get hold, but who wants to die young? Yeah,
Speaker 1: Keith Richards taught Willie Nelson how to play the guitar,
Speaker 1: tells you how old he is, perhaps, But yeah, I think, uh,
Speaker 1: I think there's just a lot of perhaps some universal
Speaker 1: m hm tenets in there that people can get a
Speaker 1: hold of it. And and that's that goes for anything.
Speaker 1: I think as people retire, as they get older, regardless
Speaker 1: of what they did, they didn't you know once you
Speaker 1: might have those moments are on the golf course or
Speaker 1: what have you, and be like, man, maybe it wasn't
Speaker 1: the best guy at that point in time. And it's
Speaker 1: just weird when stuff pops in and people ask me like,
Speaker 1: how did you come up with these stream of consciousness
Speaker 1: moments where the guy's just thinking about something random, because
Speaker 1: that's how people think, right, that's what happens. I don't
Speaker 1: don't know if it's gonna work on a novel, like, well,
Speaker 1: that's what is making you uncomfortable because you're you know,
Speaker 1: eating a piece of pizza one day and you're like, man,
Speaker 1: why did I ever say that? Because that's when it
Speaker 1: comes up a wana. You have any questions that you
Speaker 1: want to ask off camera? But are you sure we're
Speaker 1: all here? I can give you the mic, I say,
Speaker 1: we're all here, give her the mic. Yeah, come on,
Speaker 1: now here we go. We can talk, we can top off,
Speaker 1: we can top off.
Speaker 3: I love no.
Speaker 4: I thought I loved what you said. I thought it
Speaker 4: was so raw and honest and.
Speaker 2: No.
Speaker 4: I you know, I I was thinking because I wrote
Speaker 4: a piece about how I so much of what you
Speaker 4: said resonated with me because I wrote a piece about
Speaker 4: how for me writing it doesn't really like exercise, you know,
Speaker 4: your demons, but it does help you make peace with it.
Speaker 4: I think that was the exact term I used to
Speaker 4: you know.
Speaker 1: So, yeah, I believe it is a It's a great
Speaker 1: outlet for me organizing thoughts and trying to get that
Speaker 1: put in kind of the Hemingway method, being as crisp
Speaker 1: and clean in the way you present that as you
Speaker 1: can be the fewest amount of words. But as someone
Speaker 1: who has trained as an expository writer, that doesn't always
Speaker 1: work really well because you want to write as much
Speaker 1: as you can to explain things. And I think that
Speaker 1: is the challenge, is to capture that in such a
Speaker 1: way that it has all the feeling and the emotion
Speaker 1: and it deals with or conveys the message without being
Speaker 1: over overt and also allowing the reader to understand why
Speaker 1: you're being spare. And that's tough. Yeah, there's the reason.
Speaker 1: He was really good at that, right, you know, and
Speaker 1: the rest of us aren't.
Speaker 4: But I have a question you said, you have two
Speaker 4: kids in the military, So what has their experience been
Speaker 4: and what sort of insights have you given them?
Speaker 1: Othery're on their own. I don't know. So my daughter
Speaker 1: of the West Point, which is its own leadership laboratory,
Speaker 1: and she had a very i would say, the idealized
Speaker 1: view of kind of what being an army officer was
Speaker 1: going to be like. And then she got to her
Speaker 1: first unit and then she was like right right, and
Speaker 1: she was like, uh, so we have had many conversations
Speaker 1: about leadership and both you know above you adjacent to
Speaker 1: leading staff in CEOs. So the best I can give
Speaker 1: her a perspective is we start to talk to different
Speaker 1: about different situations. And it's not to say like this
Speaker 1: is what you should do. It's more like, okay, I've
Speaker 1: encountered that before. Here's some things you can think about
Speaker 1: as far as you know talking to them whoever it
Speaker 1: should be. But yeah, she's you know, your second antenant,
Speaker 1: first lieutenant. You don't have any clout, you don't have
Speaker 1: any ability to affect much except for the people beneath you.
Speaker 1: And I think that military leadership is really should be
Speaker 1: about servant leadership, and the higher you get the more
Speaker 1: difficult that becomes. You can think of that in a
Speaker 1: corporate sense too, and I think there's people in corporations
Speaker 1: who just don't have any perspective on that at all.
Speaker 1: They don't really care, they're not really tied to that.
Speaker 1: It's just a different set of programming and it certainly
Speaker 1: my son he joined the Marine Corps. He wanted to
Speaker 1: be a Marine officer for different reasons than I did,
Speaker 1: and he has created his own path but still has
Speaker 1: to deal with the same things and just the I
Speaker 1: think there's an idea that you're told, and you talk
Speaker 1: about installation inside of these officer training programs, that this
Speaker 1: is how it's going to be, and then you get
Speaker 1: out there like, wait a second, I didn't think I'd
Speaker 1: have to deal with a guy like this, Or how
Speaker 1: do you get somebody who just doesn't want to do this,
Speaker 1: you know, to at least do it enough till they
Speaker 1: get out type of thing. And there's a great, great
Speaker 1: book by Mike Malone, Michael Dandrish Malone called Common Sense Leadership.
Speaker 1: It's only about this big, absolutely fantastic. You should add
Speaker 1: it to the shelf. My dad used it. He gave
Speaker 1: it to me and both of my kids have used it,
Speaker 1: so we've got generations of Ingram's using this book. I
Speaker 1: recommend it. I learned a lot from that just reading
Speaker 1: it and you know, applying his lessons Malone's lessons he's
Speaker 1: a good friend of my father's, to small unit leadership,
Speaker 1: particularly at the platoon level, and then as you get
Speaker 1: up further up the chain, there's tenets that you can
Speaker 1: pull from that. But I think people sort of look at,
Speaker 1: particularly in the junior officer side of it, that that's
Speaker 1: just sort of their formulation period and then once they're
Speaker 1: done with that platoon a company time, they can just
Speaker 1: move on and they'll put that behind them. But that's
Speaker 1: actually where you formunulate who you are as a leader,
Speaker 1: formulates your your core, and if you get away from
Speaker 1: that and that, that's where you start to diverge from
Speaker 1: your values and tenants and things like that. I hope
Speaker 1: that answers that.
Speaker 4: You mentioned Hemingway. Who are your other literary influences.
Speaker 1: I like Michael Hurr, who wrote Dispatches. He also is
Speaker 1: the primary screenwriter for Full Metal Jacket. Very interesting guy.
Speaker 1: I like uh Joseph Conrad as a novelist. I like
Speaker 1: Ambrose Bears, also a war novelist, are actually rather pragmatic,
Speaker 1: kind of dark writer, but very interested. Like Jack London,
Speaker 1: I think he's really got some Yeah, he's just Stephen Crane.
Speaker 1: I think he's you know, another another very interesting writer.
Speaker 1: I do like Edgar Allan Poe very again very dark,
Speaker 1: but uh, pros Is is tremendous.
Speaker 4: Have you read Tim O'Brien.
Speaker 1: I do like to. I love the things they Carried.
Speaker 1: I like Carl Lance's matter Horn is also actually Fields
Speaker 1: of Fire by James Webb. There's certainly plenty of modern authors,
Speaker 1: but some of the the the the older, Uh, literary
Speaker 1: people are are awesome, really enjoy them. Great.
Speaker 2: You gave me a couple recommendations for World War Two
Speaker 2: novels that are still sitting on I bought them. They're
Speaker 2: sitting on my bookshelf and hopefully I will get to
Speaker 2: them in twenty twenty six.
Speaker 1: What is it here to Eternity? It's wonderful you read
Speaker 1: that woke? No, No, that's Winds of War. Sorry, James Jones,
Speaker 1: he wrote Thin Red Line. That's right. It's a trilogy, and.
Speaker 4: For the name, but it's a trilogy.
Speaker 2: And the other.
Speaker 1: One and the Dead, which is yeah, yea, yeah yeah
Speaker 1: by Norman Maayler. Yeah. Steinbeck also huge, speaking speaking of Vietnam,
Speaker 1: he did a lot of dispatches from Vietnam as a
Speaker 1: writer correspondent. But I like John Stabeck stuff as well.
Speaker 1: This is fiction is fantastic and I love Fight on
Speaker 1: the Western Front. Can't beat it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I have to admit I've never read the book
Speaker 2: to read, but I love the movie.
Speaker 1: Well, I was gonna say only only watched the nineteen
Speaker 1: thirties version.
Speaker 2: I watched the new one that came out, and the
Speaker 2: nihilism of it resonates.
Speaker 1: It has good tenants, but it doesn't I believe it
Speaker 1: doesn't capture what the nineteen thirties version is. Look for
Speaker 1: it in Germany. I just got on Blu Ray.
Speaker 2: Actually, since we're on this topic, bring it up my
Speaker 2: probably like my favorite war movie is Actually this came
Speaker 2: out probably in the late forties. Have you ever seen
Speaker 2: the Americanization of Emily No? John John Gardner, Jane Gardner.
Speaker 1: Isn't it?
Speaker 2: And uh It's it's an anti war film that was
Speaker 2: made right after World War Two.
Speaker 1: It's like it's an incredible movie. Okay, my favorite anti
Speaker 1: war movie is Grand Illusion, fantastic French film. Well, I'll
Speaker 1: look for that one too.
Speaker 2: I'm always fascinated by how many people we've interviewed on
Speaker 2: the show who are inspired to join the military by
Speaker 2: watching Full Metal Jacket, which is like a full throated
Speaker 2: anti war.
Speaker 1: We all fell for it, man, oh man, we we did.
Speaker 1: We us jar as, we really did. Speaking of which,
Speaker 1: Eugene Sledge with the Old Breed, that's a fantastic memoir
Speaker 1: Breen in World War Two. Yeah, his, Yeah, it's a
Speaker 1: really really great book.
Speaker 2: So tell us about the next novel coming, Ivan, It
Speaker 2: sounds like you're kind of in the final stages of
Speaker 2: writing it.
Speaker 1: Yep. It's called The Bear and the Wolf. It is
Speaker 1: at and this has it, This has tenets of a thriller.
Speaker 1: But this, in this case was absolutely written as a
Speaker 1: sort of a cop drama, kind of an adventure murder mystery. Yeah. Absolutely,
Speaker 1: It's got a very sinister tone to it, a little
Speaker 1: bit of a departure from where I've been been writing.
Speaker 1: But actually that was a great next project after not
Speaker 1: only writing the other four novel novellas that I've that
Speaker 1: I've written that have led to Once We Plays Forever,
Speaker 1: but now this one is just something very different. I
Speaker 1: actually had to do a lot of research talking to
Speaker 1: police officers and some former military guys. And I said
Speaker 1: it in the nineteen eighties, so it's not technology heavy.
Speaker 1: Requires a little more, yeah, detective work and development.
Speaker 2: The book of the novel I have coming out in June.
Speaker 2: It's very much set in a remote part of Africa,
Speaker 2: and when you strip all the technology away, it's interesting
Speaker 2: that it allows you to kind of really focus on
Speaker 2: the characters, and the characters have to be much more
Speaker 2: interesting because the political intrigue isn't there, the technology isn't there.
Speaker 2: You don't have these sort of gimmicks to rely on.
Speaker 1: Well, and because I said it in the nineteen eighties,
Speaker 1: to go exactly what you're talking about, we have this
Speaker 1: idealized notion of what the nineteen eighties are and I
Speaker 1: took kind of a dark undertone with that. But really
Speaker 1: what influenced it was just the soundtrack that I had
Speaker 1: in my mind of like what this thing should look like,
Speaker 1: the peche Mode and peche Mode I did send you
Speaker 1: a link on that. The Police Foreigner. You've got van Halena.
Speaker 1: There's all kinds of great stuff from there. It's a
Speaker 1: little eclectic.
Speaker 2: Tell folks a little bit about what the book's about,
Speaker 2: because I'm really interested by, like the premise of it.
Speaker 2: I think it's an untapped moment in history, if you will.
Speaker 1: So essentially it ties in with the serial killer ski.
Speaker 1: It's not to say they're not out there still, but
Speaker 1: certainly in the nineteen eighties when were growing up, he
Speaker 1: had just a large number of very high profile cases
Speaker 1: of you know, people being serially murdered or having some
Speaker 1: really bad things happened to them. And I looked at
Speaker 1: it from a perspective of, well, what if there was
Speaker 1: somebody who was involved in human trafficking was also a
Speaker 1: serial yeah, kidnapper, but he also has his own things
Speaker 1: that he likes to do. And I said it, in Alaska,
Speaker 1: it's very remote, so the way he does this is
Speaker 1: won't reveal that, but he's he's kind of hidden in
Speaker 1: plain sight. And it's also tied to a fledgling group
Speaker 1: of the hostage Rescue team out of the FBI, who
Speaker 1: at that point in time were developing different skills sets
Speaker 1: to conduct hostage rescues. And I kind of looked at well,
Speaker 1: what if they managed to track down a guy who
Speaker 1: was doing this, but his location was so difficult to
Speaker 1: get to that you had to very specialized people to
Speaker 1: do so. Because it's set in the United States, you
Speaker 1: can't just use military forces because of post comatatis and
Speaker 1: how would they go about doing this?
Speaker 2: So if you haven't, I suggest reading and even contacting
Speaker 2: Danny Colson wrote No Heroes, he's the founder of hr T.
Speaker 1: Well, I actually wrote him into the book. Oh really,
Speaker 1: as so I probably should. He's a cool guy guy.
Speaker 1: I wrote him well because at the point in time,
Speaker 1: it's really when the unit's being founded, and I talked
Speaker 1: to several members who were of the members of that unit,
Speaker 1: not only presently but at that point in time. And yes,
Speaker 1: it's a work of fiction. I take a little bit
Speaker 1: of liberties with kind of like how they go about
Speaker 1: doing stuff. But yeah, it is action adventure. But there's
Speaker 1: also a huge detective part of this, which as I
Speaker 1: mentioned in my earlier appearance on the podcast, and I
Speaker 1: originally planned on being a federal law enforcementation. So I
Speaker 1: think I'm trying to scratch that itch that I might
Speaker 1: actually have gotten to do that it'd be a little
Speaker 1: bit of a gum shoe, But I also very much
Speaker 1: influenced by the Netflix show mind Hunter. You know, as
Speaker 1: I was looking at just oh, you know, all the
Speaker 1: stuff that they were doing with that, I was like, well,
Speaker 1: what if they just melded you know, the investigation with
Speaker 1: this you know, action arm of the FBI and then
Speaker 1: were able to come up with how they were going
Speaker 1: to you know, track this guy down and the things
Speaker 1: that he's doing. It got to a point where when
Speaker 1: I was in the head of the antagonist, the primary
Speaker 1: you know, serial awful guy, I can calling him a
Speaker 1: killer is not it doesn't do him justice. But I
Speaker 1: was just like, man, am I am I really developing
Speaker 1: this guy like this, like this is the something. Maybe
Speaker 1: I should take a break from this moment as I
Speaker 1: as I put him together.
Speaker 2: But hr T is an interesting unit because they're a
Speaker 2: counter terrorism unit, but at the same time they're also
Speaker 2: badged law enforced federal law enforcement officers that can investigate crimes,
Speaker 2: make arrests, testifying court all that.
Speaker 1: Stuff, and and and they have to Yeah, you know,
Speaker 1: it's not just it's not just like it with us.
Speaker 1: It's really clean. You just go in and shoot up
Speaker 1: the bad guys and all right, we're see you later.
Speaker 1: We're with them. You know, they got a whole chain
Speaker 1: of custody that if they're involved in it, they still
Speaker 1: have to you know, participate in that whole whole piece.
Speaker 1: When do you think that book's coming? Well, I hope
Speaker 1: Mike Sager's watching this and we can start talking about it.
Speaker 1: But I need I don't yet know. I really need
Speaker 1: to get it through. As Hemingway wrote, the first draft
Speaker 1: of anything is ship. I don't think it's ship, but
Speaker 1: it's definitely not great. It needs work. Beta readers need
Speaker 1: to get their hands on it and need some feedback,
Speaker 1: and then I'll probably go back to CAIDI and get
Speaker 1: some developmental editing and go back through my process. But
Speaker 1: I would, I would. I would love to see it
Speaker 1: come out. But that's not a reach, it's just a
Speaker 1: matter of side. Yeah, so far, the book's doing well.
Speaker 1: I'd really like to get it higher visibility and people
Speaker 1: read it and just take advantage of what I do
Speaker 1: have out there. But yeah, always always looking at the
Speaker 1: next project, a guess. But right now that's refining that
Speaker 1: and I've got some screenplays that I've been poking away at,
Speaker 1: some cool projects as welcome.
Speaker 2: So the book once we pledged forever it's out now.
Speaker 2: There'll be links down the description for you guys watching
Speaker 2: the podcast or listening.
Speaker 1: To it reading, go and find it.
Speaker 2: It's Amazon, wherever else people go to buy books, you
Speaker 2: can find it.
Speaker 1: I think Mike has got it on Okay, multiple platforms,
Speaker 1: but Gotchagur group is sorry, the main main publisher got it.
Speaker 2: Anything else that we haven't covered that, anything you want
Speaker 2: to say about the book or anything else before we
Speaker 2: get going tonight.
Speaker 1: No, I think we've covered it. Like I said, I'm
Speaker 1: really really pleased with it. Love the way that it
Speaker 1: finally came out. That was it's a journey. As Elena
Speaker 1: will absolutely attests you, as you well know as well,
Speaker 1: publishing is uh, it's a process. Writing is a process.
Speaker 1: Getting it published as a process, and just getting it
Speaker 1: getting it out there is its own things learning experience. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And if so, if anybody has done it, you know, congratulations,
Speaker 1: And if you're thinking about doing it, you know, just
Speaker 1: go try. I mean, there's there's plenty, plenty of stuff
Speaker 1: out there.
Speaker 2: Yeah, we we interviewed also just recently. I think he's
Speaker 2: a buddy of yours worth. Yeah, he's a writer also.
Speaker 1: Yeah, he's better than me. He is Yeah, He's helped
Speaker 1: me a lot with with just my own my own process,
Speaker 1: and I've done some writing for Tom Bebkin, his guys
Speaker 1: or his his form, Lethal Minds Journal, his uh substack forum.
Speaker 1: That's cool. Oh, that's right, And you have a substack
Speaker 1: plug that tell people. I do find Ivan f Ingram
Speaker 1: dot substack dot com. Publish every week. Lately it's been commentary.
Speaker 1: I'd like to get more into the creative space, or
Speaker 1: at least more reflective space. It just kind of depends
Speaker 1: on my mood, but I try and publish every week.
Speaker 1: Like do encourage people. Obviously to be paid subscribers helps
Speaker 1: matter as a writer, but you need not subscribe as
Speaker 1: a paid member. There are some things that I publish
Speaker 1: exclusively for the paid side of it, but ultimately it's
Speaker 1: really meant to be, you know, for discussion, discourse and
Speaker 1: for people to kind of just get a flavor of
Speaker 1: what I'm working with. And I kind of look at
Speaker 1: it as writing is a lot like playing an instrument.
Speaker 1: You need to practice to get good at it, and
Speaker 1: substack helps me do that. So some weeks it's I
Speaker 1: think nailing it and other times it just doesn't quite
Speaker 1: sound right. But I appreciate anybody who reads it anyway,
Speaker 1: So you know how that goes. Yeah, the only way
Speaker 1: you get better is by reading and writing. That's it.
Speaker 1: And having other writers read your stuff. And I tell
Speaker 1: you're probably not as good as you think you are.
Speaker 2: That's all right, So guys, go check out the novel.
Speaker 2: Like I said, I really enjoyed it. I read it
Speaker 2: on the kindle. Hard copy is also available. Really like,
Speaker 2: like I said, I felt like it kind of like
Speaker 2: tells the Marine Raiders story kind of from front to back,
Speaker 2: you know, from the beginning to the kind of like
Speaker 2: recovery process.
Speaker 1: Well, it is a psychological book for sure, just a
Speaker 1: while you're in it, but it is meant to make
Speaker 1: people think. And and I don't.
Speaker 2: I don't think there's anything else out there quite like
Speaker 2: it as of now.
Speaker 1: I don't believe. So. My my publisher said the same things,
Speaker 1: like I've never actually read something like that. Yes, it's
Speaker 1: very different, pretty different kind of book, maybe specially even so.
Speaker 1: Thank you everyone for joining us tonight, and we will
Speaker 1: see you next week. Thanks for joining us. Thanks it
Speaker 1: was awesome, appreciate it.
Speaker 2: Hey, guys, I want to tell all of you today
Speaker 2: about a new newsletter that we're launching that encompasses both
Speaker 2: the Teamhouse podcast, the eyes On podcast, and the high
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Speaker 1: What you're gonna get. So this is a once a
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