Combat Story (Ep 28): Elliot Ackerman - Marine | MARSOC | CIA Paramilitary | Best Selling Author

a little bit like playing football it's like when you're in the infantry you're playing high school football so you're out there every friday night like you know love of the game it's gritty your pads kind of stink they're not so good you know you're a little bit sloppy but you know high school football then like i go over to marine special operations raider battalion now it's like i'm playing you know division one ball we've got like nice slick pads we're like maybe sponsored by nike and every now and again one of our games is on tv you know then i went over the agency it's like an nfl i mean you got your own locker like you're flying private you know around to to go to the games and you're playing against like the absolute toughest teams out there with the best players on your team welcome to combat story i'm ryan fugent and i serve war zone tours as an army attack helicopter pilot and cia officer over a 15-year career i'm fascinated by the experiences of the elite in combat on this show i interview some of the best to understand what combat felt like on their front lines this is combat story today we hear another set of combat stories from elliot ackerman a decorated marine infantry officer special operations operator cia paramilitary officer silver star and purple heart recipient and best-selling author as many will recall elliot was our first guest on combat story long before we ever did video interviews that first interview remains one of my favorites and covers an incredible inside look at his role as a platoon leader in fallujah ii in 2004 and the true grit and determination required in this second interview we pick up where we left off from round one as elliott describes being one of the first members of marine special operations command and his subsequent deployments with the unit we also dive into his national best-selling book places and names subtitle on war revolution and returning where elliott describes revisiting both in mind and body his combat experiences it's a fantastic read and in the interview he shares moments from the book that include returning to the very buildings he fought from in fallujah years earlier and another experience having an unthinkable meal with a former al qaeda and iraq leader as they shared their memories on the front lines fighting against each other elliott is a special marine who survived five deployments and fought at the very highest levels i hope you enjoy this second combat story with elliott as much as i did elliott thanks for taking the time to share your story a second time with us yeah thanks for having me so this is three and a half years i think since the last time and you were one of the first people i ever interviewed and i still to this day don't know why the hell you said yes to that first interview but i'm so glad you did um i found it to be really insightful and i wasn't sure what it would be like interviewing vets and your description of what happened in fallujah and the evolution of you as an officer just hit a hit a nerve with me and i've just not stopped since so i just want to say a huge thank you for being a guinea pig when you didn't have to you have a lot of name recognition i did not so thanks so much man oh man thank you i thought we had a lot of fun talking those many years ago i can't believe it was three and a half years ago i know yeah and i only just released it last year for people who who have listened to this show more often like i interviewed you then when i was at the agency i couldn't release it until i got out so i was able to really release it last year but it is hard to believe three and a half years so much has gone on for you multiple books and i just want to catch people up briefly before we dive into this this session and anybody can go back and listen to that first interview surprisingly like 20 or 30 000 people wanted to hear you and i talk which is great i'm sure we'll get even more this time but just in a nutshell and correct me if i'm off here elliot for people to get the recap like we talked about you growing up going to tufts went into the marine corps you know you did rotc infantry right into fallujah and we we spent a lot of time on that fight in fallujah it was super interesting to hear and then you get the silver star purple heart we never touched on your marstock time uh the special ops side so i wanted to spend some time there and then you go on to write five novels you're writing for all kinds of publications white house fellow making me feel like i don't do anything myself so so much to cover but we're gonna pick up from the post fallujah time i think would be appropriate if that's all right with you yeah great perfect go ahead what do you want to know yep so i i what i wanted to do was if we if we could start with you deciding to come out of the conventional side of the marine corps and go into the special ops right you'd gone through fallujah i don't know if you did another deployment after that on the conventional side but what was the the decision there for you moving over onto the special ops world so it had always been an ambition of mine to get over to special operations and i had actually um before i even was commissioned as a lieutenant um i got a five-year bachelor's master's degree uh at the fletcher school of tough so i was like in the rotc program on a four-year commissioning track into the military and then my junior year of college i get accepted in this program where was basically like you get a two-year master's degree but by only adding on one year so it's like your senior year accounted towards your masters and then you did this fifth year and then you would get your bachelor's degree and your master's degree at the exact same time i only bring that up because it's great for me it could turn out to be like this total boondoggle in which the marine corps could not commission me because i didn't have a bachelor's degree i would get the master's degree at the same time and because i didn't have a bachelor's degree i was not commissionable so it allowed me to immediately get a master's i bring that up with regards to going into special operations because it left me in this weird position where i had like this free summer and i was you know i had a military id because i was an rotc midshipman so i was you know in the military but they didn't have anything for me to do that summer and i had this great captain who's sort of uh he was the marine officer instructor so in charge of all of the rotc students heading to the marines he was a old ch-46 pilot just i mean he and i are still friends a great guy and um he basically said he said listen if you want to if you can talk your way into any school in the us military like i'll write you no cost orders to go to that school i mean like we won't pay for it but we'll give you but we'll give you a piece of paper so you'll officially be on orders uh and i managed to uh kind of just through luck talk my way through i talked my way into jump school dive school in the amphibious reconnaissance school i'm kind of over this like just jam-packed kind of very frankly like really punishing summer of just getting whaled on in all these schools but um so when i went to the marine corps i had you know i had been through those schools went into the infantry and then just very clearly knew i wanted to go into special operations uh once i got out of the infantry and it was an interesting time because that was it so this was in uh in 2006 don rumsfeld was the secretary of defense and you know there was a real focus now on u.s special operations command special operations and growing that capability and for the longest time the marine corps had no u.s socom component uh and so in 2006 by mandate of don rumsfeld because neither the commandant nor the head of u.s socom actually wanted marines in special operations command he said no there will be a marine component command it will be called marsoc and it was founded in uh 2006 and i showed up there like january of 2007 with sort of the first group of guys who were doing this and what they were basically doing um was sort of like how you know the navy seals were built out of the udts the underwater demolition teams in world war ii they were building what are now the marine raiders out of the marines force reconnaissance community so i was sort of going into a command that until very recently had been second force reconnaissance company and i was showing up and now it was going to be you know at first they called it second marine special operations battalion and then it became the second marine raider battalion um so that was sort of my path there so i always knew that's where i wanted to go and um and arrived at sort of an interesting time it was sort of like we were you know racing the race car around the track while we were like still trying to put the wheels on and paint it what what's the difference between if there is one when you when you say like force recon and then marsoc are they synonymous are they under the same command yeah i i don't want to get you know just for listeners i don't know how how interested people are because it gets a little like technical so they're gonna be interested okay if you're interested so for the longest time you know you had you had the marine reconnaissance community and so when i said i went through like our training course dive school the one big one i went through was on the amphibious reconnaissance school and that's attending it was a 10-week program in four-story virginia and i was just a total haze x um and interestingly enough to show you whatever small world it is you really meet people folks always said this to me but it's really proven to be profound in my life you meet people those ages and like they wind up being people you're just married up with for your whole life uh and have a huge impact on me so i show up the way i get to amphibious reconnaissance school is i'm talking about the marine officer instructor this captain's a helicopter probably like a great guy gives me no cost orders well i was at tufts the marine officer instructor at holy cross which was down the road from us was this guy named phil zeeman great guy who was a former second force guy and so i went to him at the time i was like hey i've got this free summer and i was like i really want to go to ranger school and he's like yeah i don't go to ranger school like that's that's useless he's like you what you need to do is go to the amphibious reconnaissance school because that will give you this mos and even though actually i didn't give officers the mos so it only it was an enlisted mos but be like you know that's the thing that you that makes you a reconnaissance marine and he said it's all right you know i'm gonna i'm gonna see if i can work a deal with you because the guy who's the uh assistant officer in charge down there is this captain and he and i are buddies from second force and his name is doug zembach and um doug zembach is like anyone in marine circles like doug is you know doug was doug was killed he was a detailee for cia when he was killed but he's his legend in the reconnaissance community and just frankly just in the marine corps uh known as the lion of fallujah but you know i show up like a snot-nosed midshipman this is sort of like you know no one's really been to war yet and doug is like the hulking guy at the amphibious for constant school and he's second in command i'll never forget the first night i got there we went out we went out like we were allowed like we just kind of checked in we've been there like three or four days and they let us out like on a pass one night to go out to dinner and so we when i was like the officers and ncos were gonna go out we're gonna have a strategy session of how we were gonna lead our class through this whole you know hellacious course we know we were going into or sitting at this restaurant and because i was a midshipman you know i was like kind of a nominally an officer and so i'm sitting there and um uh and we see and like the far table dug and within me is then what you know she became his wife pam like oh hey hey you know let's let's order him sort of remember send over a drink to him we're like you know hey like hey sir you know good to see you and as he's walking out with pam he brings over he orders up a round of jaeger shots in the middle room he go he lifts up his shot of jaeger and he goes he's like recon men want to want to be us women want to be with us and like does this shot and walks out the door and you're like who is this guy uh and if anyone who knew him would tell you like you know that was sort of part of his charm like he you know he would say kind of this outrageous like he'd always be talking about like you know brothers if we don't make it we'll we'll see you in valhalla and like that was just sort of his mo and if anyone else said it would sound like ridiculous and contrived and cheesy but like you love being around him because like he you know he believed it and you know when you were with him like you believed it too and when you're you know in the profession of arms like you need to believe sometimes because there's certainly lots of things that can make you cynical so anyway i only brought up so i kind of i've gone through that course i always knew that's what i wanted to do one of the other officers in that course um who's still at the agency he had a very distinguished kind of marine uh career was really one of the intellectual he was a second force recon platoon commander it was one of the real intellectual plank holders over at marsoff meaning when he came back from doing a couple deployments in iraq with second force reconnaissance he then comes over to marsoc and you know was setting up like the table of organizations one of the guys they really relied upon he then left and went over to the agency as a paramilitary guy he's he's still there and is very senior now um but you know he was like two racks down for me i mean he's one of my best friends and you know i see him all the time now but i just bring that up because you know you i never would have in that moment guessed sort of how profound those relationships would have would be for me throughout my life um and i was like and also frank like it's like felt like a real privilege to like get a b with those guys at such a nascent stage of our um of our developments but i bring him up because when i was he was always my marine big brother and i was always like hey man when i come back when i finish at 1 8 you know i really want to come over i want to come over to second force come over to second force and then this stuff happened in 2006 and second force now becomes sort of marsoc 2nd raider battalion and when i showed up there was a lot of um organizationally a lot of upheaval uh of like what is the mission uh what is the niche that marine special operators are going to fulfill you know are you guys going to be a strike unit are you going to be doing like ford internal defense and unconventional warfare like oda's like what what your job marines like why do we you know and it's sort of it's something if you you know if you are a marine that kind of always is like in the marine dna like hey why the hell do you guys exist so i said i mean america doesn't need a marine corps america wants a marine corps i think that was very much the experience of being in marshall because we sort of had to pave our own way because we were kind of our own niche thing uh that deployment in marine special operations was yes it was about being on a combat deployment and yes we very much had our mission in afghanistan you know and we were partnered with an african commando battalion um and we wound up you know we deployed for the first time in this reorganized configuration almost kind of like a special forces oda no no company uh marine special operators had done that before we were the first to deploy what's called msot's marine special operations to teams which is still a configuration today um but so we had that afghan mission sorry we had that afghan mission but then simultaneously sort of had this like macro organizational mission like don't screw it up because if you screw it up like you know there are bigger bigger more stock equities involved than you guys really do that's tough hey so i want to get into that combat but i want to talk just briefly there's this there's something in places and names that i want to read and i think it's back to that to uh the amphibious recon school where you describe somebody helping you during the process during a stalking exercise so i think it's it's that part and the quote is you you say my my career and life might have taken a different course if he hadn't taken care of me that day in the sun and the way you if you could provide context for that story i thought it was excellent in the book and it sounds like it had a profound impact on the direction you went i just couldn't tell if it was at that school or something later no that was at the amphibious for constant school and it was just sort of one of these days and actually seemed like a sort of benign day where we were doing a stalking exercise so meaning we were like kind of all wearing ghillie suits and the idea was you know you've sort of seen the scene there's an instructor like in the back of a humvee with binoculars out and all those students are fanned out in the field and you need to like stock up to a certain point without them seeing you and so you know i'm like lying there and it's it's you know virginia and probably that point it was like late july early august and i'm like you know creeping in the hot sun the mistake i made was you know it's all very sandy there and so i kind of like was stuck in the low ground where the underbrush was just all sand and you get higher it was more kind of dirt and grass it's all sand that's standard been baking so you're like crawling on this just you know hot sand and we were out there for like you know two or three hours by the end of this thing when i was sort of finally all over and they called the exercise i stood up and i was out of water and the policy of the school was if you at any point went down for heat like your heat casualty overheated passed out they would they would take you out of the class because they're like you know because because once you pass out for heat you become susceptible to it happening again like it's too dangerous we can't have you in the course anymore i i was i was i was basically at that point ae casualty like i could barely walk and my my buddy the one i mentioned who was sort of always my marine big brother and you know now we're at the agency like he saw it immediately and grabbed me before any of the instructors could give him a bit like dragged me over underneath the tree like dumped water on my face kind of smacked me a few times you know and like got me up and got me on the truck and you know anyone came close like he's fine you know leave him alone and like gave me the 15 minutes to sort of get just get it together so i was not a key casualty and i just thought yeah i've often thought that on that back on that like you know what if he hadn't done that for me and i'd washed out of that course because i was a heat casualty um my you know that aspect of my professional life could have gone in a different direction um so you know yeah these little things really they really matter yeah that's that's a cool story it's really told so well in the book so as we jump forward then elliot to back when you're you're in marsack you're deploying to afghanistan could you you know nothing classified obviously but just any what was kind of the configuration that you used you mentioned it's similar to an oda configuration but it's the first time and it's kind of this msop model so what what did the configuration look like and then what was kind of like a regular mission set you would run there and one of the you know so one of the interesting things was like marine special operations at least then it's like it's a very small community everybody know everybody knows each other and i only bring that up because so we were a hotel company so hotel company was the third company of marine special operators to deploy the first one fox company had had a very controversial and hard deployment uh and i don't want to get into everything that happened but there was like a big investigation uh i've always kind of my read on this has always been frankly that they deployed to afghanistan they had they didn't have a great relationship with the uh the uh special operation task force there the siege associative um for a variety of reasons and i'm not casting you know blame either way i wasn't there but um but then there was sort of like an incident where the taliban said oh they killed all these civilians and the sigis was very quick to be like we wash our hands and then we don't like coming and they was very controversial and it was really sort of an existential moment from our sock um and i say it's small because the one of the platoon commanders in that in fox company that first company was a very good friend of mine like an exceptional marine officer he'd actually been shot through the he was in my in one eight in my infantry battalion uh he was a bravo company i was an alpha company he was a first lieutenant when i was a second lieutenant uh and he'd been you know shot through the femur in fallujah leading his marines had like rehabbed himself had been like gone nine months later through the amphibious reconnaissance school and passed it with like a recent chat humor i mean he's you know a tough dude makes it through the course great marine and then you know it's just this horrible nightmare of a deployment so we put i only bring it because like that's sort of the context in which we're operating so when they've gone out their organization for the first two marine special operations companies it was sort of almost like um like kind of the black hawk downs we were talking about that earlier you know uh task force ranger kind of model where you have like this platoon of delta operators and they have a trailer platoon of rangers with them and that is like a big strike unit and so the idea was that you would have this like platoon of around 40 what used to be forced recon marines or now marine special operators were older you know direct action operators that you would have sort of a regular marine infantry platoon called the trailer platoon and those would not be recon marines uh but eventually they would feed into the the direct action platoon and marshall deployed forward that concept and the only problem was that like the siege instead of commanders in afghanistan are like we don't need a big marine strike unit like we need odas and when they came to us they basically said okay you guys are going to deploy in the new configuration we're just going to get rid of this trailer platoon all together and we're going to take that 40-man it was called the dasher platoon direct action special reconnaissance platoon we're just going to chop it into thirds and those each third will be a marine special operations team of 14 marines so basically two four ma two four-man elements a team sergeant and uh a team leader and so when i originally came to marshall i was young i was a first lieutenant uh at the infantry i wasn't a captain yet and they assigned me to go right out the door um as the trailer platoon commander and actually another friend of mine was the dasher platoon commander who's a very senior captain uh and they chopped it all up and then i wound up you know getting one of the marine special operations teams when we went to afghanistan basically with an oda mission jeez and then and you guys i think in the book you're in paktika is that right in rc east no so i was with i was i was in pectica when i was with the agency got it all right sorry so i missed where did you deploy for that first time um you were in we were in uh herat province at a play where our team was based in shindan airfield which is right on the border between harad and ferrara provinces in western afghanistan okay got it and then if you can take us through like i'm sure you ran tons of missions is there one in particular that comes to mind that was just high intensity dangerous you know last time we talked we talked about this this gauntlet in fallujah was there another time that even came close to that for you when you were on the marsoc side um yeah you know there was a i mean there were a couple our our mission basically when we got there was they were standing up these commando battalions from the afghan national army they were basically going to be the afghan kind of equivalent of a ranger battalion and they were going to be geographically situated so we were partnering up with the 207th afghan commando battalion which was gonna be rc west's strike unit for the afghan national army so we met them in kabul finished their training course with them which was like for three weeks and then we flew them all the way out to shinden and got them set up up there and so it was our team each commando battalion has two odas attached to it and so it was our team and this one oda from seventh group great guys and we knew as a team too like our imperative was you know we needed to show that we would work great with an oda and we were very fortunate and that like the guys on the oda i mean i'm still some some great friends of mine we're just like a great oda like we were very lucky like everybody got along great um and i would actually say sort of one of the things that brought this together very quickly is i think about two weeks after that oda showed up because we were in country before they were um our sister team our sister marine team which was down in farrah in the south got into a very big fire fight call had to call us and accompany the commandos down to do the quick reaction force for them so we wind up driving like all night to get down to them we drive down uh we had like a little bits of troops in contact coming down there and we could see like flares going off at night as the taliban were kind of marking our you know noting our progress towards this town we show up in the middle of the night you know our sister seems like hey we've been you know they've been in this like running gun fight all day long in this town uh outside of another town called shuwon and uh the next morning like we're all going to go into town we're going to clear this town out so inevitably the next morning we're going to clear out the town and of course everyone's melted away and there's nobody in the town anymore the taliban have left so we're kind of packing things up they're going to go back to their firebase which was like sort of further to the west and we were going to go kind of east northeast back to our firebase and there was sort of like one road through the main town of shawan and i was like well and we're all exhausted like nobody's slept like well we can go through the road or we can try to go off-road if we go off-road it's like really rough we're probably gonna bust up our trucks you know it's gonna take like another four or five hours like you know like all right you know we're gonna go through the town so long story short we basically you know we go through the town we get into a huge ambush uh i remember right as we're going into the town this like i mean it was like something out of a almost like a gangster film there was this water truck and i was like i think i was like i was like third vehicle back and it was like a 15 vehicle convoy and this truck like kind of jackknifes across the road and it's making like this really awkward three-point turn as we're like going into town but we're sort of like we're kind of committed at this point and like oh we can't turn the convoy around like uh you know all the hairs on the back of your neck go up and then the truck moves we drive maybe you know 100 yards in and then you just certain rpgs from both sides and we're in the middle of this ambush drive drive drive you know you you know as you learn you you know in an ambush you push through the kill zone and so we push through the kill zone we get out and um you know we've got uh one of the guys from the oda guy named dave nunez um was was basically his truck had gotten hit he was trapped in the truck um truck was on fire he died uh all of our trucks come limping out of this town and we were just totally um you know which is really really in bad shape and uh we get out you know we get out of town we kind of regroup we're trying to get a head count because on the list like because it takes a while to figure that out like i'm telling you oh you know like i didn't know in that moment that we lost it all i see is like we pushed through the kill zone okay i'm out of the kill zone you know who we got i'm checking with my team sergeant willie like you know what was it looking like back there i don't know all our trucks are through but 7326 is still back there you're trying to get you know so time passes we figure we basically figure out okay we've got like it was three trucks had been just destroyed and everyone's out we had like a number of about 12 wounded guys but dave's you know still back there um and i remember at that point like every truck was basically except for like one or two was towing another truck and i'm linked up with my team leader like you know what do we do about you know how do we get dave we gotta get dave's body out here what do we do and um you know you see in movies and people talk about stuff like like you know leave no man behind you know you know what you do but i'll tell you when you're when you're there and i know clear as day i've got two trucks that aren't towing another truck he's dead like do we go back in there and i know if i send these two trucks in there you know we're probably gonna get killed doing that for a body like those are tough tough decisions you know and like what do you do uh and you know in a spot like that so uh you know long story short after like much deliberations and arguments and how do we do this and uh you know the other team got out of their fog because they were actually kind of you know they were at full strength and that night went in and got dave's body out um but i just tell this story because i think so many many times in like training or at least how i was given to me in training people would just sort of say things like and you know you never leave a man behind like oh yeah you never leave the man behind cause you never leave man behind you know live dead never leave behind it's like well you know that that that gets pretty gnarly in practice like i don't know about you like i'll say for myself like if i was dead and like i'm gone i wouldn't want three of my buddies to lose their life to get my body you know what i mean like you know i myself plan on being cremated so i don't really care you know and i would like them to have it like so it's you know like this is real stuff that i don't think it's talked about enough um and if you ever get in a fight where you're really taking casualties i mean like you're seeing like platoons getting wiped out and stuff like that you know that calculation starts getting really really fraught and i think that um uh i just i just think that you know we we do ourselves a disservice when we kind of roll out these these very heavy platitudes that maybe make us feel good about ourselves we don't really analyze them uh as to what their what their true moral implications are um i'll just make kind of one other point on that um so i have you know i have four kids now i have uh you know two my own i have two two step sons and i look back at that time uh my time in iraq and my time in afghanistan my very last deployment in afghanistan i had my daughter um so i was a father but i look at the guys i was with like my team sergeants some of the more senior ncos who i knew you know at the time like i knew they had kids who were you know seven years old six years old eight years old and i look back now i'm like how the [ __ ] were you doing the stuff that we were doing with three kids at home like how the [ __ ] did you do that like how did you oh my god and because i imagine now taking the risk that i know those guys were taking in my current set of circumstances i'm just like an aw total of those guys that they were able to you know compartmentalize enough because listen i like i'm telling these stories about afghanistan like when this stuff has gone down i was like you know i was 28 i had a girlfriend my parents loved me i know and they would have been heartbroken if anything had ever happened to me but like you know there aren't little kids involved uh and so i you know it's just i look back i look back at um that time and i realized my god there was so much going on beneath the surface with all these guys i was so close to you know because they had a family that held it i just you know just because i wasn't a father i have a family i couldn't imagine at the time and now i can and like my jaw just drops so man that that's a great story there's so much that i would just like to to ask about there i think the first one is when you are kind of deliberating arguing with people about going back in for uh david was it were you the senior officer there although you said you were first lieutenant i don't know if at the time your captain was this like your call to make at the time yeah so it's interesting it gets into sort of group you know i i i bring this up not because i think there's a right or wrong answer just because i don't know maybe if you're listening it's you know and you have a tie with the military to make you think about it so it's interesting because we were split we were at two teams and um my the team leader and i our arrangements like we would basically just switch missions who was the mission commander you know who's like kind of name was on the dotted line and all the mentally had to call the ball um and you know nine times out of ten kind of decisions are made collegially you know no one's like this is how it's going to be because you don't really need to be that way everyone knows what the plan is but i was just through coincidence the mission commander on that one but it was his guy who was back there and so um so i i deferred to him i was like what do you think what do you want to do and he's like i know dave like you know we gotta we're not gonna take these two trucks and just go screaming back into shawn because we're gonna get a bunch of guys killed doing that it doesn't make any sense you know just stop a beat what was interesting was i had a i had a boss at that time who i didn't really see eye to eye with and he was actually in bagram dave called his boss who was an army lieutenant colonel and i called my boss this is all on satellite uridium you know like you know this um basically the sat radio yeah and dave's boss was great he's like understood that's how you're seeing it we're gonna figure out how to how to do this hold what you got take care of your guys you know we're going to figure this out i i understand what you're telling me we don't want to see a whole bunch of more you know more guys getting killed today over this we're going to figure out this problem but we're not going to do a bonehead way and my boss was like seeing a very very different tune you know kind of like uh hey hey hey what the hell is wrong with you get your ass back in there i don't care you know and so i was sort of looking at him like this is what i'm hearing we have to do is what your boss is saying we have to do you know i think this is you know this is making more sense to me right now but it was not i only found because it was not an uncontentious um decision and uh you know it's you know it's complex and it you know it gets i think it's very emotional and it's and it's and it's uh and it's messy and i would be lying to you if i told you like to this day i don't look back and think about it you know what i mean say oh you know like maybe we should have just rolled the dice and said hey you know maybe we could have maybe we could you know maybe we could have like beat death once more time and gone and got him and now he would have been okay you know who knows but you know it's it's tough it's why i wind up writing about a lot of this stuff because you know you just keep asking about those questions over and over and over again you know and ultimately you know you know we got dave's body out of there and you know it was another team that did it you know it wasn't us his you know his team that was able to do it and i know that for a lot of us you know that's been something that we've felt disappointed about but at the same time too there you know no one else got killed that day so yeah feel good about that so it's you know is this this stuff's complicated and i agree entirely with what you were saying about when they teach you to make decisions i i distinctly remember back in rotc like when they try to pose a you're going to have to make tough decisions like this it's never something like what you just described like that's a tough decision right yeah like you have to overrule a friend of yours who you've been fighting with you got a boss you you got like two lieutenant colonels tell her you know like senior officers and things you know and yeah and you probably had a platoon sergeant or whatever it was the equivalent who had their own opinion that's hard as hell and and i'll tell you the one thing you know like people ask me why i went in the military and i kind of always wouldn't accept like you know i feel like there there might be like some point i feel like you know i'm a guy from this country like i like i would like to feel like i made a contribution to making you know some good decisions on behalf of guys who had to survive um and i can look back in my career and i can really think of a few key times where i was like you know it's like hey call the ball ackerman and i'm because i'm like on the radio and this is one of those times there were times that flew to where like i'm having a conversation already like a very intense conversation and i'm you know and i'm sort of like staring at whatever's like right in front of me and then like i'll kind of look up out of my peripheral vision and i'll see that there's like five six ten guys all from the team or the platoon kind of i can see eavesdropping because they know you know they like it like they're not dumb they know like hey yeah what's the skipper doing oh he's on the phone with you know the task force oh yeah are we going in that's what he's talking about oh and if we're going in you know you know we might get schwepped or you know like in fallujah we talked about on your other show like you know i remember being on the radio when we were pinned down in a house and my company commander who was a great company commander you know was getting orders from hire like hey you guys got to get out of that house and i'm on the radio we're totally pinned down if we go out the front door this house and we're going to get smoked he's like i understand like you got to go and i remember going back and forth with him on this i mean you know like i mean it was probably an all-time three minutes but you know looking up and seeing like every guy who wasn't like actively in the fire fight that moment was like uh what are we doing are we actually going to do this um and you've had that's having the sense that like as goes your conversation and your ability to convey kind of the reality of the situation to your senior commanders you know that that will kind of dictate your fate and the fate of everyone around you so um i would say that kind of incident in schwann was also one of those incidents yeah i remember that i remember that that series of radio exchanges and i remember yes the pressure of my buddy who is the team leader and you know talking it over with my team sergeant quickly but the thing i remember the most was kind of catching the odd glances of the guys on the team you know who are kind of wondering you know all right what are we about to do yeah that's like truly when their lives depend on what what couple sentences you have to say and what you hear on a radio it's crazy and you just have to like and you just have a profound sense of like man you know i hope i'm not a bozo because these guys that's so true all right i have one other question here because you brought up you know you so you deployed without children and then again with a kid right so yeah the first time i deployed i had a six month old son so i never had the other way but i would imagine the way you described it is true is there any did you did you um like what was different for you when you had a child going into combat like how did you approach things differently did you make decisions differently was there a noticeable difference or was it just heavier burden afterwards i would say i didn't notice it was my it was my last deployment with the agency and i would not say there was a huge noticeable term only because my daughter was so young she was like two and a half months when i found out and um i know your father you know my same daughter she turns 11 now this summer and the the depth of a relationship i have with her now is so much profoundly deeper than when she was you know just like the littlest infant she was in some respects for me still like this abstraction like you know yes i understand that i'm a father now but you know you know i got a little infant and okay that's great but you know now my daughter and i have you know she's my like 11 year old daughters so so for me that sense of like just sort of this aw that i sense of the the guys i knew who were there with real families has only deepened and as i've come to understand what it means to be a father to my own children um you know that being said i do think even at that early stage i started to ask myself questions when i was going in and after afghanistan like you know why am i here and uh i mean me like just at a very personal level why are you coming here you know why are you still doing this work you know what what's your reason and if you were to die here would you would you be okay with that um you know we talked about like doug zembak you know when he you know when he died it really i think hurt and really profoundly affected a lot of people i mean it really you know i would say kind of caused my knees to buckle a little bit because he was just such a titan um but there was sort of i think amongst many of us who knew him well what was acted as a little bit of a sound was we all said i think this was true so you know but like if you told doug this is how it was gonna end i mean when he died on a raid leading troops going after a senior al-qaeda guy i mean you know he went down swinging uh if you had told him hey man like you're not going to make it but this is how it's going to end for you like there's always this partners like you know he would have been all right with it you know like he would have been like as i said like see you in valhalla brother like you know um and i don't say that to me like the huge loss i mean he left behind family too and i know they live with that loss every day but then but so but i looked at myself and i was like if you know at a certain point i felt like i wouldn't be all right with it if i died here if that makes sense like yeah i would be all right with it like why am i coming here what am i chasing you know and if i die chasing this am i okay with it and chris was like you know what i'm not like i just feel like i've my time here is done there's other things i want to do and i only bring that up because i know having a family did contribute to that um and so just on a token of just me a personal level uh i think it it you know it caused me to just realize that i you know i didn't want to you know you know i i didn't want to die in afghanistan yeah and this is a perfect transition to places and names um they're i think for me you hit on so many points in that book about like the purpose the mission re you know trying to understand what you were doing and i mean i didn't i didn't do five deployments like you elliot but i still felt that like i have that today it was really special the way you set it up so i want to dive into it i thought maybe if if if you think it's appropriate we'll skip over the agency time because we can't say anything about that but if we jump ahead to i mean you have a journalism career right and i feel like there's a big component there with places and names so i might just ask could you like why why did you leave the agency or that lifestyle to then get into writing and then i'd like to really dive into places and names as part of that yeah well and so it kind of touches on what we were just talking about with regards to afghanistan this idea of like you know i don't want to do this forever and so um so i was at the agency i was working in special operations and i sort of often likened it to um it's kind of like it's like it's a little bit like playing football okay so just bear with me so like when you're in the infantry right you're like playing it's like they feel like you're playing high school football so you're out there every friday night like you know love of the game it's gritty your pads kind of stink they're not so good you know you're a little bit sloppy but you know high school football then like i go over to marine special operations raider battalion now it's like i'm playing you know division one ball we've got like nice slick pads we're like maybe sponsored by nike and every now and again one of our games is on tv um you know i went over the agency it's like an nfl i mean you got your own locker like you're flying private you know around to to go to the games and you're playing against like the absolute toughest teams out there uh with you know the best players on your team but at the end of the day you're playing football football is football as football the rules of the game are largely the same and i just sort of got to the point where i was like you know i asked myself a question you know i was like do i want to play football for the rest of my life and a lot of people like yeah i want to play football i love playing professional ball like i get that i just write as much like you know what i just i don't want to play football the rest of my life like there's all these other things i want to do and now and if i want to do those things you know i was 31 when i got out i've been doing it for eight years this is really the time you got to do it because if you hang around too long you're not really going to be well positioned to go out and do those things you know one of them was you know i wanted i wanted to write um i hadn't written when i was in the military and so i got out i took a couple jobs and um you know i worked on like a political startup for a year i was a white house fellow for a year but i was sort of always on the side i was like basically quietly quietly kind of writing um what was my what was my first book and you know when you get out of the military when i got out like i didn't tell anyone i was doing that because to say like oh i want to write i mean it's so silly it's like being like you know i want to dance you know like if you don't you know i mean the show for you know what i mean so i had to just like you know get something going um so anyways uh i don't know i mean you want to hear the story of like my book is or you know so i mean i would love to what i wanna i wanna read something from places and names to kick us off here and i think as as i read this people i'm interested what they would think and then i'm going to kick it over to you here in a second elliot so this is a quote from the book now somebody in the book is saying this i trained men to fight in explosives uh hand-to-hand combat i would send them on missions they were like the point of the spear i was its handle driving them into the firefight there's nothing closer than those types of friendships if you were one of my men and asked me for my shirt i'd give it to you so i think anybody listening to this is going to be like yeah that's awesome that's like a marine right there there's a special ops guy but in reality this is abu hassar and could you tell us who that is and how you ended up encountering this guy because this blew my mind in this book yeah um so abu hussar is a you know former card carrying uh al qaeda and iraq operative um who you know has become a friend of mine um the way i met him so you know i get out i get out i'm kind of working on my first book and then basically a an acquaintance of mine who was a civilian who spent a lot of time in afghanistan was basically starting a research organization in southern turkey to do work on the syrian crisis and this is like in you know 2013 kind of right when right when sort of isis is starting to ramp up uh in syria and um so he basically starts this this basically it's like a business down there uh he and i are friends and he basically says like hey if you want to come hang out and you know do journalism and you know he basically comes like i'll be you know we're happy to be your ticket to ride just come along you know i wasn't working for him i was just like hang out at our office house and interesting stuff is probably gonna happen so he sets this thing he and his partner set this thing up and they hired a number of uh you know local hires to um to do the work they're doing which are like surveys needs assessments things like that for international ngos and so one of the guys they hired was this guy named um abed and abed was a former democratic activist inside syria he fled uh during the revolution when the government came looking for him to draft him into the army she's living in kind of this part of this the widening syria diaspora very erudite guy used to work at the british consulate you know speaks english you know speaks english with a british accent um and so uh one day i'm like sitting in our sort of house office and i'm like making dinner uh and abed kind of comes driving up in this little like crappy black peugeot that was like the company car it's like dust all over the car he kind of gets out he walks in and i'm like like hey i bet like how was your day man he's like oh that was pretty good pretty good he's like you know i was down in a chocolate and a chocolate is this like wisp of a town right on the syrian border it's actually bisected by a set of railroad tracks north side of the town is turkey the south side of the town of syria she's like oh i was in a chocolate refugee camp today he's like i met this guy um i really think you should meet or i met this guy and i'm like oh who's the guy he's like well he he i really think you should meet him he fought for al-qaeda in iraq i'm like oh yeah he's like yeah i just feel like the two of you would really get along and so you know so like i'm for anything so we kind of set the meeting and the guy was this guy abu hassar and he had fought for al qaeda in iraq and al-anbar province and some of the same time that i've been there and he had run guns and fighters intel alambar from eastern syria in deir azur where he was from he was like living in a chocolate refugee camp and his story was he had been he'd been doing that and then towards the end of the u.s occupation um well actually he'd been in iraq doing that and towards the end of the u.s occupation he was on one of his basically smuggling runs and he goes into uh he goes into al-anbar to meet with one of the they called them amir's what they would call their commanders in al-qaeda and he meets with one of the mirrors and they say hey listen your boss who was the border amir the guy who ran the border we found out that your boss is on the payroll of the mukabara the syrian khabarov their secret police it's sort of either i would start either you take care of your boss you know meaning off him or we're going to take care of you so obviously our drives back across the board he's like you know he doesn't know what to do and literally the next night the muhabarat inside syria shogu's house they throw him in prison and he spends about three years in prison and um early on in the revolution something that assad did which was very astute is sort of all the activists like abed were kind of out in the street protesting was he goes into the prisons where he locked up all these jihadists and he releases all the jihadists from print from jail because you look much better in the in the eyes of the international community if you're fighting against jihadists as opposed to fighting against democratic activists so assad does that abu hassar finds out he's going to get out of jail and a lot of his kind of jihadist buddies come up to him it's kind of like you know like almost like the movie the blues brothers she's like all right like we're going to get the band back together this is going to be great and these guys sort of formed like the nucleus of um you know jabar al-nusra and the islamic state like sorry are you with us and he's like listen because assad is letting us out of jail i imagine like half of you are probably already on the payroll of the mukabara uh i did this once before and i went up in this prison like i'm done i'm going to turkey and so he went to turkey and that's where i met him and so the two of us kind of i bet my friend abed set this whole thing up for us just just you know like hey let's go have a cup of coffee and you guys can talk about the war but sort of the tricky thing was i was like what do you want to do abby you want to like tell him a former marine special operator like wants to have a cup of tea with him and we're like yeah it's probably like let's let's see how it goes before you kind of you know lay that on him and so we originally kind of set up the meeting we just said hey he said hey there's this american he'd been a journalist during the iraq war he'd love to talk to you and so we sort of sat down uh you know i was a little bit disingenuous like pretending to be just a journalist and we got about like an hour in the conversation like we were having like a really good rapport i sort of said like hey listen i gotta come clean like i was also a marine and i really wanted to meet you and he kind of laughed and said like yeah i thought that was probably the case so we wound up having this big conversation just sort of you know i think there was this really shared curiosity we both had this experience and the wars that it totally defined us and the huge question mark is like who is this person you were fighting against who defined you you know it's like what i say in the book is like being in a shadow dance you know like you're dan you're dancing with someone you can feel them move against you and you move against them but you never see them you know and sort at the end like you wanna you wanna see them see who they are and like ask them you know i had that curiosity and my bet by meeting with agua star was like my gamble was when i tell this guy i was a marine he's not gonna like get all of upset about the politics he's gonna be like yeah you know i'm curious about you too and let's have a talk and that's what ended up happening we became friends can you descri it's it's great in the book like i highly recommend can you describe the napkin and and what you two were doing because and i think he wasn't he didn't speak english right like it was going through abed for translation yeah so why not so what wound up happening is a certain point like where you know we're we're talking like we're getting very into it um and um and we're like basically sitting like a pic it's like a picnic table in this cafe and abid is translating the whole time and everybody's like you know we're drinking lots of tea and we're smoking lots of cigarettes and i think the first time we talked for about five hours and um i don't know like hour like three and a half of it's like first of all one thing that happened that was interesting was i could see how we would talk and then abu sarah would you know at times kind of go off into the and i write about any sort of tangents about his sort of you know his islamic vision of you know what will happen at the end of day's battle in da beak and the prophet has you know he's predicted all of this and you know i'm taking my journalistic notes but like you know at certain points i'm like i'm not i'm not writing this down like and i can see how abit is translating all of this and i can see how abed is kind of getting frustrated you know he says there will be the end of days battle yeah i'm getting this coming at that stuff and um and i'm like you know it's sort of frankly like really at that moment sing about body language i'm like you know if i am in some ways framed as having been antagonistic to abu hasar the person who's really his antagonist too is abed you know abid is this like highly educated erudite syrian democratic activist and he is watching in 2013 his entire revolution and country go completely in the toilet because of the rise of these islamists embodied in abu husar and this ideology he's espousing and so and that kind of makes like a strange connection between abid and i because we're both sort of you know we're both sort of like veterans of this war against abu hussar so anyways he's translating these translations translating at a certain point abit so i'm like guys like i gotta go i gotta go take a leak you know like i mean this is it's a lot to see a lot of faults and um he leaves and like as intensely as we've been abused and i have been talking um suddenly like we have no one to translate it's like whereas awkward as like 2 13 year olds on like a first date you know like he's kind of looking at his hands and i'm looking at his hands and abids gone but we had this sort of like i had sketched out this like very kind of rudimentary map of the iraqi syrian border and so um he takes the map and he writes a place the name of a place on it and then he puts a number next to the place and he kind of hands me a pen and i'm like i didn't get it first time oh wait i get it and i put a number next to his number and he does the same thing you know name a place another number then i put my number next to his number and so sort of as you know like as we once kind of chased each other around iraq our hands are kind of chasing each other around the map because you know the names of the place names obviously and the numbers were the dates that we'd been there and we wanted to see if we'd been at the same place at the same time fighting against each other and so i write about in the book that what again occurred to me at that time so as much as abid and i had this connection that we both sort of been like ideologically disenfranchised by abu asar and fought against so many of the things he embodied abu hassar and i were also very much tethered together because we were tethered together through this shared language of places and names and dates and that was a language that even if abed had been there sitting next to us he couldn't have translated that was our language alone yeah god is it safe to say elliot that you like you had respect for him yeah totally you know you know i don't agree with his ideology you know i don't think there's gonna be an end to days battle at da beak you know i'm i'm you know i'm not i'm not too into like fundamentalist islam but you know he's not into democracy so i mean listen it's like you know at the end of the day you know you gotta you can either try to see someone's humanity or you decide that you don't ever want to see it again and uh i wanted to see his and he wanted to see mine and you know we left everything else kind of on the table god you say it so nonchalantly but like you got a marine former cia paramilitary guy going up against an aq fighter that's really special just especially the way you describe it there's there's something else he says that i and it nests with some of the other things you talk about in the book elliot so he says when i was first in the jihad i was a strong man uh starving man feasting on the action when i got older i had to eat more slowly you know just like a really interesting way of putting it and you kind of talk about this as well like almost the the naivete early on and then the older you get the more you see this the more you see the world and what's happening how it kind of changes perspective and so i want to jump there's a part where you're i think you're with vince you describe him another vet he's in turkey and you ask like why are you here in turkey and he says to be close to it and so i was wondering if you could talk about it because i feel like abu hasar probably has it and a lot of vets out there know it too yeah well vance is sort of i mean i lived in istanbul for a number of years and particularly around the syrian civil war i mean there were lots of expats there's a very big expat scene there you know many of whom like you you know you picked the service a little bit it's like oh you were in iraq oh you're in afghanistan oh you're why are you here i'm a photographer i'm a writer i'm like you know oh you're here to cover the war do something related to the war or you know i work for an ngo and so vince was this sort of uh you know just like a far out marine i knew uh bumped into who's like teaching english and turkey he had like this amazing story of he was in a uh creative writing class uh in college outside of chicago after he got out of the marine corps and he'd been like very active online sort of following what was going on in the arab spring and he made like some twitter friends who are from cairo and literally like when the air force spring popped on like a wednesday he like he found out there was gonna be a huge protest in cairo on a wednesday on a whim he bought a ticket to cairo lands like thursday morning goes to the protest like friday gets thrown in an egyptian prison on saturday gets evac by the state department on sunday and it's like back in his creative writing class the next week you know he's you know he's just he's just he's sort of like a roaming but like so he and i were having all these conversations about like his story how he wound up there um he'd been in like the sixth marine regiment um and i kind of yeah i said i was like you know why are you here like teaching english like do you really love teaching english that much and he's like no i wanna you know i wanna come and i won't be close to it and she said that you know i was like hey but you know what's the what is the it you know um and i mentioned in the book i think it's like it's an experience that's like so large that you sort of shrink to insignificance when you're close to that experience uh and it's dangerous because that's how you get lost in it you know how you vanish how people kind of just never come back um so um so yeah so i think i think probably you know a lot of that so i certainly identify with this you know this this this sense where you know you know i definitely felt it like in fallujah and i've felt it at times in afghanistan and i felt at times currently syria where you're like man i am just like i'm the world is like opening on a hinge everything's changing on like a hinge or a fulcrum and i'm like standing right there and i'm watching it all um and it's very seductive have you lost the desire to be where it is by now well it's different it sort of evolves um your sense of it evolves in new ways you know that sense of feeling full i would say i um i get that sense of because i would i would tether you know being close to it with something else which is having a purpose and um so i would say has my desire to have a purpose in some way diminish over the years no i understand anything it's become stronger but i would say the sources that i go to to derive that purpose have changed in certain ways and um i wouldn't say mature so much as i would just say have evolved you know um they're just you know they're you know they're different when you're i'm in my early 40s they're different when they're in their early 40s when you're like 24. um right so uh yeah and you you described kind of the most insidious form of ptsd is this purposelessness associated with giving up the war um so i might ask like if somebody were to say hey what's your purpose now elliot do you have something there that you found now as in your early 40s yeah i uh i'm a father a husband and a writer you know that's what i drive my purpose for now uh it took a lot of work to to you know to get on that path where i'm doing those things and i'm doing them at a level that i feel satisfied with and they're working for me um but i've i have repurposed myself and i think that what a lot what i have seen amongst my contemporaries the ones that have sort of left the service and left that life and done well have been the ones who've been able to kind of successfully repurpose and the ones i've seen have really struggled have been the ones who haven't really been able to repurpose they've been able to find what that you know what fitzgerald calls right that second act in american life you know he says in america in american life there are no second acts but what you're kind of what's your second act um and um and it's hard i mean listen it was hard it was hard for me um and uh and i think that's a form of you know in popular consciousness you talk about ptsd i think people immediately assume it's like you had some experience where you know you saw your best friend blown to smithereens in front of you and it you know and their their ghost is constantly reappearing in your field of vision and like and listen like there's certainly stuff like that that exists and you know nightmares and and that's a real thing and i would argue there's this much sort of larger and because it's so large and so prevalent it almost makes it more insidiousness what makes it more insidious it's just this sort of purposelessness that people feel after having these intensely purposeful experiences at a very young age yeah oh it's so true so i got just one more question on places and names and then we'll talk 2034 here um you go back to fallujah right like you're one of the very few who goes back as a civilian basically to the place where it all happened can you just talk about what that felt like to you and was there any closure that came along with it yeah um so i wanted to go back or the way i the way i started going back and how it all happened was uh i was living in istanbul and the new york times istanbul bureau chief he was the istanbul slash baghdad bureau chief uh great journalist his name's timorango he's still at the times he's on domestic beat now but we were having dinner one night and he had just come back from the third battle of fallujah which the iraqis had fought on their own against uh the islamic state and we were sort of talking about it oh man what was it like and i kind of wishfully said man i'd love to go back he was just like why don't you come back like that's not hard i'll be back there next month that we can just you know we'll get you in there and you know just come stay at the house in baghdad we'll drive over you know it's like a you know it's like a 45 minute drive and one thing that's funny is when you're there in the military your sense of geography because you're doing everything on military transport it's like it's so you know to go from baghdad to fallujah is like you know going halfway across the globe it's like such a you know such a process but you know you're like no in reality it is like actually it is a 45 minute drive it's not that long um i mean same for me working as a journalist you know i'd like you know land in istanbul and get a flight at the gaziantep but i could be you know i could i could be in new york city on a thursday afternoon and be in syria on a friday you know on a saturday morning uh and so but anyways he said you want to go back so i said sure we set the whole thing up and then just sort of by coincidence like the day i was flying in the mosul offensive launch and he's like hey man i'm really sorry like i'm not going to be in that i'm going to be in her reveal going to mosul i know you're coming in you know you're welcome to stay at the house but i'm taking all my fixtures with us i fortunately had through a friend of a friend a name or one other like kind of a backup fixer and he and i met at the airport and we sort of kind of wound up talking our way through all of these checkpoints to get into fallujah um i you know i in my mind i wanted to go stand on this rooftop where a friend of mine had been killed um in the government center which is sort of a compound right in the middle of fallujah which we are my infantry company had like seized on the first day of the battle that was like our first really big initial objective was you know you guys are the seats the government's nothing before and all this stuff so he wound up getting killed on the rooftop that first day of the battle um and so uh we got down there and turned out the islamic state could have been a government center had destroyed all the buildings so there was just rubble there there's nothing left so i couldn't stand on the rooftop but um i would say one of the things just from a practical point of view that was complicated um was again like with abu asar i didn't want to be telegraphing hey there's an old marine who fought in the second battle and wants to like come look around fallujah citizens i'm sure you won't have any issues or complicated emotions about this uh you know i think i write in that piece it's sort of like showing up in new orleans if your name is hurricane katrina you know like you might want to be welcome with open arms so the the police we were working with who like weren't frankly kind enough to show us around were sort of like i'd be like hey there's this one rubble building i really want to go see her there's just one spot i wanted to go to this one house where our platoon had been surrounded for a day you know it was this little candy store and i was like i want to go to and i was showing them and they're like why do you want to go there like they couldn't and then they and then they figured it out and they're like wait a second wait i wait a second and they were like oh you were you must have been here before um and that was sort of i think interesting seeing their reactions uh when they figured out you know that that there was sort of a uh there was a you know a personal motivation uh behind taking this journey um so yeah it was interesting to go back i think one of the things that i i mentioned this in the piece that was the most striking to me um was how little it changed i i got to some places where i've been before and i looked like i remember one point i i found that candy store and um and i was looking out from some of the advantages we spent a whole day pinned down there so you can imagine i'm like just looking at the same little narrow view all day i went to that interview and i looked at it and i saw this pile this very kind of low rubble semi-rubble cinder block wall and it was still there a decade later just this little pile of rubble it hadn't moved a whole nother battle that swept through there and the and and it's because this little pile of rubble i had wound up like crouching behind it for like 45 minutes with my radio operators that was sort of all that was between us and the almighty and it was still just sitting there you know there's this little bit of destruction in the city god yeah that's why this is a national bestseller it's a great book elliot um so let's let's jump into 2034 right so that's the most recent book um not that this matters a ton but my family happens to love it so that's my next book here it doesn't matter oh no that's great yeah no that we're all huge fans of what you write and wired and different pieces we all we check out so place and names was great let's talk 2034 if you can share a bit more like why this book why now what was it like writing it um so 2034 is a work of speculative fiction um set in that affirmation year uh and it imagines what what it would look like if the us and china went to war mainly at sea and um it's a book that uh i co-wrote with uh admiral james davridis who is uh uh retired as the uh former supreme allied commander europe so the head of nato uh and he and i actually have known each other for the better part of a decade we're both graduates of the fletcher school where he uh when he retired he went to be the dean there for six years and when he was dean he invited me to be the writer in residence for a semester so i when he emailed me and said hey you want to write a residence you know one of my duties he kind of gave me a bullet point list and one of the bullet points was you know talk with the dean about books when he feels like it and so he's like as deeply he's a very deeply red guy like you know he i'm i'm always asking him for like great fiction recommendations and so i really we knew each other's sensibilities and coincidentally we share an editor at penguin press um just by coincidence and so he originally had the idea for the book the idea being that you know if you look back at the cold war there's this really rich body of literature um it looks like the bedford incident uh on the beach films like doctor strange love even red dawn a favorite of mine um where we like imagine what the third world war looked like i think many people would say now you know with regards to china if we're not in a cold war which kind of we're like in the foothills of a cold war with china and there's basically nothing written uh in that type of you know body of speculative literature so um some sort of idea uh our shared editor was like well you know you're gonna do this you should work with a novelist and like aren't you and elliot friends and so we figured we team up and write the book and the book is very much kind of this um you know it's a character-based book i think it moves pretty quickly it's not a huge techno door stopper um they're five central characters a um female navy commodore uh marine uh fourth generation fighter pilot a chinese admiral a veteran of the iranian coots force and a indian american national security staffer and there are many other characters too but through those five you kind of you you're you go into the world of 2034 kind of through their eyes and you experience this war through their eyes and there's a variety of national viewpoints there and when each one of them steps onto the page uh you kind of hear you know they're making their case to you the reader is that they're making their case before god as to how they see the world uh in this conflict playing out so um yeah i think it's i think it's also kind of frankly although it's on a very like you know grim topic you know global war actually it's a pretty fun read so you you kind of look you have like a good smile as you're talking about it it looked like it was a lot of fun to write actually i don't know if that's true but yeah we had a blast riding it it was a lot of hunger right oh that's awesome all right so i'm gonna let you go i just had one other thing um do people like you seem like a modern day hemingway and i mean i don't mean to be crazy here but like the the type of combat you saw and what you write about and the places you've been do people talk about that with you i don't know well you know hemingway got blown up delivering chocolates to the frontline so i'd like i did better than him at least in that regard i wasn't delivering anybody chocolates listen i that's a huge compliment thank you yeah for sure not elliot it's always fun um thanks so much for round two i'm sure they'll be around three one day um and where can people find you online yeah first of all thank you and i'd love to do that you can find me online at uh elliottackerman.com and uh same thing on like twitter and facebook and uh my books are wherever good books are sold but it's been a tough year for independent bookstores so try to support your local thanks so much man take care i hope you enjoyed this combat story people often write to me with incredible stories and suggestions for interviews if you want to share a combat story of your own or from someone you served with record yourself for up to five minutes and email it to ryan combatstory.com i'll select some of these stories and feature them at the end of our episodes thanks for listening stay safe

Channel: Combat Story

Views: 33,087

Rating: 4.9486632 out of 5

Keywords: Delta Force, The Unit, Special Forces, Special Operations Forces, Delta, Squadron, Operator, Todd Opalski, Citadel, The Citadel, Force Recon, Marine Recon, Scout Sniper, Marine Scout Sniper, Marine Sniper, Marine Corps, The Marine Corps, Hoora, Devil Dogs, NCO, Non-Commissioned Officer, Ranger School, Ranger, Army Ranger, Costa Rica, Iraq, Afghanistan, Silver Star, Purple Heart, Places and Names, 2034, Elliot Ackerman, Tufts, CIA, Paramilitary, Amphibious Reconnaissance School

Id: 0LITQcjA4GI

Length: 71min 28sec (4288 seconds)

Published: Sat May 15 2021