transcript

Speaker 1:
[00:01] Modern history has a way of repeating itself. The same pattern returns. A sudden act of terror is followed by a limited or hesitant response. And because the US and its allies will accept a certain level of violence, the enemy learns that terrorism works. Jack Carr has lived inside that story. A former Navy SEAL sniper, in childhood Jack was shaped by the rise of IRGC terror. In adulthood, by the wars after 9-11. Now a best-selling novelist, Carr brings what he's learned about terrorism, war and the limits of power to his fiction and now also to his non-fiction as well. In this conversation, we move from his early sense of vocation through the brutal reality of SEAL training and combat to the deeper questions his work raises about institutional failure, about the psychology of war and about what enemies learn when nation-states get it wrong. I'm Thomas Small. This is my Conflicted Conversation with Jack Carr. Jack, it's nice to meet you. Jack Carr, my goodness, I think you might be the most famous person to be on Conflicted.

Speaker 2:
[01:38] Oh, come on, come on.

Speaker 1:
[01:40] I'm super happy to meet you, Jack. It's a real honor, thanks for coming on.

Speaker 2:
[01:44] Oh, honor's all mine, and I don't usually get beard envy. Very rarely does it happen, but man, you've got me beat there. How long has that been a part of your whole thing here?

Speaker 1:
[01:56] Well, I've had a beard since I was in my late teens, more or less, this is probably, I don't know, two years ago, I decided I'm gonna go full on a midlife crisis and just let it grow and see what happens. So this is two years in more or less.

Speaker 2:
[02:09] Nice, okay, very good, yeah. I had the beard before beards were a thing. You know, they went away for a long time, and then in the mid-90s, before I went into the SEAL teams, I went backpacking around Alaska, and so I grew out a beard for three months, and then I came back, and it was interesting, because I had like, you know, jeans, and kind of like an army jacket, almost like that first blood Stallone look when he's walking into HOPE, and I remember people following me, like looking at me in stores, kind of like, oh, this is, who's this guy? Is he gonna rob us? Is he gonna steal something? I definitely looked like a vagrant, kind of how I described some of my characters in the novels, but then had to shave it, of course, for boot camp, and then going through training, and then got to get it back when I went to Afghanistan, and had some good pictures in Afghanistan, a little less white in the beard at that time, back in 2003, but man, then it came back, it's like a style thing, you know? I liked it when I was the only one. I liked it in the mid-90s when I was the only one to have one. I didn't know anybody my age that had a beard, and it was good, it was a solid beard. And I liked being the only one, and now that it became, I don't know.

Speaker 1:
[03:09] Well, it's nice to be talking to a fellow, not just a fellow American, but a fellow Gen Xer. There aren't enough of us around. I lived through the 90s too, during that brief kind of grungy phase, when beards were in, and as you say, they did go away. I started growing mine really in 2000. I left home, I backpacked. Not around Alaska, I backpacked around the Middle East and the Mediterranean. That's how I got involved in Middle Eastern stuff. But let's talk about you. You're Jack Carr, you are a best-selling novelist, and a couple of years ago, your first non-fiction book came out, Targeted Beirut, which tells the story of the disastrous 1983 terrorist attack against the US. Marines in Beirut. Before we get into all that though, I want to learn a little bit about you. You mentioned that you were a Navy SEAL, but even before that, you were born into a military family.

Speaker 2:
[04:00] Well, the military family was my grandfather. So my grandfather was killed in World War II. He was a Corsair pilot, which is the plane that had the gull wings that would fold up so you could fit them on the aircraft carrier. There's a TV show in late 70s, Syndicated in the 80s, which is where I saw it with my dad. Started out as Bob Bob Black Sheep with Robert Conrad playing Pappy Boynton, Medal of Honor recipient from World War II, who was also a Marine fighter pilot who flew the Corsair like my grandfather. So I was watching that, but in syndication, they called it Black Sheep Squadron. I was fortunate enough to meet Pappy Boynton when I was a kid. I got to meet Robert Conrad who played Pappy Boynton in the show. But I had my grandfather's, the maps that they would give aviators back then, because if you hit the water with a paper map, it would just get wet and eventually disintegrate. But a silk map just got wet, you could still use it. So I had those maps of the Pacific region, the Pacific Theater of War, had his medals, had his wings, had pictures of him and his squadron. So I had those tangible assets that were my connection to him and that generation, because this was obviously before any sort of social media or any way for even my dad to find someone who had served with his father. So he never really met his dad. His dad was killed in May of 1945, a Fokunawa, when two kamikazes hit his aircraft carrier and took it out of the war. It limped back to, it did survive. There's a great book called Dangerous Hour that talks about really, it follows the kamikaze pilot who hits, and there's two of them, but he follows one in particular, and then like the building of the aircraft carrier and how they came to this point in the Pacific and collide, how those fates collide. But anyway, that was in my blood, I think even before I had any conception of who my grandfather was, I think there was just this innate, I guess, draw to serve and to test myself, probably that happens with a lot of young men, and that's something that I think has throughout history. But then, I could become aware of who my grandfather was, and watching all the World War II movies with my dad, Vietnam movies with my dad, Westerns with my dad, all those sorts of things, just like a young, red-blooded American male does. And I just knew my path was the military. And then at the ripe old age of seven, I find out about the Seals through an old movie called The Frogmen, and that's because those of you remember, we talked a little bit about our generation, but a lot of people don't realize that before remote controls, we were the remote controls in our homes. And so on Sundays, my dad would be watching football, and also people don't remember, there were four channels when we were growing up. There was CBS, NBC, ABC, and then there was, I guess PBS was in there, so maybe there was five, and then there was this outlier channel, this like strange one. And so that one was always playing a war movie on Sundays. And so during football, when it was a commercial, my dad would look at his watch and say, go, and I'd run up to the TV, switch it to that war movie, watch that for two and a half minutes, and then my dad says flip it back, flip it back to football, and we'd watch football till the next commercial. But during one of those, there was The Frogmen. It's a black and white film, guys crawling up over the beaches, blowing up obstacles in advance of a conventional force landing type of a situation. And so I asked my dad, who are these guys? And he said, these are, these are frogmen, because that was the name of the movie. And I said, well, who are the frogmen? This looks amazing. And he said, ask your mother. My mom's a librarian. So we went down to the local library shortly thereafter and started researching frogmen, found out about underwater demolition teams, naval combat demolition units, the Navy SEALs. And my takeaway from that research back then, when you could find the end of the internet, and for those that are watching this, not listening, you can see that's the internet right there. So that's the encyclopedia right there. So I have a world book encyclopedia.

Speaker 1:
[07:25] I thought, wow, I haven't seen, I haven't seen the world book for a long time.

Speaker 2:
[07:30] Yeah, yes, I'm collecting each decade. So those are, those are both from the 80s right there. So you can see how views on things changed over time. So you look at something, how it's described in the 1920s, and how it's described in the 30s, the 40s, the 50s, the 60s, and see how that view morphs over time. But that was our internet back then. And there were a couple other books out there, a couple of magazine articles, a couple of mentions that we looked at in the library when we went down to do that research. And my takeaways were that the SEALs were some of the most elite commandos in our nation's arsenal, and that the training was some of the toughest ever devised by modern military. So at age seven, that's all I needed. I was in.

Speaker 1:
[08:09] You thought, sign me up. So how old were you when you joined the SEALs? What was your way in?

Speaker 2:
[08:14] Yeah, so I knew I wanted to be an enlisted sniper because officers weren't snipers from some of that research. And I continued to research. I didn't just do that research at seven and then lock in. I was then collecting everything I could possibly find on special operations, on terrorism, counter-terrorism, insurgencies, counter-insurgencies. A lot of the stuff written back then was, of course, talking about Vietnam. Started these autobiographies started coming out. These memoirs started coming out from guys who had served in Vietnam. So I'm reading all those and collecting all those. And through that research before, obviously, the Internet, I found out that, hey, if you want to be a sniper, you're going to come in enlisted. So I wanted to do that. And also from reading these books and from the power of popular culture. Because once again, Gen X, power of popular culture. Every Vietnam movie shows this brand new officer show up in Vietnam and lead his men right into an ambush, like every single one. And so I'm like, I don't want to be that guy. I want to be that grizzled old sergeant who knows what he's doing. He's on his third or fourth rotation through Vietnam type of a thing.

Speaker 1:
[09:13] Just to make sure I understand, since you decided from a young age, you wanted to be a sniper, you needed to enlist because snipers aren't officers. Why did you want to be a sniper? What do you think made sniping particularly appealing to you?

Speaker 2:
[09:28] That is a very good question. And a lot of times, they don't question the call. You know what I mean? Like, sometimes when people question that call, they start questioning it too much. And then they get talked out of it or they talk themselves out of it for life in general. So I've been throughout my life, I've just listened to that innate call and followed that. So for whatever it is, probably wanting to be on my own, not being part of a smaller unit, being either in my mind at the time, pictured myself alone crawling through the jungle or just with one spotter crawling through the jungle, being behind enemy lines, like that sort of a thing. So I think that's what was probably appealing to me, the skill that it takes, the patience that it takes, the being good in the woods as they used to say, good trade craft, I guess you would say, and having that ability, having that capability.

Speaker 1:
[10:16] I am as far away from even wanting to be a Navy SEAL, certainly a sniper as you can possibly get. I like being at home, I like my books. I don't want to kill. I don't mind other people killing. Actually, I'm grateful that some people do want to fight for me, but I'm a coward. I'm not an outdoors kind of person. So I am totally fascinated by the whole idea of becoming a Navy SEAL. What was the training like? First, what is the general training for a Navy SEAL before we even talk about being a sniper?

Speaker 2:
[10:46] Yeah, it's morphed a little bit over the years and over the decades or since I came in, when I came in, you had to go to boot camp first and that's like everybody who joins the Navy goes to boot camp and you learn to fold T-shirts and underwear and make your bed and those sorts of things. Follow instructions.

Speaker 1:
[11:05] Get shouted at by sergeants and stuff?

Speaker 2:
[11:06] A lot of yelling, a lot of yelling.

Speaker 1:
[11:08] What was the most humiliating punishment you had to participate in? I'm thinking like cleaning shitty toilets with toothbrushes and stuff, anything like that?

Speaker 2:
[11:17] Yeah, it's just the normal stuff. That's not really, I mean, it's just what you do. It's not a, it's just what everybody goes through. So what's good about that is that it's supposed to break you down and all that stuff, but you share something in common with anyone who's ever been through Navy bootcamp or even someone who's ever been through bootcamp in general. You now share an experience in common. So you do that. And then at that time you had to go to a SEAL source rating, a school they called it. So a military specialty type school. So I went to intelligence school at Dam Neck, Virginia. I think it was like 16 weeks or so, but you have to wait for your class to start up. So that's a couple of weeks of mornings mopping the floor in the bottom level, going to lunch, working out, going back in the afternoon to the upper level, mopping that floor, then going back to work out again, have dinner, run through that on repeat. So that was a few weeks. Then into that intel school, go through that, and then go to BUDS. So BUDS is Basic Underwater Demolition SEAL Training. And that's where you show up in Coronado, California. That's what they've made the Discovery Channel specials about and that sort of thing. And that's what I've read about since I was a kid, is the toughest training ever devised by a modern military. So I never think about boot camp. I rarely think about intel school unless someone asks me because it's like lost time for me. I was just like, need to get through these things to get to BUDS.

Speaker 1:
[12:32] Compared to BUDS, boot camp and intel school must have been like a cakewalk because suddenly you're being put through your paces in a real way.

Speaker 2:
[12:40] Yeah, this is what you're building up for, but you have to do those other things. You have to pass all those other things. You have to pass those tests. It's just what you have to do. So now you're at BUDS and you have to wait for your class there to class up too. At the time, it's different now. And so waiting for the class to class up, it's called. And so you're just getting in shape. You're learning how to do the O course. You're running in the soft sand. You're building up those muscles that are a little different when you're running on hard pack. You're learning how to do the log PT that you see maybe in videos.

Speaker 1:
[13:06] No, what's this? I don't know what that is. What's the log PT?

Speaker 2:
[13:09] It's like telephone poles that you have and you all carry it as a team. You're supposed to instill teamwork and camaraderie and it's also difficult and that sort of thing. So you're carrying it, you're carrying it above your head and you're running with them in the soft sand and you're getting in the water with them and doing sit-ups with them. And so it's like a telephone pole, it's a little shorter, I guess.

Speaker 1:
[13:26] You must have achieved a level of physical fitness that would be impossible for a schlub like me even to imagine.

Speaker 2:
[13:34] You know, I don't know. Any average high school athlete I think can make it through. So it's not really about that. I think it's more, it's definitely, I don't think, I know. It is definitely more about that mental fortitude. That's what we're looking for. Like, yeah, you have to be in good shape, but guess what? You're going to get in good shape in your first couple of weeks of getting yelled at. And it helps if you show up in great shape, obviously. But a lot of people show up in phenomenal shape, super strong, incredible endurance, and they quit the first night of Hell Week. That happens fairly typically.

Speaker 1:
[14:02] Okay, here we go. Tell me about Hell Week. What happens on Hell Week? How is your mental fortitude tested?

Speaker 2:
[14:07] Yeah, so this is really what you're building up towards. If you've studied this and you want to do this, and of course, now there's tons of information out there online. But back then, there wasn't. It was just what you could glean from books and magazine articles, and you just know that this is where most of the attrition is going to take place, and that attrition is going to be around 80 percent. You're building up towards this thing, and it's going to start on Sunday afternoon. So when you wake up on Sunday morning, that's the last sleep you're going to get for a while, and then it goes till Friday afternoon. So you're going to be moving the whole time, and you're going to be at an edge of hypothermia the whole time, and you essentially never stop moving. You sit down to eat, of course, because they have to feed your body, because you're burning calories, like crazy. But yeah, hell week is where you get most of the attrition, and it starts right away, because people think in their minds, like, hey, I cannot do this for another five days. Sunday night, whistle drills in the sand, and it's dark, and the waves are washing over you. They do surf torture, which they now call surf conditioning, because that's more politically correct, and you're in the surf zone. But it's the same thing, and you're just in the surf zone, arms linked with your class, and leaning back, and the water's going up in your nose, and all that stuff, and you're shivering, and then they pull you out, and I think they shine a flashlight in your eyes to make sure you're not about to keel over. And so it just gets, yeah, it gets a lot of people there. So first night, second night, third night, that's when you're losing most of your guys, but the first night, I remember people quitting in droves, and then after that, you're kind of a zombie, and you're just working your way through Thursday, and then to Friday.

Speaker 1:
[15:38] And you made it through, did you ever think about quitting ever? Did you think, I'm not gonna make it?

Speaker 2:
[15:43] No, people say, you think about quitting only in the, only in that it's an option. That's like, hey, and they make it very clear, because if you quit at any other time during the program, you have to find your way from wherever you are through the first phase classroom, there's a bell outside that classroom, you take your helmet, you put it on the ground, and then you ring the bell. And so all the quitters have their helmets with their names on them, lined up around what's called the grinder, which is where you do your PT, which is kind of like a Roman, what do they call it, the Roman Coliseum, I guess, because up above, there's a second level where people can look down on you, and you're in that kind of square, doing your pushups and sit ups, and getting hosed down with fire hoses and all the rest of it.

Speaker 1:
[16:26] Jeez Louise, I can't believe it.

Speaker 2:
[16:28] But during Hell Week, they take that bell, and they put it in a trailer hitch of one of the trucks that follows you around everywhere, so it never leaves your line of sight. So we make it very easy to self-select out of this program and move your way from that surf zone, run up the beach or stumble up the beach to the truck that's sitting right there with medical personnel to make sure that no one keels over and dies. And then you ring that bell and that's it. You can have some coffee, some hot chocolate, some donuts and be warm and comfortable again.

Speaker 1:
[16:54] So how many men joined Hell Week and how many men were left at the end of Hell Week? What are the numbers here?

Speaker 2:
[17:01] It's been a while. So I'm not entirely sure, but it was around a little over 200 we started with. And then I forget exactly, it was like 26 we ended with or something like that. Somewhere like, I don't know exactly. I hate doing the numbers because it's a little foggy at this point.

Speaker 1:
[17:17] It gives you a sense as you say of that attrition rate.

Speaker 2:
[17:20] And then some people roll like I rolled after that into the next class because I had some my legs just wouldn't work after Hell Week. And so anyway, I rolled in the next class, so my legs got better and I never had a problem with them ever again. So a lot of people roll there and then a lot of people roll in what's called pool comp. So when people talk about their class numbers, the original people who started with the class that make it through to the end is different than the people that will roll into that class if that makes sense because you have people rolling for injuries, rolling for performance. So if you fail this thing called pool comp, which is where you lose the largest amount of people other than Hell Week, I believe, then they'll roll to the next class, get one more chance if the instructor staff wants to keep that burden. Like if they're a great guy, they're strong, they prove they have that mental fortitude by making it through Hell Week in that first phase. And in the second phase, they just couldn't quite get this pool comp, and I'll describe that in a second, but that's to show that you're comfortable in the water. So you'll get another chance there. If you don't make it again, then you're out. And unfortunately, a lot of people that are great guys just can't get comfortable in the water.

Speaker 1:
[18:26] When you say that, what do you mean? Like you're put in the water for like days or something? What's going on there?

Speaker 2:
[18:31] No, no. So you've already done things like a underwater knot tying and breath holds and so anyway, these things that are supposed to get you comfortable in the water, you've learned this open circuit, scuba diving stuff, but then they want to test how you are with like essentially emergency procedures underwater. So you go into the water in this pool, and then instructors pounce on you, and you're crawling across the bottom of the pool, and they rip that thing out of your mouth, and it's an old school type regulator with the two hoses that go back to two 280s on your back, and they rip that out, they tie it in knots, they hit you in the gut so that you get the water out of your lungs. Oh my God. They rip off your fins, they smash you on the bottom of the pool a few times, and then they back off. And then you have to go through the correct procedures in the correct order to get your air back on, to get your 280 tanks back on if they've been ripped off or whatever happened to you when they pounced on you, and then to start moving again at the bottom of the pool. And then they pounce on you again. So it's like 15 minutes of them testing you to see just how comfortable you are without air going through emergency procedures on the bottom of the pool. And for me, I loved it. I grew up in the water.

Speaker 1:
[19:37] I was very- You loved it.

Speaker 2:
[19:39] Yeah, cause there's very few times during this training pipeline where it's you against an instructor. Usually you're just going to yell that, being told you're worthless, that this is the worst class ever, we need five more quitters, and then we can be warm, like all that sort of thing. You can yell that constantly. And I shouldn't say that not constantly, but it's like, there's not you against anybody, it's just like you doing things and performing, being a good teammate, showing that you have that team ability, that mental fortitude, those physical attributes, all those things that they were looking for in the SEAL teams. And this is one of those times where it's you against an instructor. So I looked at it that way, and I was comfortable in the water, have been my whole life. So that was great for me. I loved it, passed the first time. That was fantastic. But there's other things like life saving. That's another one where you get to put your hands on an instructor. You don't get to put your hands on an instructor when you're doing this pool comp thing. You just gotta show them, like, it's me against you. I can do this. I'm comfortable here. Bring it. But when you're doing life saving, they have instructors out in the pool. And that, you actually, so you have to save them. And each one kind of mimics a different kind of drowning. And so some will fight you. Others are just like dead weight. And they're all different body types and that thing. But that was fun because I got to swim out there. You grab some huge instructor, some guy that's been yelling at you for whatever you grab and start swimming them back to shore. And then they take you down and start smashing you on the bottom of the pool. But you can just relax. You just hold them. So I can just, because I've done some jiu-jitsu or whatever else before that. So I was very comfortable with kind of, I don't know, grappling, I guess. And so you just kind of hold on, okay, take the ride. They're expending all their energy right now. I need to relax so I can just ride this out, come up to the top, take a breath, and then start swimming towards shore again. They'll get a couple of breaths of air and then they'll take you down again. And so I really like that, because that's when you're putting your hands on an instructor. So anyway, those things were few and far between in training.

Speaker 1:
[21:29] Jack, I mean, were you basically the same guy then that you are now? I mean, you're just so upbeat. You're so positive. You seem like super friendly. And yet you're talking with great relish about these experiences that a normal person would never be able to do.

Speaker 2:
[21:45] Yeah, I was talking to a friend from first grade the other day. And she said, you're the same kid that was on the slide back in first grade or kindergarten or whatever it was. And so, yeah, I've just been, I don't know, just me. It would be hard to be anybody else.

Speaker 1:
[21:58] Tell me about this mental fortitude here. I mean, really try to explain what's going on inside your mind. Because here you're presenting as this very, very optimistic, friendly, open hearted, open guy. Right? Very appealing. But clearly there's like a steely core to you. So when you're in the midst of some terribly harrowing experience that is being, you know, and you can tap out at any moment. Are you like wrestling hard with a desire for this suffering to stop? Or did you just always, were you always able to just take it? Like, you know what I mean? Like, what does it take there at the center of your will? Like your freedom could move towards ringing that bell, but you're like, no.

Speaker 2:
[22:41] Yeah, I mean, there are a few things. I mean, like most Gen-Xers, I learned most of my lessons about life from television and films of the 80s. So you have, let's see, Dalton from Roadhouse. I bet you weren't expecting the conversation to take this turn.

Speaker 1:
[22:54] No, but I'm very pleased that it has, I can tell you.

Speaker 2:
[22:57] Yes, it's, you know, you be nice until it's time to not be nice. You know, otherwise you'd be exhausted, I think. You know, you go through life exhausted. But so I put things in relative terms, and being the son of a librarian having studied my whole life and been a student of warfare my whole life and always approach things as a student, I put things in relative terms out there on, let's say, the beach in Coronado, California, because I thought about the guys who stormed the beaches at Normandy, Iwo Jima, and I thought, you know what? Those guys did that to preserve, give me the freedom to follow whatever my dream was in this life. And it happens to be testing myself here on the beach in Coronado, California to see what it takes to become a Navy SEAL. And wow, you know what? I can do a few more pushups in the sand because those guys were on Landing Craft, whose Landing Craft door dropped and they were immediately engaged with machine guns from elevated positions and they had to work their way across this beach and worked their way up to these cliffs. And the Rangers had to use ladders and ropes to climb up to take out these positions. And guess what? You know what? They did that and I can certainly do this. So I put things in relative terms, thinking about things from a historical lens. And so I think that really helped while I was there.

Speaker 1:
[24:07] Very impressive. Now, let's just sort of say, you made it through, you're a Navy SEAL, whatever, and then you move towards being trained to become a sniper. What is that training like? Because I imagine it's very different, very calm, cool, very much about concentration. I mean, how does that work? How do you learn how to? And what are we talking about? Like, what is a Navy SEAL sniper doing as opposed to another kind of sniper?

Speaker 2:
[24:31] It's pretty much the same. Each service will have its own sniper school. Some have multiple sniper schools like the Army does. But let me take you back before that. So this is pre-September 11th. I got to my first SEAL team 1997, and we all thought we were gonna get issued pagers, walk across the quarter deck, and start going on secret missions right away. And that was not the case. We walked across that quarter deck and did new guy stuff. So that means taking out the garbage, painting walls, changing light bulbs, making sure the beer was stocked for the guys that had more than one platoon, fridges in the platoon spaces, so doing that sort of thing. Like any new guy in any kind of unit has to do. Probably in professional sports too, new guys that show up and there's a kind of a rite of passage. And when I stretched out to the SEAL teams, you weren't yet, just because you passed BUDs didn't mean you were a SEAL. And I like, it's different now, but I liked how this happened because you got to your SEAL team and now you had to prove yourself to the guys in your platoon who you might go to war with. Because the job of the military isn't to go to war, it's to be prepared to go to war when that call comes. And so you have to prove yourself to these guys who you might be next to essentially in the foxhole. And so I like that. Now guys show up with their tridents, so they show up as SEALs. I think it's a little different of a mindset. And you know, it's probably better and more professional and more efficient and all those things. But you know, once again, I liked how we did it. And once you get to your team, then you go through the SEAL qualification or SEAL tactical training and do that for a few months. You have to pass that as well. Now you're actually learning something instead of just in BUDS where your first phase just proving that you have the mental fortitude to make it. Second phase, you're proving that you're comfortable in the water. You learn the open circuit, scuba diving stuff. You learn the closed circuit stuff, which is the pure oxygen loops. You're not giving up any bubbles when you go into an enemy harbor or whatever. And then third phase is land warfare phase where essentially you're just proving that you're safe with demolition and with firearms, safe with explosives and with firearms. Like that's the basics. That's the basic and basic underwater demolition seal training. Then you go on to the seal qualification training or seal tactical training and then you're actually, okay, we're moving beyond the just proving that you're safe and are tough enough and comfortable in the water. And now we're starting to learn some things, a little more on the tactical side and lessons from the past and all these. So now you're starting to essentially build your repertoire, build on this foundation of the basics. So you're taking it to the next level, I guess like your master's degree or something like that. And then you get to your, then you pass that, you still won't get your trident. Then you go to your platoon, and then during the six months with your platoon, they're evaluating you right there. And each team might have had back then its own little kind of mini evaluation, I guess, over a day or a couple of days, I think it was three days, where you have to pass certain tests or whatever to once again prove to the leadership of the team that you have what it takes. And all that training that you did to get there was, it stuck, I guess is the way to put it. But then your platoon gives you the thumbs up and then they give you your trident and then they pound that thing into your chest. And so that's pretty cool. So that's the lead up, that's the part we skipped over. And then yeah, then your platoon, your chief and your LPO, your leading petty officer and maybe one of the officers or whatever kind of evaluate who's interested in becoming a sniper, who has the aptitude for it. And then they pick somebody and you go to sniper school and there's a slot for you. So I went there after my first platoon and I forget how many days it was. I think things are starting to morph, but it was a few months. It was like three months or two months or two and a half months or something along those lines. And when I went through it was a portion of just shooting and you're learning all the different types of rifles. So you're starting off with like an M14, then moving up to a 7.62, then going to a 300 Win Mag, which was like the war course at the time, then to the 50 cal and you're doing all sorts of different tests, just shooting with those things, working with a spotter and also like learning how to sketch and do distance stuff and unknown distance stuff and you're doing all that and then you're stalking, you're learning how to stalk. Oh my God.

Speaker 1:
[28:37] And how far, what was like the longest distance you could snipe on, you know, like accurately?

Speaker 2:
[28:43] Yeah, back then it was a mile with the 50 cal. So it was 1600. Yeah, so is that 1600 yards or? Anyway, things are getting a little foggy. Now I find myself in my novels, I just have to check everything that I thought I knew. I have to check because I'm a little David now. In my time, I've been out for a little time. And people shoot farther now, by the way.

Speaker 1:
[29:01] How far can they shoot now?

Speaker 2:
[29:02] I don't know, but farther than that. I mean, things evolve over time. I was back in 2000 when I went through sniper school and then September 11th happened about two weeks into my second deployment. And that's when we started to get to do the things that we thought we were going to do when we walked across that quarter deck. So then it became real. And that's when we were called up to actually go to war. And then it was pretty busy from then on out.

Speaker 1:
[29:21] What were some of those things? I mean, you were in Afghanistan, I guess, right away. Were you sent right away?

Speaker 2:
[29:27] No, not right away. And we thought we missed it. So we thought we were going right away. We got on the planes in Guam, which is where we were deployed. And we started flying towards the Middle East. But we ended up taking over shipboarding operations for SEAL Team 3. And those guys ended up being some of the early troops into Afghanistan. And before September 11th, there wasn't probably pretty much the only game in town with shipboardings, meaning you were going to enforce the UN embargo against Iraq. So they're trying to sneak out oil in Class 3 tankers, DAOs, a bunch of things, but mostly these Class 3 tankers that would wait in Iraq and wait for bad weather, obviously, at night. This makes things a little more difficult. And they would head out of Iraq and then take a sharp left-hand turn towards Iranian waters. And we only had a certain amount of time to get on board, take over those ships, and turn them back into international waters, turn them over to a prize crew who actually knew how to drive these huge, gigantic tankers and then go wait for it to happen again the next night. And they'd have countermeasures up, like they'd take barbed wires, put them all over the deck so you couldn't fast-rope in, it would foul the ropes from helicopters. And usually they were going in bad weather anyway, but they'd do that. They'd put up kind of sheet metal over doors and windows or hatches, or I think they call them in the Navy. I'm like, I said, I'm a little dated, but so they weld those in place. So then you had to take an exothermic torch or a quickie saw or both and try to get inside before they got to rain water. So otherwise you had to get off.

Speaker 1:
[30:58] What a fascinating insight into how the US. Navy actually policed these things, like sanctions against a country. So you're there just doing it, you're kind of a policeman as it were, for that Atlantic world order we're always hearing about. In this case Saddam Hussein was prevented from shipping oil. He would try to do it. If he could get into Iranian waters, then you couldn't go in there because I guess those are sovereign territorial waters. But you've got to be... Did you actually do that? You landed on ships, helped them turn them around, send them back to Iraq?

Speaker 2:
[31:29] Yep, we couldn't use the helicopters because of the countermeasures they had in place. You know, sometimes other units could, but the ones I was with didn't. But you explained it just right. That's how I thought of it too. As a police officer, because when a cop pulls somebody over, you really don't know what you're walking up on. I mean, you can run the plate, you know, you can get a name, that sort of a thing, but you don't know who it's actually behind the wheel, or who's actually in that car. And on a dark street, you pull somebody over and you're walking up to that thing and you're alone. Like, you don't really know what you're walking up on. And saying, that's kind of how I looked at these ships. Like, okay, we think there's oil aboard, we think they're just trying to get to Iranian waters, but you don't really know. It's the dark of night, the seas are bad, it's stormy, and you're heading out there to climb on these things and then bust inside and turn them around and all that. So you don't really know what you're walking up on. So they were a little bit dicey just because of the weather for the most part and getting close to Iranian waters.

Speaker 1:
[32:26] And would you sometimes be met with fire from the people on the Iraqi ship? They would just, they basically give up. Once you got on board, they would just say, okay.

Speaker 2:
[32:34] My terminology might be a little off because once again, it's been a while, but that would be an opposed boarding. And that wasn't really what they were doing. Because what would happen was they knew that if we got on board and if we turned them around and got them in international waters and turned them over to a prize crew and all that stuff, that those ships I believe would then get auctioned off on some open market or whatever. Anyway, they would end up getting those ships back and just doing it again. So it's got, it was-

Speaker 1:
[32:58] Amazing, Twilight Zone life, my goodness.

Speaker 2:
[33:01] So there was no reason for them to oppose the boardings. But you didn't really, but once again, in our minds or in my mind anyway, we didn't really know exactly what you're walking up on like a police officer.

Speaker 1:
[33:12] You have to be prepared for the worst, obviously.

Speaker 2:
[33:14] Yeah. So it was interesting. It's the only time I got to do any Navy stuff during my time in the actual Navy because the rest of the time was Iraq and Afghanistan.

Speaker 1:
[33:21] Well, so there you go. So you're doing this when you thought you might be in Afghanistan, but eventually you were deployed to Afghanistan. So what were you doing there? I mean, I don't know if you can say so, but now I'm imagining you on like a dusty Afghan ridge with a sniper's rifle, like shooting some al Qaeda guy a mile away. Are you doing stuff like that?

Speaker 3:
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Speaker 2:
[35:19] Not really. It was, my sniper stuff came into play in Iraq, not long thereafter, but I went to Afghanistan in 2003, and that was the time I thought, wow, I barely made it here, just in time, because we all thought when we didn't go right away to Afghanistan, when we started doing the ship boardings, we thought, oh, we missed it, because after Vietnam, really, there were flashpoints. There was, let's say, Grenada, there was Panama, there was Mogadishu, Kuwait, yeah. First Gulf War wasn't very long. So there were these flashpoints that didn't last very long, and so that was our more recent history to fall back on.

Speaker 1:
[35:53] You didn't know the US would be there for 20 years.

Speaker 2:
[35:55] We certainly did not at that time. We thought we barely made it. Amazing, because you want to go as a SEAL or as somebody. If that call comes, this is what we've been training up for, and you want to be that person that goes. And when we didn't go right after September 11th, I mean, we still had to do the ship warnings, which, like I said, was cool before September 11th, after September 11th, not as cool. But we thought we missed it, dang it, we missed it. And everybody that wasn't deployed at the time and didn't go thought they missed it. And that obviously ended up not being the case. So yeah, so I got there, and it was mostly like direct action missions. So compound assaults, that sort of a thing, working up Intel packages. Some people were looking for Bin Laden, other people were looking for people that were associated with him, trying to build up that network and get Intel and do all that sort of thing. So it was mostly direct action missions in Afghanistan. Then it ended up in Iraq not long after that. So 2004 got to Iraq and ended up being in Iraq.

Speaker 1:
[36:52] And then you get to start sniping.

Speaker 2:
[36:54] Yeah, there was some sniper action going on there. Different than we trained up on. So you're working off in 2000 in sniper school, you're working essentially off the Vietnam model. So you're working off going out with a spotter and working your way into a position and setting up there for hours, days, that sort of a thing, waiting for your target, gathering intel, maybe not even taking a shot at a target, gathering intel, sending it back via radio, or maybe just taking notes and bringing it back yourself. So that was the model. That model definitely changed after September 11th and working in an urban environment, going in with a team, making sure you have somebody out there with you who has an automatic weapon. If you're just two people out there and you both have bolt action sniper rifles, or even you have an SR25, like a auto-loading, so it looks like an M16, M4, but just bigger, more accurate and shoots farther type of a thing. That really became the workhorse because it had been lead up to September 11th. That's that three and a one mag bolt action. We're making 700 sniper weapon system was amazing. And it still is. I still I love that round. But when it comes to moving through cities in an urban environment, I found that I wanted something I think most people did, that you wanted something a little more versatile. And so that SR25 Mark 11 sniper weapon system became really the workhorse because it was an auto loading weapon system. So you could carry a lot more ammo and you could engage like you would with your M4. But then you could also set up and provide Overwatch or do whatever your sniper mission was. So I did that in Najaf 2004, I did that in Mazzoula in 2005. Anyway, so it was a good run.

Speaker 1:
[38:33] So in that period, when did you come closest to dying? Like when did it become super hairy for you?

Speaker 2:
[38:42] Yeah, so 2005-2006 timeframe, you're out there in Ramadi and the IED threat is pretty significant. I'm an officer at this point, I've become an officer under OCS. Once again, did the exact same things I did in boot camp as an enlisted guy, so folding underwear or folding t-shirts, going to yell that again. So once again, I never think of it unless I'm asked about it ever. It was just a blank spot, it's just awful. So anyway, so I became an officer, so now I'm thinking, okay, we're heading out at night in let's say Humvees or some non-standard type vehicle or whatever we're doing to do whatever mission we're doing with those direct action or sniper mission, whatever it is. And thinking, wow, I can be worried about everything being an IED here, or I can focus on the mission. I can kind of resign myself to fate and know that we have some countermeasures in place. We have people up in the turrets that are looking, and my job here as a leader is to make sure that we get to the right target and that I'm controlling these assets, whatever they may be, air assets, QRF, whatever else. I know my responsibilities, and I need to be the best leader and operator I can possibly be. And that doesn't mean worrying that every piece of trash on the side of the road could explode and take out one of our vehicles. So that's inside the home VA or whatever vehicle we're using. That's bandwidth that is better spent, focused on my actual job. And so that generally is something when you think about getting close to dying, but that's not, but the actual closest one was in Najaf in 2004 when I have a sniper team and we're moving through this city and it was 11 days of pitched urban combat, kind of like the movies I was watching with my dad when I was a kid, you know, it's like everything's exploding. You have Abrams tanks and Bradley fighting vehicles and you're bringing in air helicopters and fast movers and you're pushing the J. Shalmadi militia back toward the Imam Ali Mosque in old town Najaf and you're moving forward every day by a couple blocks and then the Army's bringing that logistical train up, 27 Cav and a bunch of other supporting elements, they're bringing up the water, they're bringing up the ammo. Then you're talking back to the Colonel in charge of 27 Cav and talking about, okay, what are we gonna do next? Okay, we're putting Abrams here, we're doing putting Bradley here, gonna drop us off here, we're gonna go into these buildings here, we're gonna clear these, we're gonna take up our sniper positions in here, and right after that, we're gonna have fast movers come in and do whatever. So you're talking, you're working through all that stuff, but it's nonstop. For us, it was some 11 days, I think other people were there for a little longer, but because they started earlier, but that was pretty intense because it's August 2004.

Speaker 1:
[41:22] Hot as hell, holy moly.

Speaker 2:
[41:24] It's very hot, very hot in the jaw for those who remember. So at one point, we're moving through the streets in the middle of this gun battle, and the four of us, because some of the snipers would stay up in the overwash, and then we'd push forward and all that. So I think I had four guys, and we were in this courtyard, and we look at each other, and it's very hard to tell in an urban environment where shots are coming from, and it's like a lot of chaos going on, because the echoes bounce off the buildings and stuff. But we're in this courtyard, and we're kind of like, can you believe this? This is crazy, because usually, we're going out in the middle of the night, we're choosing the time, the place of our engagement, we have the target packages all built up, some intel trigger that says, hey, so-and-so, some IED maker is at this house right now, having a meeting, and then you go in and grab them, type of a thing. This was not that. This was the opposite of that. This was 11 days on the move.

Speaker 1:
[42:13] Psychologically, it must be so weird, because obviously you're kind of terrified to deaths around every corner, but the adrenaline rush must mean that you're actually quite excited. It must be weird.

Speaker 2:
[42:23] I guess there was a little excitement in there, because it was so different than what we'd been doing up to that point. We're in this courtyard, and we're looking at each other with that exact kind of thing. Like, can you believe that we're doing this? This is crazy. Where do we go next? Because I said there's all that confusion type thing. Are those those buildings that we're trying to get to type of a thing? And okay, yeah, let's go. And so we jump over this wall. And for those who remember, there were some walls there that were thick, kind of, I don't know, like mud and maybe some other stuff in there that made them pretty robust. So we go over this wall, drop to the other side. And as soon as the last guy hits the ground, a mortar lands exactly where we were standing just seconds earlier on the other side.

Speaker 1:
[43:03] Oh my God.

Speaker 2:
[43:05] So that was, I mean, so if anything, so once again, fate. So if anything that day had delayed us by a few seconds, oh, hey, hold on, I forgot my, whatever. Let me go grab it real quick from the whatever. And that just anything, anything like that. Let me grab us another sip of water. Everybody ready? Okay. Anything that had delayed us by like a few seconds meant we would have all been standing there when that thing hit.

Speaker 1:
[43:28] Talk about an adrenaline rush. Were you immediately aware of how close you'd come to death, right? Right then and there, like, holy shit.

Speaker 2:
[43:35] Yeah, it was like one of those things. But then you're in the middle of the fight. So you got to move off and make sure you got cover and make sure you didn't just turn your back on the enemy or something because it's so crazy with all the echoes and everything else going on. It was crazy.

Speaker 1:
[43:46] Jack, I got to tell you, man, as a bookish beta male, I am in awe of all of this. I cannot imagine doing any of this. How exciting. Now, listen, we've got to talk about your book, Targeted Beirut. In fact, the whole time I'm talking to you now, I'm thinking, what a remarkable coincidence. And it really wasn't planned that I should be having a conversation with you now because it all links up. Like right now, we're talking about amphibious assaults on islands in the Persian Gulf, in order to secure the Strait of Hormuz. You wrote a book about the IRGC's attack against the US. Marines in Beirut in 1983. If it was the IRGC, Hezbollah, proto-Hezbollah. It's very confusing. You might tell us about it.

Speaker 2:
[44:29] It is confusing. It's what would become Hezbollah.

Speaker 1:
[44:31] Hezbollah comes out of the sort of shadows in, I think, 1985. But it was proto-Hezbollah back then. But all of it's kind of linking up. And then you're flashing back to 9-11 and the initial years of the war on terror and all that stuff. And so you must feel an eerie sense of kind of deja vu, but also like you've lived through this long story, both as someone in the military and as a, you know, world famous writer. But it's like one big story and it's still unfolding. In fact, right now it's unfolding.

Speaker 2:
[45:01] Right now it's unfolding. And it's interesting, as we're recording this, yesterday was the press conference where we got a little more information about our downed aviators or the pilot and his weapon system officer who were rescued over the weekend. And when I heard some of those details, I mean, we have a C-130s landing in the desert, just like we did in April of 1980 with Delta Force going in to try to rescue the hostages as part of the Iranian hostage crisis. And that mission is really one that has the shadow of that failure in the desert, desert one has loomed large over special operations ever since. And so to hear that we landed those C-130s and then had to leave them behind, but this time blew them up and no servicemen were killed, which is different than April of 1980.

Speaker 1:
[45:48] We did a whole episode on Operation Eagle Claw. So it is kind of amazing. It's like this circle just continues. It's a long story. So yeah, just yesterday we heard all about that.

Speaker 2:
[45:57] Yeah, that was amazing. But the lessons of Eagle Claw were directly applied to missions going forward, to different units that were set up, different command and control structures, working together as a combined force, a joint force to go do these things, joint force, I should say. And those lessons were directly applied to what happened over the weekend. Just absolutely incredible taking. But that's what we always do. It's, we can go back further, but let's say World War II. I mean, what happened over the weekend is really the culmination of all that experience, all those lessons learned from not just special operations, but from military operations in general, lessons from the OSS, from pilots going down over Europe, from the Naval Combat Demolition Units, from the Scouts and Raiders, from the Rangers, then into Korea. What we took from World War II and applied to going over the beach and specifically to Naval Special Warfare moving a little farther inland. Then Vietnam, and that's really a watershed moment in special operations history. What we did to rescue down pilots in Vietnam or across the border in Laos and Cambodia, North Vietnam, and what Green Berets and SEALs in particular learned during that pivotal time in special operations history. Then we move in and we have Desert One, and we have Grenada, and we have Panama, we have Mogadishu, and we have the First Gulf War, and then we have 9-11, and then we have everything that we learned over those 20 years leading up to withdrawal, and then we have other Amal operations that take place in Syria, other places around the world. We have Venezuela. All of those things, all of those lessons learned culminated in that operation over the weekend to rescue this downed pilot and his weapon system officer, and you know right away that they are taking the lessons from that operation, as successful as it was, and applying those to the next one. I'm taking those lessons learned, incorporating them into training, seeing what other technologies were available, how we can morph certain things, what went right, what went wrong, and how we can do it better next time.

Speaker 1:
[47:53] It's particularly poignant because Operation Eagle Claw cast such a long shadow. It was considered such a disaster. In fact, from what I understand, lessons, as it were, that were learned in Vietnam were applied to that operation, but ultimately in vain because the terrain was so different, the conditions were so different. It was an egg on your face moment for the US military. So to think all those decades later, in a way, it's like we've redeemed ourselves doing something similar. But something else, Jack, I saw a lot on X, and even I and my cold, dead heart sometimes allowed myself to think like, gosh, the amount of money the US government just spent to save those two guys. It's crazy. You might think a lot of people were saying, this is crazy. They're sacrificible surely. We shouldn't be doing this. So help me understand, because you were there. You're in the fraternity of elite warriors. What actually is a government like the United States thinking when it spends all those resources to rescue two guys?

Speaker 2:
[48:55] Well, certainly not thinking about any of the financial aspects of it, that's for sure. I mean, one day of fraud in Minnesota or California should pay for most of that, whatever was left behind. But I know they're just thinking about recovering this, recovering our personnel, rescuing, I should say, our personnel.

Speaker 1:
[49:13] It's like honor. It's the soldier's honor, a warrior's honor.

Speaker 2:
[49:16] And it sends a message to the rest of the force. It sends a message to our allies. It sends a message to our enemies. It was a bold decision and a right decision. And every single serviceman and woman know that if anything happens to them downrange, that this particular group of leaders in the military, these elected representatives that we have in other parts of our government, that they will come and get me. And that's a huge part of this. That means that they're not wasting bandwidth as they're doing whatever they're doing, whatever the mission may be. They're not thinking, oh my gosh, if this goes bad, I'm gonna get left behind, I'm gonna get beheaded or whatever it might be. They're like, I know they're gonna come get me and I can focus all my bandwidth on whatever my job is at this particular point in time. So it's-

Speaker 1:
[50:04] I see.

Speaker 2:
[50:04] It's immeasurable. The value of what happened across the force is really immeasurable.

Speaker 1:
[50:09] So when you think about Targeted Beirut, your non-fiction book about the US Marines' barracks bombing, what would you say, like, you know, that bombing is kind of historic now. It was the origin point really for like modern asymmetric terrorism. But, you know, I don't think people at the time really understood what was going on. It was sort of shocking. So tell us about that.

Speaker 2:
[50:34] That's it. Anytime you look at something, you know, from the historical perspective, you have to put yourself in the shoes of those at the time and realize that they only had their life experience up to that point in order to make the decision. That's the only factors that they have. They don't have, in this case, 40 plus years of hindsight to apply to a book that's analyzing their every move and every decision. But for me, I knew that I was going to go into the nonfiction space at some point. Unfortunately, there's a long list of different terrorist events that I could have studied and could have focused on for this first book. But I kept coming back to Beirut 1983 because it was such a seminal event in the history of our relationship with the Middle East. It has loomed large over US foreign policy ever since. But I kept coming back to that one in particular. I was young at the time. I remember the Newsweek and the Time Magazine covers that came across our kitchen table. I remember the Walter Cronkite, of course, from 1979. I remember him talking up the days that our servicemen had been imprisoned in Iran, had been hostages in Iran. Then a few years later, I see this bombing and see the Newsweek and the Time. I have those magazines in the other room right now. They're part of the research for Targeted Beirut over here. But I kept coming back to that one as the first one in a series of books about terrorism. And I wanted it also to be history. I didn't want it to be pop history, if you know what I mean. I didn't want it to be me reading a bunch of books on the Middle East, on this event, and kind of giving my take on it, and then just getting it out there. I wanted this to be an actual work of history done the right way. So I teamed up with an amazing guy, James Scott, a historian Pulitzer Prize finalist, who I've learned so much from about research, about the proper way to research, going into archives, properly and legally annotating primary sources and all the rest of it in the notes section of the book. So he's just an incredible guy. I got so lucky that he wanted to work with me on these. But kept coming back to April, well, first April, 83, then October, 83. So April, 83, we have the embassy bombing, and we do 17 Americans in that one. We have a very bloody summer, and I wasn't aware of just how bloody that summer was, because from the administration perspective, they keep talking about the Marines in place as peacekeepers. They say peacekeepers, peacekeepers, peacekeepers, over and over again. But what they really did was drop a bunch of Marines who are trained up to destroy the enemy, and they dropped them into the middle of what we can turn, we can, I guess we'd look at it as a civil war, drop them in the middle of it, and then without any training to go along with that, and say, kind of, hey, keep the peace here. And with all those factions, they have Israel coming in here, of course, they're in Lebanon, you have the Iranian side of it, you have Syria, you have all these different factions, by neighborhood, the change by neighborhood, it's just, to drop these guys into the place there, I think, looking back, we can say it was probably a mistake, and I talked to Michael Reagan before he passed away, and he said it haunted his father till the day he died, this incident that happened in October of 83.

Speaker 1:
[53:33] I bet, I found it very kind of resonant, because as that tension between this sort of official idea of what's going on, peacekeeping, but what's actually happening, which is like a brutal war, and American personnel can't but be involved in it, and ultimately are victims of it, and I felt that it really resonated with the disconnect that seems to be the case now, like with the war in Iran, that people, a lot of people, a lot of Americans, a lot of non-Americans, they sort of, they have a kind of rose-colored view of the world order, and so when things are pushed in the direction of military action, when you basically are like, okay, we gotta do something, and it's not always pleasant, but people think like that's kind of crazy, like they had no idea that that was even on the agenda, because I thought it was all about peace, love, joy, free trade, blah, blah, blah. They don't actually understand the degree of martial violence that is always present to keep the show on the road. So I felt that that tension was being dramatized in your book.

Speaker 2:
[54:40] Yeah, I wanted to personalize it. When I started down this path in the nonfiction space, I wanted to personalize these events, because when you hear something like 241 US servicemen killed in Beirut in 1983 in October, that's a big number. But then you say, okay, you kind of chalk it up. You hear a number like over 58,000 killed in Vietnam. Like that's a big number. But you personalize it and you tell the story of the event through the eyes of those who were there, some who made it and some who didn't. Then you get to, oh, this has multi-generational effects, not just in the Middle East, but personally across families. You lose a brother, you lose a son, you lose a husband, you lose a father. That is multi-generational effects that don't just affect the next one, but it affects the next and the next and the next. And those ripples, they go out across time. And so I really wanted to personalize it. Very emotional to write, to meet with the guys who survived and who were digging through the rubble with their bare hands, with K-bar knives, with a crowbar, a shovel if they could find it, trying to dig as many survivors out as they could, to talk to the survivors who were trapped under the rubble for hours and hours, some who dug themselves out, some who were eventually pulled out by their comrades, digging them out. It's just so emotional. It was emotional for those guys. And a lot of them, it's still October 1983 for those guys, to talk to the leadership, to talk to the family members who lost loved ones. It is just heartbreaking. And the Marine Corps wanted to move on fairly quickly in the aftermath of this event. They lost more men in a single day than they lost since Iwo Jima in World War II. And so a lot of the guys who were there felt like, and rightly so, that the Marine Corps wanted to move on from this. It wasn't a bright shining moment in the history of the Corps. Now with 40 years of hindsight, now we can look at those lessons. And one of the big lessons of Beirut 1983 aren't lessons for us. There weren't really lessons as far as force protection and should you or shouldn't you put people into a certain situation. There's not one model that ever fits another situation exactly. But it's what the enemy learned from us. And by enemy, I mean it could be a super empowered individual, it could be a terrorist organization, it could be a nation state. But it taught specifically Iran in this case that terrorism works. Or specifically, it works through proxies. And there's an acceptable level of violence. It seems that changes based on administrations and what else is going on in the world, the geopolitical situation at whatever given time. But seems like for both us and Israel, there's an acceptable level of violence. And if one side doesn't exceed that level of violence, then the repercussions for an attack for an event are minimal. And in the case of Beirut 1983, there was a lot of tough talk from the administration. And then we left in early 1984 as quietly as one can. And that taught the enemy that terrorism works. And then we can fast forward to other events. We can fast forward to the attacks on our embassies in Nairobi, Tanzania. And once again, not much of a response. We can go to USS Cole. Not much of a response. 9-11, unacceptable level of violence. And now there's repercussions. And the same thing has happened with Israel as well. So, it's a very strange thing to think about, there being an acceptable level of violence. But that's what the enemy can take away from Beirut 1983.

Speaker 1:
[57:54] It's really interesting. It's linked to that operation Eagle Claw too, because that was a real awkward period for America's foreign policy, America's military. They didn't really know. Coming out of Vietnam, plus the sort of 60s generation was coming into power. They were a little bit more skeptical maybe about the virtue of American leadership. It all became very complicated, and yet now we see it's still going on. I mean, that's the thing. This war that's going on now is really old. This is the latest phase in a really long story. Now, listen, Jack, we got to bring this to a close. I just do want to talk about your new novel, The Fourth Option. So until now, most of your novels, your hero James Reese has featured, but you're introducing a new hero, now Chris Walker. How is he different from James Reese? Where are you going with this new character?

Speaker 2:
[58:45] That's right, yeah. First seven books are all James Reese, he's a Navy SEAL, background very similar to mine, prior enlisted sniper, becomes an officer, and that sort of thing. But then for the eighth one, I went back to 1968. It's called Cry Havoc, and I went to the dad in 1968, Vietnam, Mac V. Sog really took an espionage story and dropped it into the heart of Saigon, because I hadn't seen someone do that since, let's say, Graham Greene's The Quiet American, or Charles McCarrie's The Tears of Autumn, or Jean Le Carré, The Honorable Schoolboy. And those are very old books. And so I wanted to take that but add this authenticity, this foundation that I have in all my novels, meaning when I think about a character taking a sniper shot, I go back and remember what that was like to press that trigger. When I talk about a character being in a completely fictional ambush, could be in Los Angeles, California, I go back and remember what it was like to be in an ambush in Baghdad in 2006, and I take those feelings and emotions and apply them to the narrative. So even if a reader doesn't know that I was in an ambush, it feels real for some reason because they come from a real place and my heart and soul goes into every word. But after that, I thought, you know what, I need to, I want to branch out. I have all these other ideas and I'm going to branch out outside the Terminalist universe and start this new series, Stranger Comes to Town Western. I mentioned watching Westerns with my dad actually at the beginning of this. And this is really my modern interpretation of Have a Gun, We'll Travel, which was in 1950s, 1960s, Western, of course, there are elements of Magnificent Seven in there, Shane, High Plains Drifter, Pale Rider, and a little bit of the Equalizer from the 1980s for the Gen Xers. And this is the Stranger Comes to Town, but instead of being on a horse, he's in a 1980s Volkswagen Westy Pop-Top Camper and comes to town. And it's really a story about exploring justice through the eyes of him, Chris Walker, former Navy Seal and CIA operative, and then the guy who's tracking him, this FBI agent, Jared Stanton, who is the family man who has been to college, to law school, who's been an FBI agent, has never had to shoot someone in the line of duty because he's a data guy, he's building cases, and it's his vision of justice and Chris Walker's vision of justice as they get closer and closer and closer to this ultimate confrontation. And it's really about what is the meaning of justice and sometimes really does justice mean breaking the law?

Speaker 1:
[61:00] Well, what is the meaning of justice? I think we're all asking that a lot these days. So everyone should go out and buy your new book.

Speaker 2:
[61:06] Coming out May 12th, and it's called The Fourth Option. And a lot of people always ask, is it available in audiobook? And yes, it is. Ray Porter, amazing narrator, is reading it, and he's an incredible guy. So ebook, audiobook, hardcover, May 12th.

Speaker 1:
[61:20] Okay, so that's The Fourth Option. And also, dear listeners, it's really worthwhile reading the earlier book, Targeted Beirut, especially in the context of this Iran war. It does fill in a lot of the details in it. It does make you see or helps you to see that this is a long story. This is just the latest chapter in a much larger story. Jack Carr, thank you so much for coming on Conflicted. It's been a real privilege and a pleasure. That was novelist and historian Jack Carr. You will love his book Targeted Beirut, the 1983 Marine Barracks bombing, and the untold origin story of the war on terror. And his latest novel, The Fourth Option, is available for pre-order now. And remember, for deeper dives into the ideas we explore on this show, including extended conversations and Q&As with my co-host Aimen Dean, check the show notes for details on how to join the Conflicted Community. I'm Thomas Small. Conflicted is a Message Heard production. Our executive producers are Jake Warren and Max Warren. This episode was produced by Thomas Small and edited by Alan Leer.

Speaker 4:
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