Ep. 436: Getting Revenge with Jack Carr

is and has been for a long time. That's Jack Carr's book that's based off your book now that Jack card I was surprised when we had dinner last night. Not surprised, but pleased to hear when we had dinner last night that you get to be involved in all that. Yeah, Like from a writing from a writing standpoint, yeah, becau.

I grew up reading all these thrillers growing up, and then watching the movies that were adapted from those books and noting the differences and what worked and what didn't, but more so realizing that there was gonna be changes because you are telling a story now through a different medium. You are telling that story visually, so it's going to change. And you have a writer's.

series television. He's like the director of a feature film, so he's managing multiple directors and he's like the single point of contact for all these different things that go into making a TV show. We had our first conversation in December of twenty nineteen. His name is David Digilio, amazing guy, and I think I put him at ease by talking about First Blood and how First Blood and that came out in nineteen seventy two, it's never been out of print since, written by David Morrell, and the

movie with Syvester Stallone in the early eighties. Those are two very different animals, but they're both awesome, but very different. So I knew that there was going to be changes, and more so it was important to Chris and to Antwine and to me was keeping the theme of the book, keep in that spirit alive, even if there were going to be changes. So that's what we did.

just keep keep going. That's great, Fingers crossed. You never know. So it's actually on the screen, though, So you can't really get too excited till you actually see it on the screen because there's so many things that can derail

throughout the whole process. Sure, So it's uh yeah, And so I never really talked even talked about it too much until it actually came out, or until until they started putting commercials on TV and they put a commercial in front of Top Gun Maverick in the theaters for it, and uh so when they started doing that, I'm like, Okay, I'm pretty certain this is going to come out on July first now, But even so, I still, you know, still a little nervous until it actually hits screens.

it and that's just gonna gonna happen. Which is what's great about the spin off is that there's no book to compare it to Yeat, so so it's just creating. There's characters that that I've created, but it's a backstory, so there's no book about the backstory. So there's nothing for someone to sit there and just compare it to just looking for something to nitpick or someone looking for a reason to hate it, you know, And that's just kind of the world we live in today.

those novelizations and I'm collecting them. Actually, that's why I'm so up on the novelization. So I'm collecting the old ones from the eighties that I've that I had back then that I've kind of misplaced over the years. So I'm collecting all those novelizations and some that I didn't know existed.

in there, lethal weapon in there, and First Blood there. Yeah, you have. You have to be on your toes though, you know, it's not just it's not it's not doesn't say the thing and then say from the movie First Blood or anything like that. It's just it's just woven in and to the fabric for for people that pretty much the Preey grew up in the eighties. Excellent, Yeah, I love it.

is now, so they I think. So when I sold me Eater Ventures from the Life of an American Hunter to Random House, they turned around and sold the audio rights to Brilliance and had some I mean, man, you know, I don't know, if he's listening, probably is a feller. They get someone to read it and it's just not how it's it just it's wrong, it's immoral. But they got someone to read it, but they only had the audio rights for ten years, so we just got back the audio rights, so I was able to go. This

happened with my Buffalo book too. A decade went by and I was able to get back my publisher got back the audio rights, and then I a couple of weeks ago, went back into the studio and read ten years later, Wow, my own damn book.

there was there was stuff. There was like scientific understandings about about from like genetics work, stuff about the first Americans, stuff about when waves of animal migrations came and how things died out and didn't just had just changed and became like objectively different. And I fixed some of the objectively different things. But yeah, and reading it, there's everything.

So I'm like, I don't know if I'd put it that way now, but we're going to tack on to the end of this episode, We're gonna tack on a chapter of it's just gonna be like glued right on to the end of the show. We're gonna tack on a chapter of a book I wrote a long time ago and just recorded the audio now. And if you want to go find that audio book, I don't know, can you put a link in there? Or yeah, if you want to go find the whole audiobook and pick it up, go find the whole audiobook and you listen

to the whole damn thing. If you don't like to read. Also, at the end of the show, just transitions, keep coming man. Also at the end of the show, we put so there's a song a lot of love and hate? Is it mostly hatred?

what he's talking about. So I said, if you got any if you have a lot of comments that begin with shit send them to us, a number of them. I'm a bit disappointed at a crock biologist didn't have a good answer for how to easily tell the difference between the crock and an alligator. It's really quite easy. One will see you later, the other after a while.

CT scans in twenty ten. And here they're looking at a thousands of year old crocodile mummy with a CT scan and he's got a fishing hook in his gut.

that it's pretty far away. But we have like a you know, we got a good turkey choke iron sights spend a lot of time patterning the gun. Uh, and I already know it's like a stretch.

into this. If you listen, you remember we were talking about how how it was put to sort of like a public vote of sorts to determine whether you'd be able to start spearing nor the in Wisconsin. I was surprised that you can't spare northerns in Wisconsin, but you cannot spear northerns in Wisconsin, the thinking being I guess that people will accidentally spear muskies. Pat Diurkin points out, how can you be trusted to hit ducks flying through the air and know what they are in the rain

and sleep. You're trusted to identify flying ducks, but you can't be trusted to look down a hole in the ice and identify a Northern and a muskie, which is a great point. I think that you could trust people to do this, and I was surprised by how Wisconsin sets these things. And there's a thing called I don't want to criticize it before I even explain it, but there's a thing called Aldo Leopold's Worst Idea. Some people know it as but there's a thing called the Wisconsin

Conservation Congress. It consists of five elected men members from each county, so there are seventy two members in all of Doug duran is one of these from Richland County. He is one of Richland Counties, our very own Doug Durren is one of Richland County's citizen representatives. Everyone listening could learn a lesson from Doug. Many lessons from Doug Durren. What you shouldn't pick up from Doug is the idea that it makes sense to drive around listening to Grateful

Dead concerts on satellite radio. That is a bad idea of Dougs. Most everything else that Doug says is good. Doug, instead of sitting around bitching and moaning about the fishing game laws in the DNR, Doug gets in there and gets in there always. If there's like a public comment period, he makes a public comment. He's on a citizens advisory panel. He's on the deer Citizens Advisory Panel. If he's mad, he be mad. He's got a right to be mad because he got in there and got involved.

be seventy two? Someone's lying or someone died. The WCC holds a joint hearing each April with the Department of Natural Resources to propose changes improvements to hunting, fishing, and trapping rules, and other conservation matters, air, water and other environmental issues. This year's ballot, so the Congress puts together questions. The questions then go to a public vote so they can sort of ascertain how the public feels about certain

fishing game issues. This year's ballot had seventy six questions, thirty eight fish and wildlife rule changes, and thirty eight WCC advisory questions. To become a state rule, a citizen's proposal must go through a five step process, so on, on and on. I'm going to get to the main part of this. So it's interesting because you can take these little you can take these ideas and put them like very nuanced fishing game ideas and put them to a public opinion and It's interesting because you can start

getting idea of what the public thinks about stuff. Since we talked about we talked about the spearfishing thing in Wisconsin. Should you be able to spear northern through the ice? Here's the here's the results. Yes. Three and forty three wisconsinights said you should. No. Three thousand, three hundred and fifty five said no, So it got beat by a narrow margin and no opinion. Three thousand, five hundred and

two had no opinion. So they had ten thousand wisconsinights weighed in on their opinion about this, and so I think this has a low likelihood of advancing. Now here's an interesting way to measure public sentiment. There's a two day youth dear season. They put that to a vote. Should we expand it to four days?

it got shot down. Now this is the last one we're gonna touch on, because here's how nuanced it is. How about youth turkey season? Should we move that from two days to four? Yes? Four? Eight hundred and seventy two, now eight hundred and fifty five. So there's some bit where you're like, ah, turkeys, sure, dear, uh.

elegance to it. But I but I think it should be taken as a It's part of a process, it's part of a step. It's not the end all be all It's not like they just vote in everything. But when you go to set the law, uh, it gives you who as a law makes through the process, it's like an interesting to get a sense of public opinion.

populations as well. So, and everybody's a voter.

my narrator, reading that, we decided I do it. So I ran the cord into the closet and the house and I put a bunch of clothes on hangers everywhere until it sounded okay. So had the direction you know what I'm talking about? Yeah, it looked very similar to this.

show came to be and everything. And that was difficult enough for whatever reason. But now now so now when I'm writing, I think about, oh, I should probably put the accent, the Russian accent up front instead of mentioning it like halfway down the page. So he has to now go back and like part Russian accent in with a hint of this or that, so you know, it's uh, yeah, the German from with the Berlin accent or whatever that sort of thing. So he has to go figure with

what that is. Better to let him know upfront, But anyway, it was difficult. So anyway, I was just curious if you had written read all your books out loud like that.

it's not practiced yet. I think other different narrators do different things, but that's the way. The way he does it probably saves a little bit of time as well, rather than reading a whole thing and then going back. But but yeah, I try to give him the acronyms, you know, so it's not you see n O d's capitalized, you say n O ds, but it's really nods, you know, things like that instead a J S O C would be jaysack like that. That's sort of a sort of

a thing. So yeah, there's always those those types of things come up as well. But it's tough. I mean, that's that's serious business. Being a narrator reading all these books. That's a lot of hours in a room by yourself just for reading. I don't know. But more, I mean, he does a great job, so it's good, more than happy that to have him doing it rather than me.

him with his plane. He threw the course air which is a cooling that had the gold wings that you'd fold up like that put on aircraft carriers, and there was a show in the late seventies and I caught it in syndication with my dad in the early eighties called Black Sheep Squadron based off Happy Point and had Robert Conrad playing Pappy Point. And I think I had a lot of my leadership traits from that show. He was just a drinker and a fighter and it was awesome.

I loved it. I thought, that's you. But yeah, it was perfect. Yeah, exactly. That's how you settle things. You settle it with your fists outside and you go out and then shoot down a bunch of Japanese zeros and have a few beers. And I was like, that's awesome, That's what I'm gonna do. But I knew it was just kind of in my blood to join the military, follow his footsteps into the military. I had those those photos.

I had his his marine aviator wings. I had the silk maps they used to give aviators back then, because if you hit the water with a paper map, it would disintegrate in the water. But milk maps, Yeah, it's beautiful. I mean they're beautiful maps. Have them a frame now.

But so I had all those those things, his medals, and that's the only touch point that and this show Black Sheep Squadron with only touch points because you couldn't get online back then, and go to the Facebook group from that squadron and try to meet your dad all these years later, like he had no touch points with anybody from his dad's squadron, nothing like that.

we have. So maybe before we make a snap judgment on something based off somebody's tweet, Maybe take a breath, research it a little more and then make that decision. So it's I think it's important to take take kids there. So that's what we did with our youngest who's twelve, brought him up there this past week and showed him his grandfather's name up there on that is that wall.

the history of World War two in the Pacific. And then you can turn around and look out and just see all those walls with all those names of the bodies that were never recovered, and then you see all the grass where they have all the people that were buried for the bodies that were recovered. So it's pretty powerful place.

up there, you can definitely tell. But yeah, something that's something I alway wanted to do in the military that I ever got to do because we got so busy after after nine to eleven was be part of that m recovery group that would go out you got to Vietnam. You'd really go out to a bunch of different places and look for the remains of these in Vietnam, a lot of pilots but people that were not recovered. So it's a it's a large operation. You should be headquartered

in Hawaii. I'm not sure where it's headquartered now.

was big on Sundays in our household. But I was really interested in football because even back then, at age five, six seven, I wanted anyone I want to join the military. So there was those few channels back then there's CBS, NBC, ABC, and then there's the outlier, and that outlier channel always

had a war movie on on Sundays. So we'd been watching football, and when the commercial came on, my dad look at his watch and say go And I was the remote control back in those days, so I'd run up and I'd switch it to that outlier channel, that fourth channel, and there was always a war movie on,

so I'd watched that. He'd be looking at his watch for your two or two and a half minutes and then say turn it back and turn Then we continue watching football and I just kind of wait till the next commercial, wonder what's happened in exactly, So I had a lot of one of the guys, isn't there just gone gone?

And she took every opportunity to we had when we had questions, to take us down to that library and show out of research and all that sort of things. So this is early eighties, and you could essentially get through everything written about seals in about an hour, maybe hour and a half if you're a slow reader. There

just wasn't that much. And then there's more written about army special forces back then, typically about Vietnam, but you'd still you can get through that in a couple hours too, So you could potentially find the end of the Internet in the library back then as a kid. But then I started reading those same types of books that my

parents were reading. So it's let's say fifth grade's one Hunt for a October comes out, and by sixth grade, for sure, when I'm eleven, that's when I start for sure reading all the same kind of thrillers that I

still read today. So I'm reading books by David Morrell, Nelson to mill A, J. Quinnell, J. C. Pollock, Markold and Louis Lamore, Stephen Hunter and back then, all these guys and if you remember movies and television in the eighties that protagonists usually had a background in Vietnam, and it was either a Navy seal or Army Special Forces or Marine sniper or CIA PEL paramilitary. And now he's in the eighties and he's like a private investigator or he's a.

connections in there somehow. So as a kid to age ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, I'm just having such a good time in the pages of these novels. I know that after my time in the military, that's what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna write these.

you're gonna you have to do this first. But I was reading all those guys and then I found Joseph Campbell through here with a thousand faces and a series of interviews he did with Bill Moyer's on PBS in nineteen eighty eight called The Power of Myth, and then they had some books that came out based on that called the Power of Myth as well, and I saw

that with my mom. She introduced me to that and he talked about how his hero's journey was in inspiration for George Lucas and Star Wars, and of course, as a kid of the eighties, you know, that really stood

out to me. So I started applying that hero's journey in Joseph Campbell's Thoughts and Vision and Philosophy to books I would read, to movies i'd the TV shows i'd see, and even though I didn't think of it specifically in these terms, I just thought, oh, that movie didn't work because of that, that that hero missed a part of that journey. It didn't really take you what is going in for for James Reese, what is going into the cave?

So there's distinct language that I'll use in the book, even if it's just a cabin or it's something and I'll put cavern like something, so I'll describe something. I'll throw that in there, cave of like cavern like something like that dark. So I'll describe a cave even I don't use those words because I'm thinking about that journey and he's getting some sort of information in there.

We have someone that helps train, that's older and wiser, that passes along some training or some information along the way as well. So there's that there's that person in in books and movies and television, and it's just it's a very natural way to tell a story because our first stories around the campfire, and they're about the hunt, and they're about warfare, because you're passing down lessons from both the hunt and combat to that next generation through a story that you can remember.

make sense to you anymore. You find like dinosaur bones whatever, and you're like, I don't know, must have been right.

some of those same things. It was about survival, and not only was it about survival, it was about prevailing because we're just gonna survive. That's a that's a rough way to go, but you need to prevail. That's the goal.

it's woven in. There's hunting in all the stories, but in particular the second one true Believer, So it'll be interesting to see how we deal with that in the visual adaptation of it. And then the third one really has his savage Sun and that's really about the dark side of man through the dynamic of hunter and hunted.

So the inspiration for that was back in sixth grade when I read The Most Dangerous Game by Richard Connell, and even back in sixth grade, I said, one day, I'll write the novel that pays tribute to the short story, and it was the one that I wanted to start with.

When I started writing, I wrote now, six, seven, eight, nine different ideas, different one page executive summaris, and laid them all out on the table, and Savage Son was the one I wanted to start with because that's the theme that I wanted to explore, and that's the one I've been thinking about writing since the sixth grade. But I knew that the characters weren't developed enough to tell

that story yet. So I had to introduce everyone to these characters in the first book, in the Terminal List, and then even at the end of that one, I was like, no, not quite ready yet. I still need to take him now on this journey of redemption, because it would be disingenuous to the reader or to the listener to take him after these traumatic events in the first novel and then just drop him into this second

in this second one as Savage Son. He couldn't do it, and I'm surprised that Simon and Schuster actionly, my editor there didn't ask me to change anything about that second one, because it I take him on a pretty long journey where he learns to live agangs. He thinks he's dying, and he finds this next mission, this purpose in Africa, in Mozambique, taking his skills from the battlefield and turning those into something positive against the poachers out in Africa.

So he finds this new mission, and of course that's when the CIA finds him and plucks him back out for a new mission. But that's a long part of the story, and that's probably people that really of my novels, Savage Son is probably people's favorite, and In the Blood, which was the last one. Those are the two favorites.

But people that like True Believer love True Believer love that second one because of the hunting and because it's a slower story, a slower build up, because this guy's damaged and he needs to find that a reason to live again, and he finds that in Africa and Mozambique. And most people don't explore Mozambique and and hunting in modern thrillers as well. Most people don't put boots on the ground over there doing their research, which I did,

and I didn't even have my deal yet. So I finished my first novel, hadn't sent it Simon and Schuster yet, got out of the military, and knew that I was always going to write too, because of the John Grisham story. He wrote A Time to Kill first, and he couldn't give that book away, and then he writes The Firm and that thing takes off, and John Grisham novel every

year since. But if he thought this one didn't really work, I'm just going to go back to practice of law, like he'd probably just be retiring now for would probably be a partner to law firm and just be just be getting out still be thinking about that book that didn't work, called The Time to Kill, which I think is his best work actually, because they republished it after The Firm came out and hit it so big they went back and republished it, and then Matthew McConaughey started

in that movie. But it's fantastic if you haven't read A Time to Kill for those listening and watching, it's amazing, amazing book. But so I was always gonna write too, So before i'd even sent it to to Simon and Schuster, before I had an agent or anything, I was on a plane in Africa to Mo'sambique, but boots on the ground over there had lists of questions to ask the professional hunters and the trackers and skinners and everybody else,

how do you say things? And the different languages over there? What are the different languages that they're speaking over there? Of course looking at the rocks and the dirt, how am I going to describe that? And what's the situation like over there with hunting and poaching in China and minerals and exploitation and all the rest of it. So yeah, I was doing that research while I was over there, before I had any sort of a deal.

that sort of thing. So it's yeah, it's not It doesn't really work out that way. But I understand what people mean when they say it. But no, I was

twenty was good, it was a good run. If I stayed in, it was I'd done everything that I wanted to do at that point, and if I stayed in, it would be staff job and then come back as a commanding officer at some point, which sounds really impressive if you say your commanding officer or something, But in today's day and age, as a commanding officer, you're really back in attach cole operation center when the guys are out there kicking in the doors doing the job that

you really came in to do. And it's good you need good people to do that. But that just wasn't my thing. I was there for to be a tactical level leader on the battlefield, and that time was essentially done. So it was time to flip that switch and take care of my family. And we have three kids and one of them had some severe special needs, so that was like they needed me, So it was time to

move on. It was very clear to me that it was time to get out, and it was also very clear to me what I needed to do now.

nonfiction on terrorist events. So this first one is about the nineteen eighty three Bay Rout Barracks bombing, and so it just hasn't really been the seminal work on that get and there's been something what.

I remember wondering why we hadn't gone to rescue them yet, So that some of my earliest memories are those black and white photos of the people from the embassy with their their eyes, you know, taped, tapped over and blindfolded and all that. But yeah, it made sense when I'm looking at all those events that were so impactful during

the eighties. In eighteen eighty three Bairit Barricks bombing, and today actually is the anniversary of the embassy bombing in April of eighty three, and that's how we're looking into that first, and then everything that leads up to the October bombing of the marine barracks in Beirut. But I'm thinking about t w A eight four seven, I think

you have, Achille Laurel. I'm thinking of panem one O three, thinking of all these different attacks in Europe at whether it's a cafe or a nightclub or whatever it might be. In airports, multiple airports, which one to start with. And the nineteen eighty three Barys bombing was so significant because it showed Hesbela in particular, that terrorism worked, and everyone else that was watching that isn't Hesbla that a terrorism worked. What did they want? They wanted us to leave Beirut?

on in the White House. Who was advocating for Marines to go ashore, who's advocating that they should stay on an AMPTHIB ship offshore, and how that decision got made, And so we get to explore all that in detail. Interview survivors, interview people that came to identify the bodies, which is the same group that identified the bodies at Jonestown and so it's a there's lots of lots of unpack there, so that'll be the that'll be the first one. So that was a very long way to answer that

nonfiction question. So, yeah, nonfiction's coming and uh in fall of twenty twenty.

Let's say Iraq, and you're there in two thousand and four, and then you come back in two thousand and five, a year later, and you're like, Wow, things have gotten a lot worse here. Yeah, nothing is better than when I left. Then you come back and they're still there in two thousand and six and looking around like miscontinues to get worse. We continue to do the same things.

And if you're a student of history and you're student of Vietnam and you're wondering what lessons we took from that that we're applying to this, or if you're in Afghanistan, like in the early days, which I thought were the late days in two thousand and three, I thought, oh, I'm going to miss this thing, and that didn't end up being the case. But what lessons do we take

from the Soviets? Did we take the right ones we have nineteen seventy nine to eighty nine, and we can look at all these everything that happened there, and we can draw lessons and we can apply them, hopefully as wisdom. And we neglected to do that, or we took the wrong lessons. I think we took the wrong lessons. We didn't even have to go back to the three British incursions. We now have to go back to Alexander the Great or Genghis Khan, like there was more recent history.

the wall. But yeah, we had these lessons, We had history we could have looked at, and we neglected to do that and ended up being there for for twenty years and then leaving in the way that we did, and then we have just was it just last week we have officials appointed officials talking about it was a huge success the way we left Afghanistan. And then you can chextapose that with the photos of people hanging off jets and babies getting thrown over the walls and secured

and barbed wire and okay, that's your death. That doesn't quite look like So you have twenty years to prepare for this, guys, twenty years and this is your only job, and this is what you get. This is the best you can do. But there's no I told them accountable in the pages of my novels, because don't differ accountable really.

maybe two not a third out of the way. Put someone in there that can get this job done. And all those names that we know, from Nimitz to MacArthur to Patent, all those guys got there because someone in front of them failed and they were held accountable, they were removed, and we put somebody else in place to see if they could do it. Back to the Civil War, Lincoln replaced after general after general after general until he got to Grant. Then somehow those things start to change.

Maybe it's in Korea, but for sure by Vietnam. Now we have failure on the battlefield and what happens, well, they are not held accountable, they get out, they sit on boards of these different companies, and that has been pervasive all the way through today. There's a great book called the Afghanistan Papers by Craig Whitlock of the Washington Post, who got these interviews through two Freedom of Information Act

lawsuits with the I think Department of Defense. But it was these officers coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan being interviewed in a way that they thought was going to remain classified. And then he juxtaposes what they said in those interviews with what they said in front of Congress, so essentially to the American people, to their troops, to

our elected representatives, and it's one to eighty out. And there's one guy, I think it's a two thousand and nine one general or admiral that says something it's not even that bad. And he's like, hey, things aren't really going as well over there as we think. If you've been led to believe, that's about as bad as it got. And he was quietly removed a few months later. Yeah, So it's that non accountability that is really I think killing us as a nation.

came and told us what would happen. Yeah, and this was this was an uncondoned perspective, but it was it was. It was an Afghan it was in the US and they were I can't remember. They were professors somewhere, and he said, looking back, they came and basically said, here's what will happen ten years from now. And when when when we pulled out and cobble fell, I texted to say, like, man, it's got to be emotional for you or in some way, and he just said, I've for a long time, I

just haven't been able to see any other outcome. There's nothing we've done on like assessments that would suggest otherwise to act like this is a surprise as bullshit. Yeah, it was his take, his take on and now someone has spent a lot of years there.

those years to prepare. You could see from the spring end of the summer, province by province falling and it's yeah, it's really remarkable being aptitude amongst our senior level leaders that allowed them to put these eighteen nineteen twenty twenty two year old kids at this gate at Kabo Airport in a tactically dis advantageous position when we held the tactically advantageous position for twenty years at Bogram And it's just for those who have been there, they'll know exactly

what I'm talking about, the standoff distances and everything else involved in securing an area or an airport. In this case, I mean, it's it's criminal, and yet no one's held accountable, no one was no one was even quiet moved aside. At those senior levels, they just continue to do their job and they'll retire with a full pension and then sit on a board, go to a couple of meetings a year for some of these defense contracting companies, and the machine rolls on. Unfortunately, this is.

And now why are we there? And then well we get distracted by Iraq and all those resources that were focused on Afghanistan shift over to Iraq in two thousand and three, and you could see it on the ground in Afghanistan, you could see all these assets kind of pick up and and all these people that were doing all these jobs before just aren't there anymore. Just to a few people to keep things kind of keep things moving, keep these outstations supplied, keep this air overhead in case

people need it. So, yeah, there are so many lessons that we can take and apply going forward. And that's what we're not so good at it as a country is taking those lessons and applying them going forward as wisdom because we're looking at for your election cycles, eight your election cycles for the real deep thinkers among us, But we're really not honoring all those people that either died or came home damaged from the wars in Iraq

and Afghanistan. And the way we can now honor them is by taking those lessons and applying them going forward to this next generation. So these next these kids don't have to do the same things or don't have to suffer and through another twenty year war because of the

ineptitude of senior level leadership. But really, in the military, as long as you don't pop positive on a piss test, as long as you don't get arrested, too many times or get arrested for like domestic violence or something like that. You're going to pretty much rise to the top if you just remain quiet, and you're going to see people that are kind of those go getters, those hard chargers.

A lot of those people get to a certain level and move on out, either because they just want to do something in the private sect, or they they're kind of disenfranchised by what they what they see at senior level leaders or see their path ahead and they're like, I'm not gonna go work for that guy. I'm out. So really he's It's not the best and the brightest that are in my experien I'm sure there are exceptions

for those that are listening. Yes, there are exceptions, but for the most part, if you just kind of keep your nose clean and stay out of trouble, you can rise up in any in government service in general.

in New York City. They're not. Well maybe now it's a little closer from what I've seen on the news and videos I'm seeing, but we definitely made an enemy of someone. The accidental Gorilla is a good way to put a David cookol And has a great book called The Accidental Gorilla, and we made a lot. It's also called insurgent math. So you go in and kill somebody and guess what his kid sees you do that. And

but what's that kid going to do? Well, he's probably going to join the Taliban or whatever organization that's going to allow him to now also honor his tribe by getting revenge, because that's part of the culture as well, deeply embedded. It's deeply meted in a lot of cultures. Not just not just Afghan not just Taliban, but we made a lot of enemies for sure. In twenty years

we had ample opportunity to do that. So if we'd gone in with taken a little more lessons from the Soviets and realized that if we went in heavy handed, did the job and got out, we would accomplish that goal. But for some reason we stayed and then for some reason we got out the way we did. So not a big nation building guy, no expeditionary counterinsurgency is very difficult.

So if you have a counterinsurgency campaign on your own soil, it's different than doing it overseas, doing it on someone else's turf, which can prove to be There are a couple instances of long term commitments playing out Malayia places like that, but that's a long term commitment with a cohesive strategy, not shifting here and there and not rewarding people for failure, which is what we do. People keep failing up in our system.

operator I possibly could. I was so focused and I think being honest with my wife about that, realizing that, hey, the team is coming first, and that's just how it has to be because you're responsible for those guys' lives downrange, so youhowe it to them, their families, the country, the mission to team. That's just how it's going to be. Eventually,

when we're out, it'll it'll switch back. So when I got to Buds and I wasn't taking guys down range anymore, I could kind of take a breath and look around. I realized that I was going to get out. The pendulum started to just swing back. Because Buds is a machine, and it's push ups, it's sit ups, it's pull ups, it's runs, it's swims, it's it's what it has been for a long time.

And I saw people get out of the military and have a hard time leaving it behind because you have this mission, you're so dedicated to it, You're best friends are a part of it. When you're downranged there to your right and your left and you're not worried about paying bills or leaky faucets or anything like that. You're solely focused on building target packages and going and executing

those missions. Then you come home and you transition out and you think maybe you can recreate that in the private sector or something similar, and for some reason it's a surprise that you can't. And either you try to get back in or you're calling me as the operations officer saying, hey, can I bring my new boss buy

for a tour? And I was always like absolutely, you know for sure, Even when I got told no by senior level leadership, I was always like, yeah, I just come by when at this time, because I know that guy is going to be gone and you know we'll get this, get this done for you. So I was always trying to hook up good guys in the teams or or out.

wondering where the husband's down range in a racker Afghanistan and you're feeling guilty about not being there. So I saw that those couple of years that I was at Buds at the end of my time in the military and decided that Okay, it's ull probably be healthy to make this physical and psychological break and head up to Park City, Utah raise our kids in a ski town. And I think that was a good decision.

up vehicles, or whatever they're doing. They will never hear about unless something goes wrong, and then we'll hear about it in the news. But if it goes well enough that no one dies, we're probably not going to hear about it. So I think about that. I think about that every day, but I don't dwell on it. I appreciate that they're out there doing that job so I can be back here doing what I love, which is which is writing. But I never forget it. I never forget they're out there.

east On in New York. Actually, and all his this stuff went up for sale when he passed away, and I was early twenty twenty, and a fan reached out and said that they wanted me to have it. So, I mean, waste typewriter now, but I don't work. I typed one thing on it. I wrote one Hemingway quote and I put it on there, and and I write everything on my MacBook.

to get out. It was a good run. Started enlisted, did all the things I wanted to do, became an officer, got out as a troop commander at the end of when we got out a rack in twenty eleven, and now got home, looked around, realized that was a good run to time to get out.

something forever. You can take multiple online classes, multiple master classes. You can just essentially research until the end of time on the internet. Eventually, if you want to get something done, you have to execute.

already built and then sat down and wrote. But really I started with the title, and this is how it's been for every book thus far. I like to have the title right out of the gate, so I'm not worried, I'm not wasting bandwidth, worried about coming up with a good title. So even if it's a working title, I like to have that down, even if it's going to change eventually. I like to have that not just book six, but a title, a theme that's going to guide the

writing process. So each book has a distinctive theme that's just a sentence. And I got that from Stephen Pressfield misinterpretation of something that Stephen Pressfield said on Rogan But I'm glad that I misinterpreted it, and I interpreted it as he would take a yellow sticky next to his typewriter and write a one word theme. So I was like, ah, wonderful revenge, and then I changed that to revenge without constraint. I cheated a little bit.

then I ask myself two questions. I say, would is this worth a year of my life or a year and a half of my life? And if it's yes, then I ask another question. I say, if someone were to read this like walking through airport, going into Hudson News, pulling the book off and reading the back or the flap jacket, would they be willing to invest time that they're never going to get back in this story. And if the answer to both of those is yes, then boom,

I'm all in. And then I take that, turn that into an outline, and then take that outline turn it into a narrative. But what I don't do is get stuck on the outline, because if I get to a place in that outline where I'm like, oh, how he is ever going to get out of this? Is anyone ever going to believe this? This is going to be terrible.

I'm never going to figure this out. If I get to that, I just put a bunch of x's and go around it, and I keep writing, knowing that I have a year and a half to figure this out. And on the battlefield, you had seconds to make decisions. Now I have a year a year and a half that first book.

discount those two. But if it was like five, six, seven of those twenty five or thirty people were like, you should think about writing this part again, or I didn't really understand this. Then I've been okay, Roger that, but now I sent it to four people ahead of time. They were part of that original original group, but now it's four and I sent it to them before I send it to my editor, and they give me different things back and there it's all super valuable and they're

they're amazing. I thank them and the acknowledgments of my books, and then I make those make those changes or I discard them, and then send it to my editor and so they're so she's getting the best product that me and a little bit of feedback from like a fan base. And three of those four guys are lawyers, so they're good at finding things in written documents, so they're good at finding finding things need to be explained a little more exactly, yeah, exactly, and usually it's fixed with just

a sentence here or there. So I do that and then send it to New York and Emily Butler, my editor Simon and Schuster. Emily Butler Books was imprint of Atria, so she has her own imprint and she's amazing, and she's the only person I ever wanted to be my editor. And the reason I found her is that I looked in the back of books people in my genre, and I'm like, why is Vince Flynn thanking this person named Emily Butler? Why is Brad Thor thanking this person named

Emily Butler? And I decided, Emily Butsler will be my publisher, so I should probably. Yeah, she didn't know this. She didn't know this yet, she had no idea I existed. And same thing as I started writing. Being a child of the eighties, it only makes sense to pick the star that's going to star in your adaptation of this book that you have a sentence written of. And I thought, you know what, Chris Pratt's the guy and in Guardians of the Galaxy, yet hadn't been in Jurassic World yet.

He had a very small role in Zero Dark thirty as a seal, and he was in Parks and Rec. So I saw this transformation from Andy Dwyer in Parks and Rec to this seal operator. And I also thought, Hey, I need someone who's likable on and off screen because this role is going to require an audience to forgive him, possibly for a lot of the things that I'm about

to write about. And I thought about Magnum back in the back in the eighties, and I thought everybody loved Magnum, all the all the wives love Magnum, all the dads love Magnum. Everybody loved Magnum because he was funny. You wanted to sit down have a beer with him. He'd sit down and to have beers with his buddies at the King Command Maa club. But then he could flip

that switch. And there were episodes. It was the first time that protagonist in in primetime television had killed an unarmed bad guy, and that was in Have You Seen the Sunrise? And yeah, so I love that episode.

who ended up starring and directing. So it's uh so it worked out, which happens all the time. He lives in Utah, doesn't he Nope, no, he doesn't in California. He's California, but from uh moved around, but from Washington State. But but he's somebody you want to sit down, have coffee with, have a beer with, and just an awesome guy. When he optioned it, he came out to Utah, he spent a week together out in the in the back country,

and he's just a solid dude. And being on set with him, you can tell like everybody is happy to be there on that set because he's set in the tone him and Antoine. Antoine's like the commanding officer and Chris is like the troop commander, and they are setting that tone for the entire three hundred and fifty other

people on that set. And so many people came up to me that didn't have to to tell me that they'd been on hundreds of Hollywood sets before, whether it was hair and makeup people or stunt people or whoever it was, and they'd say, I've never felt the way I have on this set. But that's all due to Antoine and all due to Chris setting this tone of positivity, and they're mentoring people along and everybody wants to be

there doing their best work. But I can see how it would be the opposite too, if you had a crazy director. I can see how that could totally set a negative tone, or had a star though I number one on the call sheet, who was just crazy person, and how that could set the tone and how people would be like, Oh, I can't believe I have to go into work today and work with this crazy person. So we had the opposite of that.

BUDS and I said, hell, hey, you're getting out. Oh, come come see me in my office at some point and just let me know what your plans are and let me know if I can can help you in anyway. So we sat down and talked, and I introduced him to some people in the private sector in the industry he wanted to get into, and followed up with him, and then I forgot all about it. And then five years later, about six months before my first book comes out, he calls and I hadn't talked to him in years,

and he says, hey, do you remember me? And I said, yeah, of course, Jared, how are you? And he said, hey, man, I always wanted to call and thank you for what you did for me. The Seal teams, nobody else sat me down in their office. No one talked to me about transitioning out. No one introduced me to people in the private sector, no one followed up with me. I was just kind of brushed aside by senior level leadership. When I told him I was getting out, and I

was like, oh, man, hey, my pleasure. How's it going. You know, how do everything work out? And he said everything's great, But I heard you have a book coming out, and I said, yep, come out a few months. I can send you a gally copy, which is like a I just learned what a gally copy was like a week earlier. It's like a rough draft, and I can send that to you if you'd like. And he said, yeah, I like that, but I'd like to give it to

a friend of mine. And I said, who's that and he said Chris Pratt, Like, oh, that's convenient for me. So I sent it to Jared. He read it in November. He gave it to Chris in December. Chris read it in the at the end of December and then called a week later, want an option it? So yeah, do you have.

don't know if I brought it back. I shouldn't say that, but I thought of it as bringing it back because before the Internet, glossaries in the back of books in the eighties were so much fun for me to go through, and I could go through the extra were I was like, Oh, this is so awesome. So I wanted to bring that back the book.

explosively form penetrator or whatever it might might be. So so sometimes I make assumptions that that people are only to understand, and then I go back and I'll add a little something to describe what that means, because they are a little acronym heavy at times.

other two a beer. Oh that's rough, because they were trying so hard to make it user friendly, make the whole conversation user friendly, and there was a lot of failures. Oh, a lot of failures. Yeah, it was tough.

whole process I just talked about. Until I started turning that outline into the narrative, I still didn't really think about those feelings and emotions weaving their way in to the storyline. But as soon as I started changing that outline into the narrative, it was very apparent right off the bat that this was going to be an extremely personal writing experience, because I'm going to be describing taking the feelings behind things that happened downrange and applying them

to this completely fictional narrative. So if my character gets ambushed in Los Angeles, California, I go back and remember what was like to get ambushed in Baghdad in two thousand and six, and then I take those feelings and emotions and I apply them to my protagonist in Los Angeles, California in present day. Same thing with the sniper stuff. I don't have to go seek out a sniper out there and find a guy who was in Remady at the height of the war and say, hey, what was

it like to set up and pull that trigger? And then if I'm taking notes, I'm comparing his answers with someone else. I might have interviewed another book, I might have read another interview I saw on TV another book I might have read fiction or non movies that I've seen biases, I have whatever filters I have in place, and then putting it onto the page into my story. It all comes right from my heart and soul directly.

You can't really hold accountable in real life because if you do, you'll go to jail for doing the things that my character you'll probably be executed in many states. But you can do it through fiction. You can do it in a thriller, which is very therapeutic to write and hopefully to read for some of us. But it's him uncovering a lot of his past and his father's past. Then all connects in present day in a of course, a conspiracy. I love a good conspiracy, especially in the

pages of my novels. That's what I loved about some of the books I read growing up was the conspiratorial element to them. So I try to weave that in to my novels as well. So he tends to a he's a thinking man, but he also is someone very comfortable with violence because it's just a natural part of his life, and some people need to be dealt with in a very harsh way in this book.

Now when you get talked to start talking to Amazon and start breaking things down where you're gonna film and what these set pieces are gonna cost, Well, now you have to factor that in. You can't just directly take what you have on the page and transferred over onto the screen because there are there costs involved to a lot of that. So you have to work through some of that. But I love the freedom to be able to do anything that I want on that page, and I didn't know how it was gonna be. When I

got into this. I thought, as Simon and Schuster might ask me to kind of take you really need to have all that hunting stuff in there? Or does it need to be so violent or do you really need to mention this about concealed carry in here? It seems unnecessary. Can you? Never have they even hinted that I need to take any of that out. It's been one hundred percent creative control the entire time, which is which I love.

you're going to think about it. If you're doing something like that, you're thinking about rules and regulations as we head into the field, and these different states and things that are you can do in some one state you can't do in another. And I mean, you're gonna follow the follow those rules. You're not gonna not think about it.

And just all of a sudden, if I was a writer talking about hunting and I'm putting them in the springtime in somewhere else, and I have him going deer hunting in a state where you can't do that in that area in the springtime or whatever whatever it is, you're gonna lose that hunting audience. And you're like, if he's doing that, he should at least be thinking about it, he should least be thinking about why he's poaching, and it should make sense for the story. But a lot

of times you don't. You don't get that, so I try to give the give what I'd be thinking in a lot of these situations.

probably gonna survived exactly. Yeah, he's gonna shake it off. He's gonna shake that thing right off. But the first one. That's why the first one is so fun, because if you're reading that and don't know that it can continue, then you and the way that I end that one. I kind of leave it up in the air. It's it's interesting, but now that they're out there, you kind of know that it's going.

to explore there into the eighties. What did he do in the eighties, So I and his grand grandfather's on both sides, So I throw that stuff in there too, sometimes with the history of the firearms that they use that have been passed down. So I put all that stuff in there very intentionally so that I can I can go back and also it gone a little interest ahead of time.

So whether it's a Instagram post or a blog post, that those sentences get as much thought as any sentence in my novel. Because people are trusting me with my time there on the social channels as well on those blogs, on my podcast, whatever it might be, they're never getting that getting that back.

take a little precautions here and there. It only only makes sense today where it's so easy to find somebody.

about a dozen dogs in southeastern Arizona. They were tall, lanky hounds, most of walker bloodlines, owned by my companions, Floyd Green and Joe Mitty, two well known mountain lion of hunters with a combined lion hunting experience spanning about sixty years and five hundred cats. Many of their dogs showed physical evidence of past skirmishes with lions, including slit ears,

lacerated noses, and scarred muzzles. The injuries were usually suffered when they brought a lion to bay, a term for when hounds chased their quarry into a tree or corner against the cliff, or trap it in a cave, and then hold it there until their master shows up to deal with the beast. Earlier, I had mentioned to Floyd that it seemed as though a dog would lose his taste for hunting lions once he got scratched a time or two. It's the opposite of what you'd think, replied Floyd.

It just makes them hungrier. I was camped with Floyd and Joe at an old abandoned ranch house not far from ara vip A Canyon, at the end of a driveway that takes more than an hour to travel along this route. On our way in, we saw where something had been dragged across the road from west to east and then down into a dry arroyo. At the end of the drag marks was a dead buck with pick clean bones that had been buried with leaves and dirt

beneath the scrubby little oak. The hide was in pieces, but still connected to the carcass here and there, like a person who passed out drunk in bed without getting completely free of his clothes. Floyd tipped his cowboy hat and peeled back the deer's skin to show me the blood clots and teeth marks around the animal's neck. He also showed me where the spine had been wrung around in circles three or four times. There wasn't a doubt in his mind that we were looking at a lion kill.

Though it was at least a week old. This was good news. We'd come to hunt this area because a local ranger had lost fifty calves to lions here the previous spring, about nine months earlier, and this was proof that at least one lion was still hanging around. If you had asked me ten years earlier, I would have told you that I'd never want to hunt a mountain lion. What's the challenge? I would have asked in shooting a cat out of a tree. The notion of challenge is

one of the most hotly debated aspects of hunting. Definitions of the word evolve so constantly and are so subjective that it's hard to find two hunters who define it in the same way. As a way of dealing with the confusion, Some of us abide by a more readily definable synonym known as fair chase. It's an ethical term that provides hunters with a guiding principle to abide by.

Jim Posowitz, the founder of Oryan, the Hunter's Institute, writes that fair chase addresses the balance between the hunter and the hunted. It is a balance that allows hunters to occasionally succeed while animals generally avoid being taken. Some hunting strategies are such an affront to the idea of fair chase that hunters share in almost universal disdain for them. For example, most hunters would agree that dynamite shouldn't be used for duck hung because it would take away the challenge.

Most hunters would also agree that night vision goggles shouldn't be used in deer hunting for the same reason. Often, as is the case with these examples, our notions of fair chase are enforced by law. It's illegal to kill ducks with dynamite. It's also illegal to hunt deer with the aid of artificial lights. However, fair chase is not

universally legislated. Certain activities that are definitely not fair chase, such as the pathetic practice of hunting animals inside high wire fences is permissible in many regions as long as it's done on private property and with the proper legal permits. Whether or not a hunter chooses to participate in this limp dict activity comes down to personal choice. Other issues of personal choice are much more nuanced than this example, though they're taken no less seriously by many sportsmen over

the years. I've met hunters who eskew rifles with telescopic scopes because they I prefer the challenge of using rifles with open or iron sights. I've met hunters who don't use rifles because they favor the additional challenge presented by compound bows. And I've met hunters who gave up on compound bows in order to take on the even more

difficult challenge of hunting with a handmade long bow. However, some hunters who use handmade long bows hunt dear by sitting in a tree stand next to a bait pile, a practice that is considered unchallenging by many guys who prefer hunting on foot in open country with a rifle and a telescopic scope. I generally believe these differentiations to be positive, however, nitpicky because they demonstrate that hunters are thinking people who struggle to define the limits of their world.

I know that I certainly do, though I've come to realize that rigid boundaries are sometimes hard to determine. Consider something that happened to me while I was living for about nine months along the Big Horn River in Wyoming. While there, I became friends with a hay farm whom we'll call Bill. He had a side business raising game birds.

He would buy pheasant and chucker hatchlings from a wholesaler for around a dollar apiece and then raise the birds to maturity inside huge tent light structures made of netting. Hawks and falcons would dive at the birds from above and hit the netting so hard that they'd blast through it like it was wet and newsprint, so the upper portions were reinforced with wire fencing. Bill fitted each bird with a little piece of plastic called the blinder, which

worked like the blinders you see on draft animals. But while the blinder on draft animals keeps them from getting spooked or distracted by objects in its peripheral vision, the blinder on a pen raised game bird is meant to keep him from seeing clearly enough to maul his penmates out of the frustration and anxiety that are hallmarks of wild animals that are forced to live in tight confines. When the birds were mature, Bill would sell them to want to be hunters for nine or ten dollars each.

When a client called, he'd go into his bird tent and collect the number of birds that the guy wanted to shoot. He'd put the birds into cage and load the cage on his ATV, and then drive them out into a field one at a time. He'd pick out the birds and twirl them around with a windmill motion that Pete Townshend from the who famously used to play his guitar. This would put the birds to sleep, or

at least something resembling sleep. Then Bill would form a little hut out of field grass and tuck the bird into it. The timing of this was delicate. He wanted the birds to come to their senses soon enough that they'd fly away when the clients came along, but not so soon that they'd wander off in search of food. Before that happened. When the clients came out, their activities certainly hinted at hunting. They would lead dogs and carry shotguns and shoot at edible birds that were flying through

the air. But while game farm hunting does have these attributes of actual hunting, lacks the beautiful essence of uncertainty that is to hunting what pan drippings are to gravy. The hunter's success did not come from the fact that they'd studied the species and learned its ways and scouted its habitat. Instead, it came because they paid some guy to raise the birds and then make sure they were put out in the field where the hunters almost couldn't help but find them. One day, Bill invited me to

hunt his place. This seemed like a strange choice of words for him to use. While Bill definitely advertised his business as hunting, he in no way actually thought of it as hunting.

my ethics. But then I got to thinking about it. I thought about how these bird species were not indigenous to this region or even to the continent, about how they'd probably never survived the winter, and about how if they did, their presence on the land was at least as false a concept as hunting for them would be. I also considered how tasty they'd be, so I went out with Bill, shot a few birds, boned them out,

and cooked them in a stir fry. To this day I find myself thinking about the rightness and wrongness of that hunt, and I only mention it now so that I don't come across as overly cocky about the certitude of my own moral compass. It's helpful to think of the ethics of hunting as a form of religion, and that most people's beliefs are influenced as much by where they were born as bout what they've learned since leaving home. I grew up in an area where hunting deer over

bait was the normal way of doing things. In late September, we'd sometimes drive to a carrot processing facility near Grant, Michigan, where we could buy a pickup load of oversized and misshapen carrot rejects for five dollars. We'd then go to our hunting areas and shovel these carrots into a duluthe pack and lug them into the woods near the intersection of deer trails. Once a pile started getting hit by deer, we'd add more carrots and hang a tree stand in

a nearby tree. Hunting over bait, I spent an incalculable amount of cold and miserable hours without seeing a single deer. Sometimes the bow season would pass without my getting a shot at an animal, except maybe a squirrel or grouse that passed beneath my tree. The limited number of deer that lived in my hunting area had adapted to the absurd abundance of bait piles in the woods and had

learned to simply avoid them during daylight hours. After all, there were plenty of other foods for them to eat, such as the apples and corn, and the orchards and fields that were often within a few hundred yards of our bait. So by using a strategy that some might describe as cheating or as taking away the challenge of the hunt, we were doing something that, in hindsight, had

the effect of making deer hunting almost too challenging. Twenty something years later, I no longer hunt over bait at all. My reasons for this are not based entirely on ethics. Instead, I am not interested in using artificial bait because I am not interested in hunting animals that are doing artificial things. To go out and find a deer by solving the riddle of its natural patterns is far more enticing to

me than finding a deer by interrupting those patterns. Baiting is not, in my opinion, a type of hunting that fosters an intelligent understanding of animals. But if you enjoy it, go ahead. My impression of hunting animals with hounds was formed through an equally subjective and haphazard set of experiences. My introduction to this kind of hunting came when I was about eighteen years old and was invited to accompany

a raccoon hunter whom we'll call Dave. It was the late summer training season, when you're allowed to exercise your coon dogs in the woods, but you're not allowed to kill any raccoons. We went out at about eleven PM and turned the dogs out of the truck along a two track. We then drove along with the dogs running out ahead of us, the way you see some lazy

people exercise their pets. We hadn't gone a mile when the dogs struck a hot trail and bellowed their way down a slope and across a creek and into the darkness. Dave cut the truck's engine and we listened to the dogs. He could tell from the pitch and intensity of their barks that they had already brought the raccoon to bay. With headlamps, we walked down the slope and across the creek and found the hounds scratching at a small oak. Up in the limbs were a female raccoon in several

of her young cubs. Dave then explained to me that it wasn't good to pull the dogs away from the raccoons without killing one, because they might lose interest in hunting if they weren't properly rewarded. So he raised up a twenty two pistol that I didn't even know he had and shot one of the raccoon cubs dead out of the tree. After that, I told him I was done for the night, and I honestly figured that I wouldn't be hanging around any more houndsmen for at least

a long time. But now in the deserts of Arizona, I was not only hanging out with a pair of houndsmen, I was doing everything I could to help them, And as I was learning, the pursuit of a lion is much more complicated than simply shooting an animal out of a tree. The real challenge was getting an animal into a tree in the first place. Doing that required finding something known in the parlance of lion hunters as an

overnight track. That means a lion track that was made within the past eight or nine hours, when conditions are right, not too windy, not too dewey, not too rare. A track of that vintage is likely to retain enough of the lion's residual odor for dogs to be able to pick up the scent and trail it. Yet, despite the slaughter of calves that had occurred here, the previous spring, and despite the recently killed deer that we found, we had yet to locate a promising overnight track after days

of searching for one. Every day, Floyd and I would wake up well before sunrise. Joe would already be gone, having left so early in the morning that it was more like nighttime. Floyd and I would head into the desert with some predetermined landscape feature as our ultimate destination, masas rocky buttes, deeply in sized canyons, high ridge lines, saddles passes, all places where lions are likely to either hunt, sleep,

or travel through. Floyd is in his mid fifties, and his appearance brings to mind Robert Redford when the actor was about that same age. He's part owner of Western Hunter and Elk Hunter magazines and full owner of Outdoorsman's, an iconic Phoenix sporting goods store that specializes in high end European made optics, as well as Outdoorsman's own line

of American made backpacking tripod systems. His line of work allows him to think of chasing lions as a business related activity, which means he can hunt as much as he wants to without having to feel guilty about it some years ago. He and his girlfriend owned and operated an aerial photography company. This required Floyd to buy a helicopter. I learned to fly a helicopter in a month, he told me. Meanwhile, I've been hunting lions for twenty years

and I'm still learning stuff. Lion hunting is the hardest thing I've ever done, At least on this hunt, Floyd mostly preferred to look for overnight tracks without the assistance of his dogs. For one thing, he didn't want them to get tired out before it was time to actually

chase a lion. For another thing, the passage of all those dogs pause has the potential to disturb the delicate evidence that a lion might leave while traveling over a portion of the Earth's surface that is covered predominantly in rock, cactus, and grass, surfaces that do not readily collect the tracks of a passing animal. Floyd calls himself a bare ground lion hunter, a description that differentiates him from guys who hunt colder and wetter regions with predictable and frequent dosages

of snow, the world's most track friendly substance. While a big lion can weigh up to one hundred and fifty pounds. It can kill an elk weighing four times as much. They seem to walk about as gently as a balloon hitting the ground. The only place that they'll leave a track is in the sand, and around here sand occurs

primarily in the same places creek beds. Game trails that attract a lot of competing traffic from mule deer, havevelina, cattle, quail, bobcats, coyotes, big horn sheep, and dogs if you let them run out ahead of you. Floyd spends so much time studying the ground for lion tracks that has begun to affect his posture. His natural stance has his eyes staring at the ground directly ahead of his boots. He's trained himself to tune out everything on the ground except for the

tracks of lions. On average, these measure about three and a half inches from front to back and side to side. Perfect complete lion tracks are far less common than imperfect partial lion tracks. You might just see the imprint of a few toes in the sand, or the outline of a track that's interrupted by a flat piece of rock. The important part of a lion track, the part that eliminates impostors, is the trailing edge of the heel pad. It leaves an impression in the sand that looks like

the bottom of three letter us placed together. When we were out looking for tracks, Floyd and I had many conversations that went like this, here's something interesting. I'd say, this has got to be a lion. Looks a little like a dog, but it's a lot rounder. You should check it out. Can you see the heel pad? Floyd would ask, No, I'd say, look for another one, he'd say. Then finally it happened. After five long days of doing little bit walking and looking for tracks, I found what

we were searching for. It was blow a large butte in a dry creek bed where a few boulders funneled the animal traffic into a narrow gap. Here you go, I called out to Floyd, here's a heel pad. Sure than hell. Floyd walked over to have a look. His face registered a moment of interest, but then his enthusiasm waned. Looks to me like a coyote track where he spun around in the sand, so it looks bigger than normal. He said. Then to have Alena step down the back

of it. That's what gives it a lobed. Look and notice how you don't see any more good tracks ahead of it or behind it. Just coyote and have Alena keep in mind. He went on, anything can make a lion track once it takes a line to do it. Twice, you find me two good tracks with lob pads, and then you've got something worth looking at. While I was disappointed by our inability to find a good lion track,

I was hardly surprised. Prior to my visit to Arizona, I had had only three physical encounters with wild mountain lions. Each of those encounters reinforced my notion of the animal as a secretive and elusive creature. The first encounter stands out in my mind most visibly. It happened near Clearwater Lake in Montana's Swan Mountains, just after I moved out west. That night, i'd been fly fishing for cutthroat trout, and I stayed on the water until a little past dark.

When I was done, I hiked three quarters of a mile through the woods back to where my van was parked on a forest service road. It was pitch black by the time I began to long and bumpy drive out toward Highway eighty three. About halfway along, I came to a place where the forest service road had been cut into the side of a steep hillside. I rounded the corner and there was a gang of meal, deeer, doze and fawns, all bunched up in the middle of

the road. When I got close, they ran to the right and struggled up the steeply pitched hillside in a whirl of hoofs and falling rocks. Just as this was happening, I caught in my side view mire a sudden flash of movement and the halo of the brake lights. I shoved the shifter upward into reverse so that the van's backup lights would come on, and then I stuck my head out the window to look. There it was, standing within inches of the rear bumper, the first mountain lion

I ever saw. He spun himself in a turn that seemed like wine swirling in the glass. With that, the lion vanished into the dark. Over the next few weeks, I thought about that mountain lion far more than I've ever thought about any single living creature, besides a dog named Duchess that my family owned for about thirteen years. I did a fair bit of thinking about what the lion was doing before interrupted its hunt that night, but I did a lot more thinking about what it did afterward.

To the north of where I saw the cat was the largest tract of contiguous wilderness in the lower forty eight I was baffled by the mystery of that lion amid all that country. What did it do over the next few days? Where did it hunt? What did it eat?

where the lion goes. The lion hunter is also I found out one of the most hated types of hunters in the country. If you think of the conflict between hunters and anti hunters as a long term war, the right to hunt lions with hounds is the current front line battlefield in many Western states. This would have been unforseeable just one hundred years ago, when it was common practice for states to offer bounties on mountain lions because of the cats tendencies to prey on livestock. In Arizona,

killing a lion would earn you fifty dollars. In the nineteen sixties and seventies, Western states began to recognize mountain lions as an important part of the ecosystem and also as a species of interest to big game hunters. Most states reclassified lions as a game species and made it necessary for hunters to buy a legal hunting license in a mountain lion permit in order to kill one. There

are several ways to hunt lions. You can attract them with a predator call, which typically mimics the sounds of wounded deer or rabbit. Or you can hang around in good lion country hoping that one of the cats happens to come along. But by far the most effective way to hunt mountain lions is through the use of dogs. In Montana, eighty nine percent of lion hunters used dogs, and Wyoming it's ninety percent. Over the last twenty five years, sixty five percent of all lions harvested by hunters in

Arizona were killed with the help of dogs. Anti hunters have long recognized the importance of dogs and hunting lions. I believe that the more organized factions of anti hunters camouflage their opposition to hunting in general as a more specific opposition to hunting lions with dogs. It allows them to wage small scale legal battles against the broader spectrum of hunting without having to conquer the issue had on.

Some of these battles have proved winnable, as it's easy to convince people who have never once hunted or laid eyes on a wild lion that hunt Hunting animals with dogs is somehow a perverse activity. In nineteen ninety four, Oregon voters passed an initiative that banned hunting lions with dogs. The hunting lions by other means remains legal. The same thing is true in Washington and South Dakota. Hunt lions, yes, with dogs no. If you're puzzled about how such laws

could ever come into existence. Consider the results of a two thousand and one pole of Arizona residents. While only twenty nine percent of those polled indicated that hunting should be banned outright, sixty two percent indicated that the use of hounds two hunt lions should be illegal. To be perfectly honest, I was inspired by my personal lion experience to reconsider my own suspicions about the practice of hunting

them with hounds. I wanted to see one of the animals up close and to experience the thrill of eating its flesh, and the only realistic way for me to do this was to join up with some high hensman and head into the hills in search of a track. If we got one into a tree and I didn't like the way it felt, I could always walk away without killing it. While we were hunting lions, Floyd's partner, Joe, slept in the back of his pickup on a pad

of carpet. He kept his dogs tethered outside of the truck, scattered apart so that they didn't fight or get tangled up. When he got up at three am, he would pull on a pair of faded Levi's Danner hunting boots in one of Floyd's outdoorsmen's backpacks, and then he would unclip the pack of hounds and they would take off together into the darkness. They would cover several miles before it got light out, and then another six or seven miles

after daybreak. This was an impressive bit of walking for a man who'd retired from the concrete laying business, with pass injuries including but not limited to a shattered Sternham concrete finisher, a gnawed leg, mountain lion, and a gunshot wound sustained after dropping a three point fifty seven revolve in such a way that the hammer hit the concrete and discharged around. As Joe walked, he would use a headlamp to study the earth in front of him for tracks.

His dogs would range out to the sides and ahead of his line of travel with their noses to the ground. By their specific barks, he could tell whether they were detecting the recent passage of a lion. He spent five whole days this way without any significant strokes of luck. Then, on our last day of hunting, Floyd and I were getting ready to leave camp when we heard a cacophony of bellows coming from Joe's dogs high on the mountain above us. It sounded like someone torturing a gang of

opera singers. Even from a great distance, Floyd knew exactly what Joe's dogs were saying. That dog you hear there with the low bellow. He doesn't make noise on an old lion trail, said Floyd. He's too old and wise for that. He only makes noise on a good overnight track. We studied the mountainside where the barking was coming from, and soon spotted the flickers of light from Joe's headlamp. He was moving quickly across the face of the mountain.

There was a notch in the skyline that marked the entrance to a canyon, and soon Joe's light disappeared into that notch. The sound from the dog's barking began to fade as the distance increased. Joe's voice then came over the walkie talking. He implored Floyd to cut loose some of his dogs. Have you seen a track yet, asked Floyd, Any idea? What way the lion's going? Is it a tom? No tracks yet, said Joe, But they're really moving the trail. Just get some dogs loose and get them up here.

Floyd unleashed six of his own dogs, who immediately headed uphill towards the source of the barking. Floyd then turned to me and said, we better get moving. The canyon that Joe and the dogs entered described a long arc. Floyd explained he figured that we might catch up with them by following a neighboring canyon through a straight or route. We headed across a sage patch, passed them sauaro cactuses,

and then into the mouth of the canyon. The daylight grew as we made our way into the dry brown mountains. As we walked, Floyd explained the trouble of chasing a lion that the dogs could smell, but that you haven't seen a track from. While the dogs can certainly tell that a lion has passed through, they are not able to determine which direction it is traveling. This can lead to obvious and considerable confusion. As Floyd put it, there's a fifty to fifty chance that the dogs are taking

to you in the wrong direction. After a mile of walking, we still hadn't heard the dogs, and we couldn't tell where Joe had gone. We were unable to reach him on the walkie talkie as the deeply cut topography interfered with the transmissions. We traveled another mile and then left the canyon bottom and started walking uphill toward a ridgeline. When we got up there, we still couldn't hear anything.

I noticed a high, thumb shaped spire of rock that rose out of the mountains like a city skyscraper, rising above buildings half its height. I commented to Floyd that the lion was probably headed that way, or at least that's where I'd had if I were being chased and wanted to elude my pursuers. Floyd replied that the lion still didn't know it was being chased. He'd been here hours earlier and was probably off sleeping somewhere oblivious to our presence in the world. We pressed on. Hours went by,

and the day passed into afternoon. As it would turn out, the line had indeed headed toward the thumb shaped spire of rock, whether or not he knew he was being followed. Later, Floyd and I would finally meet up with Joe near its base. By then, the dogs would have lost the lion's trail, and they'd be too exhausted to follow it. Even if they hadn't, we would find them lolling around on a jumble of rocks. Now and then one of the dogs would lick a certain rock and bellow it's saliva,

having released some trace of a lion's order. Then it would head off in some direction or another, making a ruckus. I would get excited all over again, thinking that I might still get my chance to see a lion up close. But each time the dog would return, having lost interest in what was becoming an increasingly cold trail. Finally, Joe and Floyd suggested that we start the long walk back toward camp. We all had to be somewhere the next day.

I walked away in silence, disappointed that I was unable to learn whether it was challenging to shoot a lion out of a tree. Getting to that final moment of truth had been quite simply too challenging.