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