Publications

 

I’ve been fortunate enough to have several pieces published. Here they are in chronological order:

When I returned from my first deployment to Iraq, in 2006, the Ipswich Town supporters’ club asked me to write something about us giving the soccer shirts to the Iraqi children. They were publishing a collection of Ipswich Town supporters’ stories called Ipswich ‘Til I Die, and they wanted to include this in it. I tell the same story, albeit at greater length, in my book Driving Around, Waiting to Get Blown Up. Distributing those shirts was without doubt one of the highlights of not just that year in Iraq, but my whole time in the Army.

“Lt. Murphy’s Honor was Page 1 News”
I wrote a letter to the editor of the Washington Post explaining how disappointed I was that the posthumous award of the Medal of Honor to Lieutenant Michael Murphy (the SEAL officer depicted in the movie and book Lone Survivor) was not covered on the front page. To their credit, they published it on October 27th, 2007. I had several veterans from the D.C. area contact me as a result.

For my last two years in the Army, I worked on the insider threat, which was defined as Afghan allies attacking and killing U.S., NATO and allied soldiers, primarily as they were training them. I had a number of pieces published in U.S. and NATO training publications, to include COIN Common Sense. I also contributed large parts of the ISAF Insider Threat Handbook and the ISAF Security Force Assistance Guide.

(To all the armchair classification experts out there: yes, I know the ISAF Insider Threat Handbook is “restricted;” the cover, however, is not).

“This is No Way to Fight a War” 25 October 2018. 

In 2018, I wrote an op-ed which was published in the Washington Post regarding my thoughts about this enduring threat to our soldiers.

“Don’t buy the stats; deployments ruin military families”

By talking to a friend in 2019, I realized that out of 11 guys with whom I had stayed in contact after my deployments to Iraq, all of them were divorced (myself included). I wrote an op-ed trying to bring attention to this issue, and the Duluth News Tribune and Inside Sources.com did a nice job with it. We are rightly concerned with the number of veterans taking their own lives, but there is a hidden cost of deploying to servicemen and -women and their families which is also devastating.

“A Scarf from Kabul”

I wrote this story after a little girl I knew in Kabul was killed by a Taliban suicide bomber in 2010. The Moving Force Journal published it in 2021:

“War is a Racket”

Tarbell.org published an op-ed I wrote which discusses how big business makes obscene amounts of money from human conflict. I was disgusted but unsurprised at how dramatically and how quickly the big ten defense contractors’ market value increased following the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Juxtapose that with the growing rumblings from these same companies and their supporters at the Pentagon and in Congress that the U.S. defense budget is inadequate, and it’s obvious that a new, Reaganesque arms build-up cannot be far away. “Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.”

“The Bunker”

Before I actually studied writing, I didn’t have an appreciation for poetry and I certainly would never have considered myself a poet, but through the tutelage and patience of professors such as Ed Perlman, I slowly started to put some lines together. Poetry, though not for everyone, is for me the hardest thing to write and requires a higher understanding of words and how to employ them.

One of my favorite paintings is “The Bunker” by Victor Juhasz. Victor has captured the boredom and self-reflection soldiers endure when deployed, and that painting inspired me to write this poem. I have been reading Book of Matches Literary Journal for several years now, so I was very proud when they decided to print my poem in Issue 6, published in September 2022. Now, I guess I’m a poet after all.

Veterans Day Op-Ed Published

I wrote an op-ed for Veterans Day in 2022 which The Baltimore Sun was gracious enough to publish. In it I called for readers to tell their Congress member to pass stalled legislation to address veteran homelessness and to build a Global War on Terror memorial in Washington, DC.

Life’s a Pitch

I know it’s not something I’ve written, but this is the only appearance I’ve had, so I figured I’d put it here. I was interviewed in August 2023 by Mark Murphy of the Ipswich Town fan show “Life’s a Pitch TV,” where we talked about the soccer shirts my battery distributed in Iraq in 2005. As I mention above, distributing those shorts was memorable for me, but getting to be on this show with Terry Butcher, my all-time favorite player and childhood hero, ranks right up there with it. You can watch the episode on YouTube here https://youtu.be/gVxsRODJVIQ?feature=shared. I appear at 47:15.