Most of what I learned about the military was through fiction. There was no internet, so you couldn’t just Google “Navy SEAL,” and spend the rest of your life going down all these rabbit-holes online. Pollack - all these guys whose protagonists had these backgrounds that I wanted to have in real life one day.

In the early ‘80s, I started reading Tom Clancy, David Morrell, Nelson DeMille, J.C. Up on their shelves, I remember Robert Ludlum, Ian Fleming, Ken Follett that I wanted to read. As soon as I got to fifth grade, I was reading the same things my parents were. I grew up in the ‘80s, and my mom was a librarian, so I grew up surrounded by books and with a love of reading. JC: When I was a little kid, I wanted to be a SEAL and I wanted to write fiction. TF: So when you decided to get out of the military, how did you decide you wanted to write thriller spy novels? So everyone was pretty much a new guy after September 11th, it didn’t matter where you ranked. JC: Before September 11th, having some experience was different than after September 11th. TF: What was it like moving up through the ranks, and then bam, you’re low-man-on-the-totem-pole again? Then I went back to the SEAL Teams as an officer and ended up in Afghanistan right away. We thought we were going directly to Afghanistan but instead we took over ship-boarding operations to enforce the UN oil embargo against Iraq for Team 3 while they hit Afghanistan.Īfter that deployment I went to OCS, Officer Candidate School, where it’s basically the same as boot camp but you get yelled at by Marines instead of Navy people while folding underwear and T-shirts, ironing things, totally ridiculous. I was enlisted for the first six and a half years, and then I became an officer. Everyone wants the tactical and the desert tan. TF: The civilian market wants to be in the military market now, and you combine that with the 18 years of war, it’s totally taken over the industry. By 2006, the tactical world dominated the Show. Everything else was hunting, fishing, or outdoors. At my first show, even though it was after 9/11, the “tactical” side was still a very small portion.

Now when you walk into the exhibition hall, it’s essentially the whole show. The military section was very small back then. Jack Carr: I have been coming to the show since 2003 or 2004. The Federalist: You’ve been coming to SHOT Show long before you became an author. We sat down with Carr at SHOT Show, where he talked about everything from spy novels and his military career to writing and his next novel due this spring, “Savage Son.” Carr began writing his first novel, “The Terminal List,” before he was officially out of the military, and began writing his second novel, “True Believer” before the first was even published.

Savage son a thriller jack carr