As a librarian’s son, Jack Carr developed a passion for learning from an early age. He made frequent trips to the library and was inspired by movies, including “The Frogmen.” Released in 1951, “The Frogmen” is about the Navy Underwater Demolition Teams, the precursor to the SEALs. Carr, who saw that movie when he was 7 years old, later became a SEAL himself before establishing himself as a bestselling author, series co-creator and producer.
These days, Carr is a busy man. The author of seven “The Terminal List” books, he has also helped oversee television projects tied to the series. “The Terminal List: Dark Wolf,” a prequel series chronicling the journey of Ben Edwards (Taylor Kitsch, “X-Men Origins: Wolverine”) from the Navy SEALs to working for the CIA, is set to begin streaming on Amazon Prime Video on Aug. 27. The second season of “The Terminal List,” based on Carr’s novel “True Believer” and again starring Chris Pratt (“Guardians of the Galaxy”) as Navy SEAL James Reece, is in production now. Carr’s next book, “Cry Havoc,” focuses on Reece’s father, Thomas, and is scheduled for release on Oct. 7.
Carr, who will turn 50 on July 3, recently spoke with Military.com. His answers have been edited for brevity.
Military.com: How did your time in the Navy SEALs inspire your writing career?
Jack Carr: “I always knew I wanted to do these two things in life: one, serve my country in uniform, and two, write thrillers. My grandfather was killed in World War II, so I grew up with pictures of him and his squadron. He flew the F4U Corsair. I had his wings, medals and the silk maps they used to give aviators.
“Then I was watching a show called ‘Black Sheep Squadron’ [a TV show, originally titled ‘Baa Baa Black Sheep,’ about a WWII aviation unit]. I’m watching that with my dad, and that’s his connection and my connection to that generation, back when people came home from the war and just got back to work, and there weren’t Facebook groups. It was just building us into the country that we are today.
“For my dad, who never got to meet his father, he couldn’t track down anybody back then. The connection to that generation [Baby Boomers] and World War II was through popular culture — films, TV shows and books. That was very impactful to me growing up, having that connection.
“I saw a movie called ‘The Frogmen’ when I was 7 years old, asked my dad what a frogman was and he said, ‘Ask your mother,’ because my mom is a librarian. We went down to the local library and started doing some research and found out about SEALs, UDTs, and from that moment on, I was hooked.
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“I knew that one day, I would serve my country in uniform as a SEAL. That was the goal, and as I got a little older, certainly by age 11, I am reading the same kind of books my parents are reading, Tom Clancy comes out with ‘The Hunt for Red October.’ Then I’m reading David Morrell, who created Rambo and wrote ‘First Blood’ back in 1972, which was later adapted into the film in 1982. I’m discovering those guys through films and television show adaptations. I was reading A.J. Quinnell (“Man on Fire”), J.C. Pollock (“Mission M.I.A.”), Louis L’Amour (“Hondo”), and these guys are really my professors in the art of storytelling. Books really gave me a foundation to move into writing … but also into the SEAL teams to make the decisions I was able to make downrange because I had this foundation.”
Military.com: Do you use any specific experiences from the SEALs in your writing?
Jack Carr: “Yes, and it is different from what I anticipated it would be. Early on, I thought these would be totally dissociated professions. One, serve my country. Two, writing. I knew I would get the sniper weapon stuff right. If I didn’t know something about an aircraft or helicopter, I had friends, and if they didn’t know, they could point me in the right direction. EOD [explosive ordnance disposal], same thing.
“What I didn’t anticipate was how much of a personal writing experience it was going to be, even though my processes from the first book remain the same. I thought it through of what makes sense to me, which involved a title, a theme, a one-page executive summary and outline. Through all of those phases, I still thought, ‘OK, the technical stuff I’ll get right and will tell a good story.’ I have this background — and some of the SEAL stuff will play in — but I thought it would be in a more technical sense. Taking the feelings and emotions to events that happen downrange and applying them to a completely fictional narrative was something I did not anticipate and has held true through all of the books.
“In my first book, my protagonist gets ambushed in the streets of Los Angeles. I get to that part and remember what it was like to be in Baghdad in 2006 and get ambushed there. I just take those feelings and emotions from 2006 and then apply them to this story. It’s the same thing with pressing a trigger on a sniper rifle. I don’t have to go out and track someone down who was in Ramadi [in Iraq] at the height of the war.
“And then start taking notes and having those notes filter through any preconceived notions I may have, like any documentaries or films I may have watched and other books I may have read. It gets filtered through all of that and then back out onto the page into a fictional setting, which is a lot of dilution. Instead, I can just think about what that was like to drop over the back wall of the base in Ramadi, go into the town after curfew and set up a sniper hide site, and I can remember all that stuff. Then I can write that down in a fictional story.”
Military.com: What can you tell us about “Cry Havoc”?
Jack Carr: “From the very beginning, I wanted to introduce characters early on in the series that could have a whole series [built] around [them] later, that they would create enough interest that people would ask me to hear more about James Reece’s dad, or I want to learn more about the Hastings family in Rhodesia back in the ’60s and ’70s. There are two family trees that I could explore through multiple generations. I got that from Stephen Hunter (“Shooter”), and that’s part of my foundation. Stephen Hunter wrote “Point of Impact” and created Bob Lee Swagger, which was made into the movie “Shooter” with Mark Wahlberg and later became a TV show. Hunter has become a dear friend over the years and is an amazing guy.
“It made sense, because of things I set up in later novels that incorporated more of James Reece’s dad into the backstory, to do that first. That became ‘Cry Havoc.’ It’s 1968 Vietnam. It’s the dad, a SEAL in Vietnam, pulled over to MACV-SOG [Military Assistance Command, Vietnam-Studies and Observations Group] on his third tour. This became my most heavily researched book yet. That is saying something. For the other ones, I knew nothing about finance; finance is featured in ‘Only the Dead.’ I knew nothing about AI [artificial intelligence]; that’s in ‘In the Blood.’
“I thought that was a lot of research; no, the research for ‘Cry Havoc’ to get 1968 right, especially the Vietnam veterans to know I put in the effort to get it right, to get Hanoi right, what it was like in Moscow, then there is a section in Washington, D.C., and Maryland … I wanted someone who didn’t go to Vietnam but lived in 1968 to get the right feelings of 1968.
“It became a much more in-depth research project than I anticipated at the outset, which is why it is coming out in October rather than in June [the original release date for ‘Cry Havoc’]. I could have just written it with what I had in my head and what my preconceived notions of things are, based on all the documentaries and movies [I’ve seen] and books that I’ve read over the years. I certainly could have gotten it out by June, but I really wanted to capture 1968 and do it in a way that wasn’t just conventional. Now it’s coming out in October, and the effort has been put into making it as good as I could possibly make it. I am not about churning these out to get another book on the shelves; it must be better than the last one every single time.”
For the complete interview with Carr, click on the video below.
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