Retired Navy SEAL Jack Carr On The Hunter, The Hunted, and “The Most Dangerous Game"

CrimeReads.com offers a piece by Jack Carr, a retired Navy SEAL and author of The Terminal List, True Believer and Savage Son, on hunting, war and the classic short story, The Most Dangerous Game.

I was, and remain, a student of war and of the hunt. Experiences in combat and in the backcountry helped shape me into the citizen, husband, father and writer I am today. The one has made me better at the other. I suspect it has always been this way. It is the feelings and emotions from those most primal of endeavors that form the foundation of Savage Son. 

I was first introduced to Richard Connell’s masterpiece, “The Most Dangerous Game,” in junior high school. Connell, a veteran of World War I, published his most celebrated short story in Collier’s Weekly in 1924. Upon that initial reading, I was determined to one day write a modern thriller that paid tribute to this classic tale, exploring the dynamic between hunter and hunted.  

Providing for and defending my family and country are hardwired into my DNA. Perhaps that is why “The Most Dangerous Game” resonated with me at such an early age, or maybe those primal impulses are in all of us, which is why Richard Connell’s narrative continues to endure almost a century after it was first published.

Fast-forward thirty years. As I prepared to leave the SEAL Teams, I laid out all my ideas for what was to become my first novel, The Terminal List. The plot for Savage Son was among several of the storylines I was contemplating as I decided how to introduce the world to James Reece. 

For that first outing, I knew my protagonist was not yet ready for what I had in store. I needed to develop him through a journey, first of revenge and then of redemption, before I could explore the dark side of man through the medium of the modern political thriller. Is James Reece a warrior, a hunter, a killer? Perhaps all three?

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link: 

https://crimereads.com/the-hunter-the-hunted-and-the-most-dangerous-game/ 

You can also read Richard Connell’s The Most Dangerous Game via the below link: 

https://americanliterature.com/author/richard-connell/short-story/the-most-dangerous-game

And you can read my Counterterrorism magazine Q&A with Jack Carr via the below link:  

www.pauldavisoncrime.com/2019/05/my-q-with-jack-carr-retired-navy-seal.html 

American Sniper, American Hero

Rich Lowry's column in the New York Post covers the success of the new Clint Eastwood/Bradley Cooper film American Sniper.  

Clint Eastwood's new movie, “American Sniper,” marks the return of the American war hero.

Heroism on the battlefield had never gone away, of course, far from it (witness the Medals of Honor awarded for acts of extraordinary valor in Iraq and Afghanistan). But the classic war hero is more than just brave or fierce. He is famous and almost universally acclaimed. On top of his battlefield exploits, he is a cultural phenomenon.

That is what “American Sniper” unquestionably makes of Chris Kyle. The late Navy SEAL sniper had already written a best-selling memoir and was known as “The Legend” within the military for his record number of confirmed kills during four tours in Iraq. The success of the movie, where he is played by Bradley Cooper, also means he will be remembered as a larger-than-life figure. Such is the power of the silver screen.

... All of this is profoundly disquieting to the left, which has so much sway in Hollywood. It hates and distrusts the idea of the war hero, believing it smacks of backwardness and jingoism. Its notion of compelling war movies were the tendentiously anti-war flops “Green Zone,” “Stop-Loss” and “In the Valley of Elah.” Its reaction to “American Sniper” has been to belittle the movie and smear Chris Kyle.

Actor Seth Rogen compared “American Sniper” to the Nazi propaganda film featured in the movie “Inglourious Basterds.” Director Michael Moore tweeted that he’d been taught to consider snipers cowards. Kyle “was a hate-filled killer,” according to The Guardian, which also deems him “a racist who took pleasure in dehumanizing and killing brown people.”

You can read the rest of the column via the below link:

http://nypost.com/2015/01/19/americans-love-war-heroes-despite-what-hollywood-liberals-think/

My Q & A With Captain Dick Couch, Former Navy SEAL & Author of "The Sheriff of Ramadi'

My Q&A with Captain Dick Couch (Ret), former Navy SEAL and author of The Sheriff of Ramadi,  appeared in Counterterrorism magazine.

You can read the Q&A below: