The Terminal List

Jack Carr Talks about His New Book “Beirut”, Military Life, Tomahawks and Success in the Age of Social Media

by Richard Baimbridge

“From a very early age, I’d say probably about the age of 7, I knew I wanted to serve my country in uniform, specifically as a SEAL,” Jack Carr tells me while sitting outside on the balcony of his Park City, Utah home. It’s early morning, the temperature is brisk, and he has a barrage of interviews ahead of him, yet he’s laser focused as usual with a cup of strong black coffee in his hands and signature scraggly beard.

He says that as a child, he was deeply influenced by a love of the outdoors and the thrill of adventure. But that he also spent a lot of time in the library reading books, growing up with a mother who was a librarian -- which is where his love affair with literature began.  

“Back then after you did all the research you could do on SEALs, that took about an hour in a library,” he says. “So, I started reading books by Tom Clancy, Nelson DeMille, Louis L’Amour, and others -- reading all these amazing Thriller authors who gave me an education on the art of storytelling.”

Carr is a former Navy SEAL who led special operations teams in Iraq and Afghanistan as a Team Leader, Platoon Commander, Troop Commander and Task Unit Commander. This experience is what fuels the books he’s written, many of which have gone on to become international best-sellers and made into blockbuster films, like The Terminal List.

“I look at my military career and my writing career as two distinctly different chapters in my life,” Carr says. “When I was in the military, I was totally focused on being the best leader and soldier that I could be, and focused on studying the enemy, because that’s what you owe to the guys to your right and left downrange.  But I came back from my final deployment and looked around and realized ‘Oh, creeping up on 20 years here’, and I knew it was time for something different.”

Carr began as a SEAL sniper, became an officer, then moved up to troop commander. But after leaving the service, he suddenly found himself having to start all over from scratch.

“In December 2014, I wrote about 9 one-page executive summaries, put them down on a table and chose The Terminal List to come out of the gate,” he says. “I knew I needed to come out of the gate with something that was just hard-hitting, visceral and primal.”

Carr says that although he enjoys reading some of the true accounts of former SEALs like himself, that was never his path. From an early age, he always knew he wanted to write fiction – Thrillers, in particular. He says that even while writing The Terminal List, he envisioned the book becoming a film with Chris Pratt as the lead role. In a prophetic turn of events, after Carr sold the rights of the book to Hollywood, Pratt did indeed end up reading the script and took the role.

But things weren’t always so smooth for Carr, either. His middle son has a rare genetic disorder that took 8 years to diagnose. The difficult experience of raising a special needs child shaped part of the story in his second book, True Believer. He also had to figure out how to navigate the ultra-competitive world of book publishing entirely on his own.  

If you follow him on social media or listen to him on podcasts, you’ll know that he’s become a master of self-promotion with everything from bowhunting to hurling his signature Tomahawks. He’s managed to shape his image and his brand into a hugely successful enterprise.

Yet the idea of self-promotion didn’t really come naturally to him. “I had no social media and didn’t want any of that,” he says. “I’m a very private person, which might seem hard to believe today. But I looked at the publishing space just like I did at the battlefield – on the battlefield you’re looking at how to capitalize on momentum, gaps in the enemy’s defenses, how to adapt to a changing environment.”

Although he’s always been first and foremost a fan and a writer of fiction, Carr has recently strayed into the arena of true stories with his first non-fiction book, “Targeted: Beirut – The 1983 Marine Barracks Bombing and the Untold Origin Story of the War on Terror,” released in September of this year. It debuted in the Top 5 of the New York Times Best-Seller List.

Carr says that more than anything as a writer he strives for authenticity that comes from personal experience.

“If my protagonist gets ambushed as part of the story, I don’t have to go find somebody who was in an ambush and ask them what it’s like, I just remember what it was like to be ambushed in Baghdad 2006, and I take those feelings and emotions and apply them to a completely fictional narrative. But if it reads true to someone who picks it up, that’s because it’s coming from a real place – right from my heart and soul directly onto the page, with no filters.”

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