First thing I should say: I am completely stunned at the
level of interest and support I’ve had for Poor Man’s Fight. My book has
succeeded way beyond my expectations. The most that I had really hoped for was
that it would do about as well as Good Intentions… but in just 17 days, I’ve
probably sold as many copies of PMF as I sold of GI all last year. I cannot
express what a difference this makes in my life and in my writing ambitions.
Thank you. Seriously. I don’t know what else to say but
thank you.
Something about the book itself:
I’ve been meaning to write Poor Man’s Fight for at least 15
years. Maybe more.
All through childhood, I had no doubt that I would enlist in
the military. I loved all things military. The G.I. Joe comic did more to teach
me to read than any of my (very dedicated and capable) elementary teachers
could. I had a lot of veterans in my family (Mom was Air Force and proud of it), and while none of them ever once put any expectation on me to do my time, my interests and world-view
certainly did set that expectation.
It was the early ‘90s. I wanted to get involved in drug
interdiction. The Coast Guard quickly became the obvious choice. I signed up.
Boot camp was hard.
My first ship was much, much harder.
One of those constant themes I derived from all that reading
of military history and military fiction as a kid was camaraderie. I didn’t go
in looking for new friends, but I did naively take for granted that I would
find new friendships easily. I’m a personable guy. I had a great many friends
in high school. One might have even called me “popular,” but I hadn’t a clue
until the day of graduation because I didn’t run with what I presumed was the
“popular crowd.” So, yeah, I figured I’d probably be able to get along with
most if not all of my shipmates, just like all the guys in all the TV shows I’d
ever seen about war and all the movies I’d seen and…
…and, yeah, not so much.
I was a scrawny, nerdy nineteen-year-old kid from the “land
of fruits and nuts” who had voted for Bill Clinton, for God’s sake. I got put
on a 110’ patrol cutter out of Key West, Florida with fifteen older guys who
had nothing in common with me except the uniform. I got seasick—a lot. I had
been on boats before enlisting, and I had thought it was fine, but then I
discovered what real water was like. I have never liked drinking, and these
guys were largely enthusiastic drinkers in a party town. My roommate was a good
ol’ boy from Alabama with racial attitudes that horrified me and my
multicultural Los Angeleno sensibilities. I was plainly not man enough for my
supervisor, or his supervisor, or the captain. And it’s very hard to stand up
for yourself when there’s a formal, legal rank structure with you at the
bottom.
It was the hardest, loneliest year of my life. It’s not fair
to say that they were all dicks, or that they were jerks all the time, or that
there was never any reason that they might be justifiably annoyed with me… but
overall, it was miserable. By comparison, boot camp had been a blast.
Tanner’s story isn’t mine. Tanner isn’t me. We’ve got some
significant commonalities, as many protagonists will have with their authors,
but I made a point of making sure he diverged from me in a lot of ways. Tanner
doesn’t want a uniform. I wanted to be a successful serviceman so badly it
hurt.
But my experience on that first ship—I was only there for a
year, and then I transferred out and things got better—really influenced me. It
also inspired a good portion of Poor Man’s Fight, at least thematically. Like I
said, I had always drawn the notion from books and film and TV that comrades
were supposed to be, y’know, comrades. Friends. Or at least not constantly
shitty to each other.
I wanted to do a book where none of that camaraderie happened,
because I had never read that book before. It’s probably out there somewhere
and I just haven’t discovered it, but just the same, I wanted to write that
book.
There are a lot of stories from my ship I wish I could’ve
somehow worked into Poor Man’s Fight. We rescued people and we caught drug
smugglers and I was part of the “Haitian Vacation” of 1994. I saw no combat,
but I nearly died so many other ways it’s kind of funny looking back on it now
(unless you’re my mom). There was the point where we went into drydock for six
weeks, and I kind of snapped and started pulling pranks and throwing out
insults right back at everyone.
There was also the night I realized I could hack it after
all, no matter how awful all the circumstances were. Luckily, that happened
only one or two months into my time on the ship.
The day I arrived in Key West was the first day of a massive
influx of refugees from Cuba. They came on anything that could float. I’ve seen
a family of four on a raft no bigger than my dining room table. We picked them
up by the dozen, and eventually offloaded them to a larger ship. This usually
involved our Rigid Hull Inflatable Boat, kind of a Zodiac boat stowed on the
back of the ship and launched through use of a big crane.
So one night, with maybe a hundred refugees on our deck and
the seas getting nasty and rain falling, someone decided it was time to offload
onto a larger ship. I went out into the rainy night along with the rest of the
deck department to launch the RHIB.
The motion of the ocean, as they say, got uglier with every
moment. We had hundreds of pounds of RHIB swinging over us. I was on one of the
stabilizing lines, with water constantly spraying all over my face and my
glasses. I got worried about my ability to do my job, and figured I should warn
my boss.
“Jim!” I yelled. “I gotta tell you, man, my glasses are full
of seawater. I can’t see what I’m doing too well!”
Jim was in his thirties and balding and running the controls
on the crane, and admittedly wasn’t a complete jerk to me all the time. He just
kept his bespectacled—and water-covered—eyes on what he was doing and said,
“That’s okay, Elliott, I can’t see a damn thing, either.”
And right then, I stopped worrying about whether or not I
could handle all this. All that hype about precision and professionalism from
the recruiters and the advertising? Bullshit. It’s just people stumbling along
as best they can, just like the rest of the real world. They make mistakes and
screw up and pick up and move on anyway, ‘cause the job still has to be done.
And dumber, jerkier people than me could do this job. Other people had lived
through this. There was no reason I couldn’t, too.
