Navy Seal Novelist Jack Carr on Dealing with the Real NCIS

Now there's a going back to what you said about Seals writing books. Interestingly enough in the first book there's an interrogation scene, interrogation, an interview, meaning not a torture scene, but sitting down with NCIS, the Naval Criminal Investigation Service. And so some bad things, my career wasn't all wonderful, like the downrange stuff, very lucky, very fortunate to be in a couple of right places at the right time to do some interesting things. But when we got back, a good buddy of mine, Mark Owen, he writes a book called No Easy Day and that's the one about the Bin Laden raid. And that one, oh that was like a tipping point because in our community at the time there had been active valor, that movie with Seals, active duty Seals playing characters in an actual movie. There were other books out there so there was already discussion happening like hey are we too much in the limelight here, we're supposed to be these quiet professionals, but you know going back in time I read all these Vietnam books growing up and every autobiography I could about people in the military, Grant has his memoirs or whatever. So there's a precedent not just in this country but worldwide of people getting out, talking about their experiences and that's part of a first person account that historians will use later. Is it frowned upon at all? So it was starting to get even more and more frowned upon right up to that point and that was the tipping point. So when that book came out, that's when everyone said, or not everyone, senior level leaders were like okay I'll stop and they really, well because of that book they went and all the investigations that happened, they went in and essentially anyone that had a connection with him, they pulled in and investigated as a way to put pressure on him to get what they wanted. So I was one of those guys who had known him for since 99 or something like that. So we've been dear friends since that time and so we have emails going back all these years so I got pulled in to this interrogation room and they pulled out single, personal emails, single sentences, totally out of context to try to get me for something that would put pressure on him and they did that not just with me but with almost anyone that had some sort of a connection with him, they investigated because he's already out of the military at this point. So things that you said totally out of context like joking around about something or just statements about things? Just statements like what did you mean by this? And I used that in the first novel because I'm sitting there in this interrogation and you got these guys across from you and essentially NCIS here from my perspective are people that they couldn't make it into the FBI or the CIA and they weren't tough enough to be street cops so now they're busting people on piss tests in the military and that sort of thing. Actually my first experience with them was after September 11th and I think we're all on the same team and we're doing these ship boardings in the northern Arabian Gulf to enforce the UN embargo for oil tankers that are leaving Iraq and then going to Iran. And so our job was to take those ships down before they got to Iranian waters and then the UN would take over after that but it was a really interesting time because I got caught pulling over someone and you're walking up and you don't really know what's going on and so they would come out of Iraq, they had all these metal over all the windows, it cut off all the ladders on the ship so you'd have to use a caving ladder to hook and climb up and then you'd have to breach and get inside these things and get them back into the Gulf before they hit Iranian waters otherwise you had to get off. So it was kind of a crazy deal but during what we're doing a couple nights on, a couple nights off, that sort of thing with another platoon and then NCIS shows up and they pull us all into these different rooms and they said hey so an M60, some sort of like machine gun type thing has gone missing on one of these ships that you guys were on and I was like oh that's terrible, how can I help you? And so they start talking and they're like how would you get one off a ship if you wanted to steal a machine gun from a ship, how would you get it off? And me, I'm just kind of creative, I'm like we're all on the same team here, I'm like oh this is what I would do, I'd take it off piece by piece and whatever I said. And then as I was nearing the end I'm seeing it in their face and seeing the notes they're taking and I'm like wait a second, are they like trying to get me to, like I didn't take that M60 off a ship piece by piece, we were only on there for like a- The problem is you're an author. And I'm trying to think it all through, yeah. So I'm like- You're being creative. Yeah, so even back then I had a bad experience with them. So what are they saying to you? Did you do this? Did they just start accusing you? With the Mark Owen, oh in there no they didn't accuse me but I could tell that things shifted and I'm getting so creative and telling them how I do it and I'd mix it in with this and we'd get it off like that. Just get excited and smiling? Yeah, totally, yeah, just like I am now. And these guys are just like, anyway so I kind of figured it out near the end and I'm like, oh wow, this is not, something's not feeling quite right here. Like these guys are just after a win. That's what they're trying to get somebody, that's their job and if they can get a seal even better. So after Mark Owen wrote the book No Easy Day, same thing. And you saw these guys across the table and this is years later. So it wasn't like immediately. They went after some guys immediately, whatever, but they put all this together over a long time and followed all these- What was their ultimate goal? What did they want? They wanted him to, they wanted to build a case against him, a criminal case against him- For what? For not submitting his book to the Department of Defense for review. And- Is that so they can redact certain things that are classified? Yeah, which is why I was hypersensitive to it and even though mine are fiction, I submitted them. And that is a protocol? So when all those things in your book where it says redacted, is that why it's redacted? Really? So it's because of them? Yeah. So they made me hypersensitive to it. So no other author of fiction that has the security clearances that I had, no one else submits fiction. But I was so just tied to this because of my experience with the Mark Owen book and what they tried to do. I was like, I just want to make sure. And what they've taken out, absolutely ridiculous. So the first book, I didn't appeal it because they took 45 days to do it, which I thought was pretty good because they say they'll take 30. And I thought it's pretty good. They took out nine lines or something like that, which was fine. But the second one, a month goes by, then two, then three, then four, then five, then six. And they get almost to the seven month mark when they finally get back to me. So at this point, we had to push the publication date out of April to the summer. It's like a movie trying to figure out when you don't want two Avengers movies coming out at the same time from the same studio. So these are thought well ahead of time. So it was not convenient to have to push it all the way to the end of July. So it was a pain. And every single thing in there that was blacked out, my attorneys found in publicly available government documents. So not just like on Wikipedia or from somebody else that wrote a book or no publicly available government websites, government documents that anyone on earth can download. So they had done their due diligence to check if that stuff had actually been released already publicly. My lawyers did. Yeah, but the people that the people you submitted to at the Department of Defense, they just have this black pen and they're just taking things out. And then they see, oh, CIA will send it off to the CIA. You know, I don't work for the CIA, but they send it off. And then that starts the CIA clock looking at it. It's just ridiculous. And this is not something you had to do. It's by precedent. No, because it's fiction, because it's fiction by precedent. Now, like we talked about those laws earlier, three felonies a day. Laws are written if you look at them very broadly so that the government can interpret them the way they want to. And that didn't always used to be the case. If you go back 50 years, the idea was you had to write a law that the average guy could understand in one when you looked at it one time, read it. It's evident what that law means. Not anymore. The language involved, how long they are, how tough they are to decipher, even for attorneys to decipher. So it's written in a way that they can come after anyone they want for anything, which is by design. And they used it to go after Mark Owen. They used it even though that's nonfiction. He went to an attorney that had experience in this space, which you would do. Who's the best attorney for this? Oh, the guy that did a book called Kill Bin Laden with someone from Delta Force. That guy has experience. I'll go to him. So he went to that lawyer who said, no, you don't need to submit this. So there's lawsuits and all sorts of stuff that are associated with that. But for me, what they did, this is years later, his second book, he sends it to me. So I'm getting ready to get out of the military. He sends me his second book and says, hey, what do you think of this? And so I read it and I get, you know, read it quick. And then I sent him like one note that said, hey, awesome. Maybe in the first part in the preface, maybe talk about your experience over the last couple of years with the first book and what the government did to you and how you reacted. Just people would probably be interested in that. So I wrote that. So now I'm in this interrogation room with these NCIS guys. And that's one of the things that they pull out and said, so why are you editing classified material that hasn't been approved? Like, I don't know. The guy's a good friend, sends me the thing. I look at it. So what they wanted was to just put pressure on him and say, hey, we're going to go after your buddy if you don't do this for us, which was totally to say. So what did they want from him? I think they wanted him to admit he was guilty. And they also wanted a statement of not submitting it to the Department of Defense Office of Prepublication and Security Review, not going through. They want to make an example of him so that anybody else getting out would know that they had to do that. And I don't think it worked because there's plenty of books out there that are nonfiction that have not been through that process. But that's what they wanted from him. They wanted all the money from it, which was significant. All the money. Yep. And interestingly enough, all the money. And he was always going to give it all. That's the other part of this is so interesting is because I've known him for so long, he was always going to give it all away. And he had no reason to tell me that, you know, year before the whatever, however long it was before, like he wasn't setting this up as some criminal mastermind, but he was always going to give it away to a SEAL Foundation. And when the book came out, it all went into a bank account. But guess what came out of the bank account? Lawyer fees after that. So he still had all the money except for the lawyer fees. And then they still go after you for taxes that you're supposed to be. Anyway, it's the government. So they wanted that money, anything money going forward. Like if they made a movie from it, all those proceeds, they just wanted to crush them and make an example of him so other people would submit or make people think about nuts, not even writing anything anyway. How did it all end up? So it's a lawsuit with the attorney that gave the bad advice. I'm not sure exactly where that is. And then all the money went back to the government that was in the account and he's paying off the rest of it that went to attorney fees. So he didn't make anything? No. Wow. One penny. All the money went to the government. All the money went to the government. Plus taxes. So double money. So all the money goes to the government because he lost? Is that the idea? Because they finally put enough pressure on where the lawyers do their thing and they figure out a settlement of some sort. And that was the settlement, all the money. Wow. And is second book the same deal? No, that one went through the process. But after I read it, so he sent it to me before he sent it in. Oh, okay. But you know, there's nothing. But you read it and that's what they, that's what they, one of the things they used to try to get him to do what they wanted. So, and that wasn't the only one. There's all, everybody that knew him got pulled into this thing. But point being is that had that not happened, then that interrogation scene in my novel where James Reese sits down after what happens to his team, sits down with those guys across the table. I changed it to Afghanistan, changed it from San Diego to Afghanistan. But that's how I felt about the guys sitting across the table from me. So it feels real because I wasn't just like, hey, have you read into interrogation room or I'm arresting a couple of cop shows where they have somebody in an interrogation room. I'll just kind of write what that looks like or feels like. No, that's what it feels like to be in there having these eyes on you. Having them tell you that there's no cameras on when you know that there are and all, all that sort of thing. So I got to put all that together and make the book what it is. So without that happening, without them trying to go after me to put pressure on him and everyone associated with that, the first book would not be nearly as good. Like the combat stuff, yeah, it's different. But the other stuff, the conspiracy side of the house and the NCIS guys and that interrogation in particular and some of the bad guys, that's once again, you can't kill people in real life, but you know what? It's a canon fiction. And so it made it so much better than it would have been otherwise. So now looking back and I thank him to this day, I'm like, you know what? That first book, that resonated with Simon and Schuster for some reason. And a lot of it's what happened down range and those feelings and emotions. But a lot of it is because of what happened with with you as I was getting out. That's interesting.