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Episode 19—We Go Back in Time with Brian Mockenhaupt!
130 Plays9 years ago
This episode was originally a three-parter from back in the day. It features Brian Mockenhaupt, author of the critically acclaimed By-Liner Original "The Living in the Dead." Enjoy the hell out of this throwback all mushed together into one episode.
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Transcript
Introduction and Episode Background
00:00:00
Speaker
Hey, what's happening CNF-ers? It's your buddy Brendan here, coming at you from hashtag CNF Podcast HQ, aka The Bedroom Closet. What we've got here is a rerun to throwback to 2013, episode 3.
Brian Mockenhopped's Award-Winning Story
00:00:21
Speaker
with Brian Mockenhopped who is the freelance journalist who wrote the award-winning byliner original The Living and the Dead just an excellent piece on a group that was under attack and then the subsequent PTSD is just a wonderful story beautifully reported and beautifully written.
00:00:46
Speaker
Why I'm doing this rerun here is because I had broken up that episode three into three parts because back then I tried to keep the episodes very short, like 20 to 25 minutes. And now since I typically run about hour-long episodes, I decided to just put this one all in one lump so you could
00:01:10
Speaker
enjoy it yet again and also give you a sense of how raw the podcast was back then and if you thought it's raw it's raw now just wait till you hear this it's totally uh you can totally make out everything but it's definitely a cut a cut below what it is now and if you think it's low now
00:01:31
Speaker
So, in any case, if you know anybody who would like this episode, definitely
Call to Action: Sharing and Subscribing
00:01:38
Speaker
share it. Share other episodes, subscribe to it on iTunes, and subscribe to the email newsletter at BrendanOmera.com. Gonna go to a monthly newsletter. That's my collection plate, asking you to subscribe, share, and
00:01:55
Speaker
offer your email address if you don't mind, I don't spam ever. So in any case, enjoy this latest episode, which is a rerun, sort of, of episode 3, and this being episode 19 with Brian Mockinhop. Thank you.
Brian's Background and Story Essence
00:02:14
Speaker
was named the winner of the $25,000 Michael Kelly Award for his story, The Living and the Dead, about a marine platoon in Afghanistan. Brian, a former infantryman, wrote about Tom Worrell and his platoon, which suffered heavy casualties, namely Worrell's friends Jimmy Malachowski and Ian Muller, the effects of which followed Worrell home to the United States. The reporting for this piece stretched over 18 months, taking him from foot patrols in northern Marjah
00:02:40
Speaker
to Camp Lejeune in North Carolina, where the Marines struggle to reintegrate into the world they had left behind. Brian is a contributing editor at Outside, Reader's Digest, and Esquire Magazines, and is the non-fiction editor at the Journal of Military Experience. The Living and the Dead appears on biliner.com. So Brian, how did you come to this story?
Covering Military Stories: Challenges and Trust
00:03:00
Speaker
Hey, Brennan.
00:03:02
Speaker
It was a story that I wanted to write for a while. I've been covering the military. I've been writing about the wars since 2005 when I got out of the army. And in that time I've been back to Iraq as a journalist and I've been to Afghanistan several times. And one of the things that always struck me was leaders in those situations.
00:03:26
Speaker
are in incredibly tense and stressful moments trying to accomplish these really hard missions while taking care of and guiding these young men under them. And when leaders get hurt or die in battle, someone has to take their place, sometimes, right in the middle of a firefight. Someone has to step up and assume control, and it can be
00:03:53
Speaker
hours or weeks or months before they're able to sort of emotionally process what has happened. You know, so someone takes over a job that they never wanted in that way. And someone says, here you go, you are now in charge of these guys, because the person right above you who might have been a French and a mentor has been killed. And then the people who are beneath them
00:04:16
Speaker
have to adjust to having a new leader at this incredibly stressful time in their lives. But finding a specific story to follow was hard for a few reasons if you want to spend time on the ground.
00:04:29
Speaker
The unit in Afghanistan, you have to go through a logistics process, go through approval from the public affairs office and that kind of thing. So it can take a while to find out the unit you're actually going to be with on the ground. You have to say, well, I want to go to Helmand Province and meet with these guys. And their tours might be, you know, I think they're like from the Marines. It's, I don't know, I think they're about, their tours were a year at the time, but
00:04:57
Speaker
you have to plan ahead for getting over there and being with the right people at the right time. So there's logistics issue. But the other part of it is, I guess, sort of a tactfulness issue. It's hard to find this unit and they had tough and compassionate. You can't really just go and say, Hey, I want to come and write about your friend, Chuck Hill. You know, one of the most terrible days of your life.
00:05:21
Speaker
It can seem a little bit ghoulish, but I was over in Afghanistan. I was going to be out with Marines in Helmand Province, and I had gone to the little internet cafe at one of the bases there. I had read about the battalion that I was going to be with, and they had suffered a couple of casualties. I didn't realize at the time that they were from the same platoon.
00:05:44
Speaker
but I figured maybe one of those guys, they're both leaders and I might be able to tell their stories about what happens when leaders get killed in battle and how their men carry on. And when I got out to the main Marine base from where I was gonna push out to one of the smaller locations, I talked to the Marine leadership there and I explained the story to them and they sort of got it right away. And I said, sounds like a really interesting story and one that we haven't really seen people tell before. And they put me out to,
00:06:15
Speaker
the small patrol base of Dakota where Tom and his Marines are at. And Tom, as soon as I talked to him about the story and told him what I wanted to write, he was on board with it right away. And that's the only reason that the story worked, because of Tom being open enough and willing to talk about what had happened. And I think by
00:06:38
Speaker
him agreeing to that and him being so open, they kind of set the tone for the rest of the Marines. They looked at that and said, well, if you know if our boss is good with it, then okay, I guess we're, you know, then we, you know, we trust him. And so, yeah, we'll tell our stories to this guy we don't know as well. Were you surprised that Tom was so forthcoming right off the bat? Yeah, I was.
00:07:05
Speaker
because he doesn't know me. And this is something that was incredibly traumatic to these guys. I think it speaks to, probably in a lot of ways, to his devotion to Jimmy and to Ian, and that I wanted to write about who these guys were.
00:07:26
Speaker
But it was for Tom, you know, he was receptive to it in a way that went beyond just wanting to sort of eulogize his friends and talk about what great guides there were. You know, from the first conversation I had with him over there, when I explained what I wanted to write about, he pretty quickly understood where I was coming from, what I was talking about. I wanted to write about the extreme
00:07:56
Speaker
pressure and stress of leadership in those situations. And I think it connected with him because it was something that he was right in the middle of dealing with and feeling. And I'm gonna talk about just waking up or laying in bed at night and just being stressed out by the idea of having all these guys to keep safe and protect. And then after Ian and Jimmy were killed, it only got worse.
00:08:24
Speaker
And I have all credit to Tom for taking that chance to tell the story because that kind of story doesn't work if someone's not willing to really go deep into their experiences and how they're feeling. And it's hard as a journalist, and something I struggle with all the time, that someone is trying to find their own way through something, traumatic, and their way of
Ethics and Benefits of Lengthy Reporting
00:08:54
Speaker
processing and their way of getting right with themselves and with the world enough that they can go through their days and do what they need to do and what effect does that have when I sit down with them and say okay tell me about that day and I'm gonna need all kinds of details you know I want to know what you're thinking about and what the
00:09:16
Speaker
We know what the sunlight looked like, how hot was it, what were the sounds like, what were the smells, and sort of how post-traumatic stress works, and all that stuff is seared in your brain, and you can, that's why years later you can smell something that takes you right back to a moment, so it can't be the best thing for someone to be sort of diving back into this in a really deep way. So I tried to let
00:09:43
Speaker
Tom and those guys in some ways take the lead not wanting to push too hard in a way that was going to kind of do damage to them because no story is worth in any way being the cause of emotional pain or sort of a regression for these guys who are trying to find a way of coping with this.
00:10:10
Speaker
And that kind of leads to another question I wanted to ask you was, what is and was your repartorial approach to such sensitive issues of death of a friend in PTSD? Well, you know, one thing that was really worked out well with this story, and it's a luxury these days especially, one that you're able to write something at a length that you can
00:10:36
Speaker
really get into a subject and explore it, but also at a time, you know, you say you work on a newspaper, you have an afternoon, or maybe you get, you're lucky you get cut loose for a couple days to go a little deeper into a story, unless it's one of those things you're doing on your own time, and it's a long-term project, that you're dipping into when you can carve out a space, and you're, you know, falling over weeks or months, but in this case, going to Afghanistan, when you're with these guys on the ground,
00:11:06
Speaker
for a week, week and a half, two weeks, you're with them all the time. And you're there 24 hours a day, you're sleeping with them, you're eating with them, you're going on patrol with them. And so you have this real luxury of not having to flip open the notebook right away and say, hey, what was it like this day? And tell me exactly what happened.
00:11:30
Speaker
I don't think I asked anyone really a question for the first four days, other than just asking them things about the area they patrol. You know, the logistics of moving supplies, moving men out there, what their mission was out in the area when we're hanging out around the patrol base, out on missions.
00:11:55
Speaker
and I didn't really ask them about Ian or Jimmy for several
Building Trust with Marines
00:11:58
Speaker
days because I didn't need to, so I knew I was going to be with them. One of the things that that was able to do was show, they were able to see my approach and what I was about before I asked them about this really sensitive topic. You know, I was out on patrols with them, so they could see that, you know, I had come to Afghanistan really cared about
00:12:25
Speaker
hearing about what their experiences were like over there, that I was out exposing myself to some amount of danger on patrols, so we could see that I wanted to understand what their sort of daily situation was like over there. I wanted to see the foot patrols of it on, like the same kind of foot patrol when Ian Muller and J. Markowski were killed.
00:12:52
Speaker
then when I started asking about it, I was a little bit of a known quantity. And I've been able to talk to them about my past experiences and just hear about their time in Afghan offense. So it wasn't just about that moment. So I think that made it a little bit easier to talk about some of those sensitive and painful topics. And I could come back to it and revisit it. And with Tom, I was
00:13:22
Speaker
many different conversations. Some were sort of longer, deeper, like, you know, just really intense conversations. And then other times, you know, had mentioned something, you could kind of just leave it at that. If it was another nugget of information, they were able to, they were able to sort of play it by ear in some situations. And if it didn't feel like, you know, it was the right time to sort of press or follow up questions to dig deeper into, I knew
00:13:53
Speaker
back to it. Right, and you going upwards of four days without really, without doing your, while asking questions or doing a traditional interview, I think it fosters a certain degree of trust that this guy isn't just parachuting in and then leaving us a day later. You're proving to them that you're not a hit and run journalist. You're in this for as long as it's gonna take.
00:14:20
Speaker
Yeah, and one of the other things that enabled was that they could bring up things without me asking about the guys. So I would sit with Tom in the COC in basically the little dirt floor room that he and Jimmy lived in, where the radios are at, and it's a combat operation center. And we'd just be sitting there and Tom would say, oh, that was
00:14:45
Speaker
that picture up on the wall that's Jimmy from the memorial service or yeah we just used to hang out here and listen to classical music on his laptop oh really what kind of things do you listen to and so it's a very conversational sort of interview that it's not going through here's all these questions we're sitting here and both of us are aware that
00:15:08
Speaker
you know now is the time that we're going to ask questions and answers and it would just sort of unfurl in the course of hanging out. You know he could be watching a movie on his laptop and some of the downtime during the day and then he would talk about a specific moment or a funny thing that had happened or something like that. So then by the time it comes around when I want to start asking about
00:15:36
Speaker
specific things that haven't been brought up yet. I already have an understanding of the living conditions they have out there, what they do on a daily basis, what their mission has been, how the area has changed over the months that they've been there. I know I've heard some little snippets and details about some of the specifics on what has happened to these guys. And so I'm able to start the conversation in a little bit
00:16:04
Speaker
a deeper level of understanding on both of our parts, I guess. How great does that feel as a reporter to have that kind of liberty where you don't feel rushed by any time constraints? Things are going to unfold at their pace, whatever that pace may be.
00:16:24
Speaker
that makes it really hard to go into situations where you don't have that kind of stuff. I don't even know how I would ever go back to daily journalism years ago. I don't even know how I'd go back to that. You know, like going out and having to fill the notebook with the bare bones of, you know, everything you absolutely need, then go back and write the story up. And, you know, it would be a good exercise and certainly in discipline and craft forming, keeping
00:16:52
Speaker
Keeping the speed and building the speed and just keeping that sort of repertorial scent tone. But no, it's really fantastic to be in a situation that you're also not in a danger of forgetting some really key questions. Yeah.
00:17:18
Speaker
You don't have a terrible memory, or I'll get caught up in a conversation, and then you leave somewhere like, oh no, I forgot, this really, this really physical thing, but out there, I sit on my cot and I can look through and review notes, and then
Commitment to Impactful Storytelling
00:17:34
Speaker
go out tomorrow, maybe I'll take the conversation in this direction. It's more like, so you're just pushing into an exploring area instead of
00:17:52
Speaker
What I find is that after a while, you're filling in the mosaic of the subject, which is nice because along the way, I'm learning all these things I didn't even know to be interested in, I didn't even know to ask about. And that just comes from having that luxury of having long rambling
00:18:17
Speaker
You know, just kind of freeform conversations and then he'll mention something that opens up a new path to go down, you know, and a lot of times it's really, really rich.
00:18:32
Speaker
for the story, critical information. Yeah, those are the type of things that are great that just come with simply putting in the time. It's that sort of art of discovery in research. There are things, as you just mentioned, that'll come up that you had no idea would ever come up. But it did because you spent the hours on the ground
00:18:59
Speaker
hanging out, as Gates Lee says, the art of hanging out is kind of what we do. And these things come up that you would have never imagined to ask in the first place, and that's another thing that time affords us. Absolutely. And it's a balance, right? I mean, your time is worth, you know, your time is worth money. I mean, I would love it if I didn't have to think about the money end of this stuff, but, you know, that's a
00:19:29
Speaker
It's a reality, especially these days, that you can't spend forever working on this stuff. This story was different for me because I just didn't, um, I've been trying to get it published for quite a while and they got turned down by several magazines before, before I had talked with BiLiner about it and they, and they, um, they ran with it. But this is a story that, you know, I care about everything that I write about.
00:19:56
Speaker
some more than others, but this one in particular. I really just wanted to see it out there. I just wanted to be able to find some venue in which to tell the stories that these guys that kind of trusted me with. But you can't spend this long on everything.
00:20:29
Speaker
especially newspapers or newspapers that are vastly cut back on the amount of really long stories that reporters are spending weeks or months working on and magazines are shrinking their page counts and figuring out the economics of it.
00:20:50
Speaker
can be tricky. But there's always the once in a, you know, once in a while stories which, you know, this is something I can do that I have a good fortune to do once a year, once every couple of years, you know, or find a way just in downtime that is something I'm continually going back to and pursuing. You know, any way I can make that work, it's well worth it for me because this is where I
00:21:19
Speaker
get the most joy and satisfaction for film and writing. And over the year and a half that you spent reporting this piece, were you wholly committed to this one or was it one among other stories you were working on at the current time? No, no. I was working on many other things at the time. So originally when I had gone to Afghanistan, I was there for, even in Afghanistan, there were several other stories that I was doing. I was there for seven or eight weeks and this was
00:21:52
Speaker
And I had gone to find this story about young men in battle, what happens when leaders die, how did they get through it. I wasn't able to pitch it to several magazines and wasn't able to get any traction on it, which in the end is what made the story work so well. Because if I had come home and written that story for a magazine after getting back from Afghanistan as I had originally intended, it would have been a fine story.
00:22:19
Speaker
It would have been about these guys in the ground, what had happened to them, and how they sort of continued on and finished their tour and went home. But what is so powerful about their experiences, and I think especially for outsiders to read about it, is that's only half the story about what happened to them in Afghanistan. The other half of it is everything they lived through when they came home, and that they tried to process and reconcile being back home, being alive, not being seriously hurt.
00:22:47
Speaker
when these people who are so close to them, you know, emotionally close to them and physically when they got killed were so close to them aren't with
Writing Process and Story Evolution
00:22:56
Speaker
them. They deal with this guilt. It's like really just crushing guilt and the questions of, you know, why these guys? Why not me? That unfolded over months. And during that whole time I was looking for someone to publish a story. And it wasn't until
00:23:14
Speaker
several months after they come home, that Tom had tried to kill himself. I was in, they had come home in late July, and that was around Thanksgiving of that year, and I kept in touch with them here and there, so every several weeks or couple months, sort of touched base to them, and then finally, in the early part of that next year, when I knew that
00:23:41
Speaker
I finally found a home for the story. I was able to then, I went down to Camp Lejeune, I went to visit with Joanna Malachowski's family at Maryland, met Tom's parents, went down to Parris Island where they had all gotten to boot camp to do all this other reporting. So I was able to then be back with, it was the first time I'd seen this since I saw the Afghanistan, was able to be back on the ground with them and hear about what their
00:24:09
Speaker
kind of a mike and play they got home uh... so it wouldn't have been and i don't want to pay the story would have been and take it you know there's plenty of fine stories the care written for spending time on the ground but uh... it was only mister not being able to you know do not be able to find a outlet for the story that
00:24:32
Speaker
I was able to keep following these guys. I'd be working on other stuff and then kind of revisit it and then I'd send out another pitch to someone and have it get rejected. So I'm just glad that I finally found a place, a place that would run it.
00:24:49
Speaker
Right, and subsequently it was able to sort of bloom and ripen the way you wanted it to and then you win an outstanding and very prestigious award as a result of it not finding the homes that you initially wanted it to. So that's a great tribute to being able to
00:25:11
Speaker
forcefully have to wait to find a different home for it.
00:25:29
Speaker
It's a slower, more deliberate process. It gets rigorously fact-checked. And the other is, I mean, there's more involved editing. But a lot of times, direct for websites, it goes up fast. And then it just kind of disappears and sort of like stuff. But with things like Atavist and Byliner and Kendall Singles, I think it remains to be seen whether the business model will work.
00:26:02
Speaker
how journalists can throw that kind of thing into their mix. But in this case, if I had written it as a magazine story, it would have been maybe 8,000 words long, which is really long for a magazine story.
00:26:21
Speaker
That's a, that's a, um, that's a gift these days. And she can work on something that's that long. But in this case, you know, it sounds kind of, sounds kind of silly saying it, but it wasn't, it wasn't long enough. I couldn't have, you know, I couldn't have done justice to the story as, um, as I thought it should be told. But with eyeliner, you know, with a Kindle single, it's as long as you want to, as long as you want to write it.
00:26:52
Speaker
And that's their notion of the story they try to tell. Too long for magazines, too short for books. There's plenty of books out there that don't need to be books. But that's just the accepted length of a book is 75,000, 80,000 words, 250 pages. I couldn't have written a book about these guys' experience.
00:27:19
Speaker
I couldn't have told everything that I wanted in there. There's a book, and yet you spend way too much time talking about their background, their childhood, you know, different experiences in the military and sort of belaboring, drawing out points. But in this, I was able to do it as a space to get across everything that I wanted in there, and it ended up being like 20,000
00:27:46
Speaker
20,000 words or something. So, yeah, it was a luck doubt.
00:27:59
Speaker
Nice, and with the subtitle, you know, War, Friendship, and the Battles That Never End, how unprepared do you think the American military was for the after effects of this war, specifically, maybe every war, but has on the mind of the soldier coming back home? You know, it's strange, I feel like it's a lesson that they relearn with every war, every extended conflict. They're certainly learning much more about it than this.
00:28:28
Speaker
past decade that we know almost now this generation of war has been really fascinating for the medical advancements which happens in every single war in the Civil War I think was ambulances you know and all these advances that have come from you know medical advances that we now pay for guns that have come from combat and I think you know plastic surgery in World War I and prosthetics and blood transfusions and and then in World War I that
00:28:58
Speaker
really the advent of some more psychiatry. But it's a long, slow process. You unfortunately need damaged bodies and damaged minds to make some of these advances. And so now, especially with a traumatic brain injury and what we've learned about concussive force in the brain and find all these different ways to measure this and put people through different imaging scans that weren't available before.
00:29:29
Speaker
But certainly it had been a long time since he had a really big cohort that had been through these traumatic experiences. And Vietnam vets are still thousands and thousands of Vietnam vets who are struggling with their experiences from that war. And then the problem, of course, is that they come back after the war
00:29:53
Speaker
and have emotional wounds from what they had seen, what they had done. And then, if those don't get addressed and treated and resolved somehow, it leads to other effects. Whether it's substance abuse or, you know, a failed relationship. And then those things just build upon each other so you get to be years later. And, you know, how do you untie that big knotted up
00:30:24
Speaker
ball of twine, you know, what's the cause, what's the effect, well the root cause, you know, might be having been to war and what they saw and what it did to them, but then there's always secondary and tertiary effects. So at least now with these guys, you know, our strong world and his buddies, when it's soon after they came home, and the hope is that if they can get help, and they can have
00:30:54
Speaker
someone to talk to and be able to work through some of this stuff with some old methods and with some new treatments that they've come about. As the military learns about the damaging effects of this war, that they can get themselves on a better path before it
00:31:19
Speaker
compounds with all these other problems and the like. You know a Tom that started to affect his relationship with his wife and with his kids and fortunately he did not, you know, wasn't successful in trying to kill himself and fortunately he got to a place where he was comfortable and willing to ask for, you know, to ask for help and he was able to
00:31:49
Speaker
save himself, save his relationship with his wife and his kids. I think a lot of that also in these wars, and just combat in general, is the stigma of appearing weak and asking for help and that kind of thing. I think the military has done a
00:32:17
Speaker
Finally, a better job of reducing some of that. Letting you guys know that this is just a part of what you go through. It doesn't mean that you're deficient in any way as a leader. It doesn't mean that you're weak or that you can't handle situations that you put in. It's just part of it. It's exhibiting some real amount of strength to step forward. Be like, I need someone to
00:32:43
Speaker
to help process some of this stuff. But for Tom also to be willing to talk about that with me is, you know, it's pretty amazing. And I think it left me with some amount of feeling like a real responsibility to
00:33:04
Speaker
get the story right and that I'm not saying that responsibility to tell a story that Tom is going to be happy with are the guys but to you know if they're going to share this with me then I just felt like a real as I was writing that having all that stuff in my notebooks I felt a real burden to tell as true of a story as I could because that's the only reason they were talking to me like you know that they needed some
00:33:34
Speaker
payoff for revisiting these really painful things. You know, and the payoff is that they can know that the story of their friends is being told and what these guys were like, but also that what they've gone through, you know, it's meaningful and it matters even though it has caused them and their families great pain. It's not, you know, it's not forgotten as soon as they come home.
00:34:03
Speaker
And how do you think being a former infantryman yourself, how has that given you authority to pursue these types of stories with these particular characters? Well, when I got on the ground with the Marines, I think it definitely helped that initial vetting process. There was a journalist a couple of times, but it also had been in uniform. And so even though my experiences were different from theirs, they were similar enough, especially
00:34:32
Speaker
compared to other civilians that they might know, that I think it took a little bit less time for them to let their guard down a little bit and be ready to engage me in conversation. But I think in general, for any journalist who's there, it goes a long way, just that journalists care enough to tell a story, to go out there and expose themselves to danger and be on the ground with the guys. I think that
00:35:01
Speaker
that doesn't pass notice by the guys who are out there. I mean, a lot of them will complain about journalists. And rightly, in some cases, rightly so. I mean, there's all different levels of concern and professionalism practice in those situations. And unfortunately, sometimes people have bad experiences as a journalist for legitimate reasons. But I think in general, there's a lot of really, there's a lot of really
00:35:31
Speaker
wonderful, professional, dedicated people who go to places like Afghanistan to tell these stories. So I think that they definitely appreciate that. But then from having had some similar experiences from being in the military, yeah, that definitely helped, just in trading stories about past experiences or something like that. At what point did you know you had enough to start drafting The Living and the Dead?
00:36:04
Speaker
said I knew I think when I was in Afghanistan because it clearly could have been a story that wouldn't have worked at all that if I had been there and the person who had taken over for Jimmy wasn't communicative or and also wasn't really interested in opening up and kind of going deep into it or just some of the
00:36:32
Speaker
You know, the situation on the ground, it might not have lent itself to a really deep, long narrative, but I think as soon as I've heard some of the broad strokes, especially that Ian had been in the same platoon, and that he was the guy right under Tom, and that Jimmy was the guy right above him, and that Tom is a pretty good
00:36:52
Speaker
storyteller and noticed interesting things and was, you know, a curious guy who read books on the Civil War. And I knew right there that I had a good story that I would be able to tell this story of Tom and tell the story of leaders in battle through Tom. So I think I, right there within the first, within the first couple days, I knew that it, at least it wasn't gonna be a situation that I'd have to then go off and try to find a different group
00:37:21
Speaker
through which to tell the story. But like I said before, the story evolved and changed. And, unfortunately, Tom was willing to continue to talk to me and to tell me about what had happened to him in November. Kind of he went into this really dark place and that he was willing to talk to me about that. And that's when I really knew that, I think that's when I really felt
00:37:51
Speaker
that sort of heavy burden I was talking about on this train getting out there because these guys go through this and come to tell me that he had tried to kill himself and that he was appreciative that I still cared about the story and I was still taking time to try to tell it and to follow up with him and see what was going on with him and so if he's talking about that then
00:38:20
Speaker
I really need to find a home for the story so that other people can read about it. So I think it was at that point upon hearing what had happened to Tom that he was still willing to talk to me about it. That's when I first had the larger concept of what the story would and should be.
00:38:42
Speaker
And as you started to sit down at the computer, and now you've got the pressure and burden to tell the story and tell it well, what was your approach to the writing of this story? My approach with this story was pretty similar to how I approach all the stories. That would be a pretty sloppy writing process. Well, I don't know if you call it sloppy, but I've never been able to just sit down in front of a computer and start writing.
00:39:12
Speaker
and working through this sort of internally crafted basic structure idea. I spend a lot of time talking through things in my head, and I'll write down a notebook, just jot down ideas, and I'll fill a whole page with crazy scribblings and arrows that go here and there.
00:39:34
Speaker
So it's almost like a physical manifestation of my thought process and I just as I'm pondering and turning things over about how I best might approach it and then a lot of times I'll put on little pieces
Freelancing Struggles and Rejection
00:39:48
Speaker
of paper I'll write down key scenes and dialogues and scenes and then I'll like literally lay it out on the floor.
00:39:57
Speaker
just go through it and rearrange stuff until I have a workable concept in my head. I find it really hard to give myself
00:40:12
Speaker
start forward with something, and I wish it was noise this way, because I can't really feel like it hinders me at times. A lot of times it's better just to start writing and get stuck down, and then you can go back and tweak and revisit, but I need to have a sphere concept of where I'm starting and how I'm going to accomplish, put on paper what I have in my mind. So then once I have that, and then I'll just start
00:40:40
Speaker
to start working through it. And I rarely write, you know, from beginning to end. I just write chunks here and there. And that's what, you know, and I think if it was a different, if it was a different kind of, if it was a different kind of writing, you know, there was more, you know, exploring an idea or argument or something that
00:41:06
Speaker
It wouldn't lend itself as well to just, you know, one day, like, okay, I'm going to write about when Ian got hit. You know, and it's almost like those little chapters and things, because you can just, as long as I'm secure and confident of the overall structure of it, then I can just, you know, knock off pieces.
00:41:27
Speaker
How were you able to deploy elements of suspense in the narrative? Specifically, there's an example in the first chapter, the last step with the metal detector. And I think you really deployed suspense well, where you're really on the edge of your seat, turning the pages to see what's going to happen to the platoon. So how were you able to employ those elements to keep the page turning?
00:41:59
Speaker
of that. And that was all after the fact I was able to talk to him and walk on the road where it happened. This was, you know, I was there a month and a half after Ian had gotten killed. And the actual, you know, Tom knew, remembered and talking to some of the other guys. There were scraps of dialogue that he remembered and other people remembered. And I felt confident. He wasn't relaying whole paragraphs of information. So,
00:42:28
Speaker
If he tells me that Ian said, hey, Sargent World, you want to take the field to the road, I'm pretty confident that that's quite similar to how that conversation might have gone down. You know, I know that the fallibility of that marine recollection, those kind of things are for such an important
00:42:46
Speaker
key moments in his life. It makes sense that he would remember that and then check with other people. So I was able to incorporate some dialogue in that, but it's not a very long, but how important that moment is, it's not a very long scene. They're walking back and they walk down and Ian's out in the front and he steps on a bomb. In writing that out, it went too quick.
00:43:09
Speaker
And so trying to figure out a way to get across some sense of what it's like when you're out there, because it takes a long time to, you know, you're just walking down the road, and especially if someone is using a minesweeper and holding up at points, and it's just moments that are just loaded with tension and what might happen in the next step. But if you're, you know, it's one of the, obviously the problems of, you know,
00:43:41
Speaker
really get a sense of everything that's going on in little conversations you don't might not have a lot to work with. So part of it was having been out there in patrolling that area and then you know what to describe what was going on at the time and then the other thing was you know just sort of I guess a stylistic you know old device using you know these
00:44:06
Speaker
These mind sweepers, you swing it back and forth. You're walking and it just tick, tock, tick, tock. I think I described it, I can't turn up. So he's that at that moment. He's talking to him, you know.
00:44:22
Speaker
Do you want me to take the field to the road?" And then you know, they just got a little bit of a thought process that they started putting in bombs in the fields too. So it doesn't even matter. Both could be dangerous, but the guys are tired, so okay, we'll take the road. So he's up there. And then just using the words of TikTok, and then you can put something in another description, another
00:44:46
Speaker
Um, sentence of what's happening or here's, you know, now he's up by this mud law TikTok. Um, that the whole time trying to convey that idea that the whole time the bomb detector is going, they're on a road that you don't know. Maybe there's no bombs. Maybe there are, but that whole time as they're thinking through what's the best way to go. Um,
00:45:06
Speaker
you know if he got too far ahead all that kind of stuff and so with matt westbrook who is the dog handler he's catching up to him cause Ian was out too far ahead so now they're going ahead and Holly's right there behind Ian you know tick tock tick tock and then finally he gets onto the bridge and steps on a bomb steps on a bomb or I think there was still some debate about whether it was command detonated
00:45:34
Speaker
could have been pressure bomb, but it was also probably more likely it was a wire from down the wall and around a corner. So someone was just waiting there. How did you get your start in journalism? I went to a journalism school, went to Northwestern. Back in the 90s, graduated in 1996. I spent three years working for the Providence Journal.
00:46:00
Speaker
doing, you know, Suburban Bureau reporting. So I was covering school committee and town council and the police and writing feature stories. Did that for three years. Then I went over and worked in Cambodia, the English language newspaper for a couple of years in Phnom Penh. And I had done some freelancing in Korea for just a little under a year. And then I had listed in the army. I was in the army for about four years.
00:46:28
Speaker
And then after that, I got back into writing by writing about the military and about the wars. And initially, that was mostly what I was writing about. And now, it's probably down to about half of what I write about the military and the wars. And you've written extensively and brilliantly on the military. But how much of a challenge is it for you to break into some other genres of nonfiction, given your expertise and platform with military writing?
00:46:57
Speaker
Well I think you nailed it with that question that especially these days you have to have some sort of demonstrated, you know, niche or ability
00:47:10
Speaker
in a specific area that goes beyond what other writers have, just because it's so hard to break into certain magazines, to certain websites, that kind of thing. And that's why I was able to get into magazines after the Army. I guess the way I look at it is, I might have been the best reporter or the best infantryman, but
00:47:35
Speaker
when you put those, when you put those two circles together, where they overlap is a pretty narrow band. And that's what I was able to, that's what I was able to sell, you know, just to get a chance to do some of that writing, because at the time, this is back in 2006, people were media outlets were really hungry for, still hungry for war stories, and also with, you know, writers had some sort of personal experience,
00:48:06
Speaker
of the military. And so that's what, that's how I was able to get my foot in the door. And it sort of, from there it was all, you know, one thing leads to another, so I spent a lot of time writing about the military, and now I've spent more time writing about the outdoors and adventure athletes and so that kind of stuff. And that came about through writing about the military. I went to Afghanistan in 2009 to write
00:48:37
Speaker
And it was sort of a non-obvious story for their readership, but one that, you know, they would find interesting. They have all these stories about, you know, hiking and mountaineering. Well, here's guys who are doing that in combat. It was about the added challenges of, you know, you're going up the mountain wearing body armor. You're carrying all this weight and a machine gun and you're having to, you know, stay off the trail because it might be mined.
00:49:07
Speaker
but now you might fall off the side of the mountain because you're on a dangerous rocky edge and you might get ambushed and be fighting up there. So I go on to write that story and that then enable me to get into doing more of outdoor stuff. So now I'll write stuff outside that has nothing to do with military. And how much time do you spend generating story ideas and querying editors at various magazines?
00:49:34
Speaker
Not enough. Not enough. That's something that you should need to carve out more time for, much more time for doing, sort of on a weekly basis. Because it's, you know, even though there's several magazines I write for or have written for in the past, you know, they go through changes and, you know, they, they're,
00:50:04
Speaker
their freelance budget shrink or their ad space shrink. You never know when one might go out of business broadening that, broadening the pool of its relationships or available outlets. Hugely important and something that you just spend more time doing. But especially these days, you look at all the newspapers that are going away. Just cut way back, they don't even exist anymore.
00:50:32
Speaker
Seattle Post intelligence, I recommend news, and like giant cuts at L.A. Times or San Francisco Chronicle, and be able to be a great journalist here then if they haven't gone into something completely different as a line of work. You know, there's freelancing, so it's a pretty big pool of people who are out doing this kind of work.
00:50:53
Speaker
And to what extent are you dealing with rejection or end killed stories? To what extent? Yeah. What do you mean by that? I guess what's your experience? I'm sorry? Just crying in my beer. Yes, they're crying in your beer stein. Yeah. Yeah, I think I was just telling you early.
00:51:19
Speaker
before you try the interview that uh... i guess last night got a rejection from an editor and i know there is a very awful nice rejection but it says you know page counts are page counts are down and we have this backlog of assigned stuff and find this really interesting but unfortunately can't uh... can't do anything with it so you know what are you gonna try to find a different um... let's try to find a different uh... magazine for it you know and
00:51:49
Speaker
with some of these stories, there's a limited pool of appropriate magazines. And I realize you can tweak a pitch to tune it to many, many different publications, but if you're depending on the subject matter, there might only be five or six appropriate outlets. And sometimes it has nothing to do with the merits of the story. Sometimes they've just run, especially, and I found this these days with Brian about the military,
00:52:18
Speaker
There's less of an appetite for it as the wars are thankfully winding down. But they might have just run a military story. Or they might have run something that was very similar, military or not, something similar to it. Or at least not differentiated enough that it merits another feature story.
00:52:42
Speaker
And sometimes just nothing you can, nothing you can do about it. Story and by-liner though, you know, that was, that was a long time. I think I got turned down by six magazines, five or six magazines. But it gets to a point that it just, it was really frustrating because there was no place else I could go with it. I just did not know of anything else that I could do with it. And I had a friend who, um,
00:53:10
Speaker
had a connection with someone at Byliner and I wrote to him and said, hey, would you mind introducing this guy? Because I'm sort of at wit and I'm trying to find a home for this story. And it ended up working out. I think it wasn't for, that was the last, sort of the last ditch effort. It wasn't for that. I'd just be sitting on a notebook, several notebooks full of really
00:53:39
Speaker
wonderful, compelling material. It had nothing to do with it.
00:53:43
Speaker
Right, and then you've also got your shouldering that burden of Tom wanting to see the story published and you're at the same time just struggling to find a home for this great story. And he's probably wondering, hey, when's this thing gonna run? I can't wait to read it. And meanwhile, you're at the mercy of editors and magazines that are just saying it's not the right fit. Right, how awful would
00:54:13
Speaker
and i did for me i i did feel awful when uh... i think he had even sent me a note at one point right then i just to check in with them me after i'm like he has to look on with that and i said i'm still still looking because yet he had really opened himself up was assuming it was at least four something you know it wasn't just so that because you can't you know you that that
00:54:41
Speaker
that's on me that you know i'm that you know i'm gonna you know sort of find an outlet for it and you know on top part and rightfully so the assumption is that if i show up somewhere like anyone write this story and he said okay well it could be in print sometime yeah you know there is there is a reason for me to be talking about this you know horrible loss of experience in my life
00:55:08
Speaker
And I realize it's just part of how the business works, and sometimes things don't work out. But while that may be the reality that we live with as writers, that doesn't work for him. I was pretty thankful that there was a way that I could finally tell the story and not have to
00:55:25
Speaker
tell him, hey, sorry, it just didn't work out because the media landscape's changing and places are running long stories and, you know, that's just offensive to him. Okay, wow, great. Thanks, man. All this time talking to you and opening up about this stuff and it was literally for nothing. So, yeah, I would have
00:55:50
Speaker
And what would you say is your daily approach to writing in your style of journalism? I think it depends based on, you know, just a given day of what I'm working on at the moment. Right now, I'm working on a story about the Civil War. It's almost, it's a complete, it's a historical narrative. So after this, I'm gonna go down to the public library and I'm gonna go up
00:56:19
Speaker
sit in the genealogy section, which I just discovered recently, and it's really amazing. I found some of an obscure book that I had read about that they have on their shelves, a memoirs of a Civil War soldier. And so I'm going to go look for little bits and scraps to fill in the narrative. And I have getting me or having a first draft done, but I have a couple chunks that
00:56:49
Speaker
one in particular is kind of some heavy lifting of having to it. It's not something that sort of, it's not a chunk of narrative that writes itself. It is sort of fun just to sit down and know if dialogue and past space action, and I've been avoiding it for a little while, so I need to get a handle around that section, but I still want to be going down to write a few, right, I'd say hopefully a thousand words today, at least 500,
00:57:19
Speaker
Ideally a thousand words of this story. Most writers, I like to say, they like to play writer. They tweet, Facebook, blog, this and that, but don't have any real traction in non-fiction. And you, on the other hand, you're all about the byline. You know how to get out there and query and to hustle. And you have your little social networking presence, which is the other side of this coin.
00:57:47
Speaker
So what are your feelings towards social networking for the writer versus just turning out great content? Well, you know, I'm all for it. And if it works for people, I just don't understand. I've never taken the time to really explore what it would do for me. Sadly, about a decade and a half late to the game, last fall I just put up a website.
00:58:17
Speaker
at some of my work on it, but I don't blog on it. Honestly, I don't. I don't know what I would say in tweets, and I'm sure someone could give me a really good argument about why she's on Twitter and how I'd increase people reading the stuff that I do write. But with Twitter and blogging at this point in my life, the things that I have to say, and I've also never been,
00:58:46
Speaker
much skilled at opinion-based writing and a lot of my writing has just been reporting and observation letting other people tell those stories. But even with that, I'm sure there's ways that Twitter could be valuable to me. I just haven't spent much time figuring out what's
00:59:13
Speaker
what would be worthwhile coming from me and 140 characters. And you know the other thing is and I realize it's all part of the larger notion of having your work out there and I think these days it'll become more and more important because I'm used to writing for magazines. You don't have to market it. You just
00:59:31
Speaker
the magazine does that. People, it's marketed by the name of the magazine. There's already people who understand what Sports Illustrated or Time is, and then they pick it up and your story's in there. I think everything's becoming so much more driven by freelancers, you know, like in the case of living under that. You know, it's this e-book and you kind of have to do some sort of self-marketing with that. It's more like just doing sort of
00:59:59
Speaker
you know, author's marketing for a book. But as you mentioned, I don't do too much of this. But as deep as I get into it is posting new stories when I have them out on my Facebook page. And why did you choose to pursue an MFA with Goucher College? And what did you get out of that program? The MFA in nonfiction, Goucher is a really great program.
01:00:29
Speaker
all non-fiction, not a mixed genre program, so there's not fiction and poetry. There are some people working on memoir and essays. There's also a lot of journalists, but I think there's a really strong commitment to being fact-based. And this is the source of many, many hot arguments within non-fiction circles about memoir and the people
01:00:57
Speaker
have very different approaches to how things in the past are interpreted. And if it's coming, if you're writing about your experiences, that makes it nonfiction. Well, other people have very different views of that.
Conclusion and Podcast Subscription
01:01:14
Speaker
Goucher, I really liked about that. They take an approach that is much more in line with how I came into writing the kind of writing that I do, which is,
01:01:28
Speaker
strong reporting based non-fiction, even if you are writing about personal experiences. You know, it gave me a community of writers as a freelance writer. You spend a lot of time alone. You know, the people you write about, you're going off on trips here and there, and then after a story's over, that sort of connection is removed until the next time you're in that city, and maybe you see those people again. But you don't have that sort of newsroom conversation, the water cooler conversation of just talking to the guys that that's across from you about
01:01:58
Speaker
what he's working on or you can say, hey man, can you look at this lead and tell me what you think of this? That real-time, in-person interaction is taken out a lot of times for freelancers. This gave me a community of writers to work with. And the mentors are fantastic. And then also a way to work through
01:02:25
Speaker
to work through a craft that isn't just in producing my own feeding myself-based writing. You know, I had already been writing for a while and had the ability to get stuff published, but it's helped me fine-tune a lot of things. And it exposed me to writing that I didn't spend much time with, but then also ways of looking at my own writing.
01:02:55
Speaker
Brian Mockinop is the author of The Living and the Dead, War, Friendship, and the Battles That Never End. It is published by Byliner. Brian, I want to thank you again for carving out some time out of your day to do this interview. It's been my great pleasure to speak with you this time. Thanks, Brian. Thanks for talking to you.
01:03:12
Speaker
This concludes my interview with journalist Brian Mockenhaugh. Be sure to tune in to past and future episodes of Hashtag CNF by subscribing to the podcast on iTunes. For questions, concerns, or requests to be on the show, please email me at brendan at brendanomera.com. Thank you.