School of War - Ep 33: Steven Pressfield on the Truth about War

Episode Date: June 14, 2022

Steven Pressfield, author of A Man at Arms and Gates of Fire, joins the show to talk about writing historical fiction, telling the truth about war, and why the hardest part of art is “doing the work” . ▪️ Times  • 01:38 Introduction • 03:49 Why Historical Fiction? • 08:25 Creating The “Distant Mirror” • 12:12 Special Forces  • 14:17 Characters  • 19:44 A Man at Arms  • 22:01 Post-Warrior Life   • 23:46 The Warrior Ethos • 27:20 Society Needs, But Doesn’t Want, Warriors • 32:52 Citizen-Soldier  • 34:10 Reading History  • 37:48 Characters Are Uncovered, Not Made • 40:19 The War Of Art • 45:52 Telling Stories

We're going to do something a little different today. Normally on this show, we have scholars, historians, and practitioners of the art of war. Join us to discuss their experiences or area of specialty. Today we're going to have a novelist join us. Stephen Presfield, author of Gates of Fire, A Man at Arms, and other such remarkable novels of war, mostly set in long ago periods. We'll talk about the warrior ethos, about why men fight, and about how Pressfield has made a career out of telling the stories of

such men. It is a prescription for war, this Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. December 7, 1941, a date which will live in infamous. The bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a state of it. We continue to face a grave situation in Iran. We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets. We shall never surrender. Hi, I'm Aaron McLean. Thanks for joining the School of War. I'm delighted to welcome today, Stephen Pressfield. Prolific author of any number of books you're probably familiar with. The Legend of Bagger Vance is one of them. Most recently, a work of historical fiction called A Man at Arms. There's Gates of Fire. There's a series of books of advice about maximizing one's potential. as a writer and an artist.

Stephen, I've been a fan of yours for some years, and I have to say, I first encountered your work when it was assigned to me as reading at the Marine Corps' Infantry Officers course. We all read Gates of Fire there. So thank you so much for joining the show. Sorry, go ahead. Was that Gates of Fire?

That's right. This is circa the summer of 2008. Every Marine Lieutenant in the course read Gates of Fire that summer. Well, thanks for having me, Aaron. This is you know, I'm a fellow Marine, but not an officer. Well, look, so this is actually where I wanted to start. I think we would all just be interested in hearing a bit about your career. And maybe let's start at the start.

You know, what came first? Was it an interest in writing or was it an interest in the military in war, which has been one of your consistent subjects? And how did you end up writing professionally? That's a great question. It certainly was not. The first job was as a copywriter at a big ad agency in New York, a place go of Benton and Bowles. And I had a boss named Ed Hannibal who quit and wrote a novel.

And the novel was a hit, overnight hit. He was a star. And so I said to myself at age 23, I said, well, hell, why don't I do that? So I tried to do that. And of course, my life went completely into the toilet after the. that as I had no preparation for that mentally, spiritually, or any other way. And it just took me like another 30 years to sort of write my way out of it. I sort of, you know, kind of committed at the start and was over my head and just, you know, couldn't get out of it except by going through it. So it was

nothing I ever planned. But it did turn out to be my, my calling in the end. something that has occurred to me successful professional writers that I have known tend to be people who have been at it for a long time but I think a lot of people who are ambitious like in so many aspects of life they assume that they're going to try it once they're going to write a bestseller

and they're off to the races and in your experience but I think how many people Christopher Hitchens how many books did he write before he had a bestseller? I mean this is work. It's a career. He's a good writer from the start. Me, was a terrible writer. Yeah.

So, okay, so then in terms of your, you mentioned the Marines, you know, what are the experiences that you had that directed your attention to, I mean, I think the books that will be of most interest to our listeners, you have this rich vein of work that you have done in historical fiction that focuses on warfare, whether it's Alexander the Great Alcibiades, you know, most recently that the biblical period. what drew you in that direction? It's a great question. It's kind of a,

the answer is sort of a little bit misto. You know, Gates of Fire, which is about the Battle of Thermopyla, as you know, was about the 300 Spartans, was my second book after the Legend of Bagger Vance,

which was a golf, you know, like a mystical golf kind of thing. And I'm a believer that ideas kind of seize you and you don't even know why. And the story of Thermopyla just kind of seized me from reading the simple passage in Herodotus, which is really a short section about that battle.

And I just felt like I just had to do it, but I have no preparation for that at all, really, other than, well, really none. And I was not a Greek historian. I didn't, I'd never been there. And on top of that, I sort of thought, this is a really dumb idea. not a commercial idea. You know, it's a battle nobody's heard of. Nobody can pronounce. Nobody can spell. There are no Americans in the battle. But I was absolutely seized by it. And I just, I'm, I'm a big believer in the muse. I believe that you get inspired to do something and that you

find yourself writing or any kind of art operating above your head, above your, above your pay grade. And you don't know why. And that was sort of the case for me. And that book came out way better than I thought it would. And I found myself writing like five more in that same vein until I felt like I'm typecasting myself, you know. So it is kind of a mysterious thing. I mean, it could go. I could make an explanation and say, well, maybe I had a previous life. Maybe there was because I've always been fascinated by Greek stuff, but not very much by Roman stuff. So I wonder why.

They're pretty much the same. In any event, it's kind of a mystery. It's not like something, at least for me, that you plan out and you, you know, you have a five-year plan and you're going to do this and that. It's really more of something that comes out of nowhere, seizes you, and you just have to do it. So something that I remember from, you know, this is now 15 years ago, but reading, reading Gates of Fire as a student officer in Quantico is, at the start of the book, there's this extraordinarily compelling, vivid kind of comparison

between the narrator that the protagonist is, we're back in his childhood, and he's talking about he's from a small Greek city, and we open with these descriptions of their militia exercises, these sort of regular events where the men of the town get together and, you know, prepare, train to defend themselves. And something that's very clear as you're reading it, certainly, if you have any military experiences, it's very unsurious, right? It's a sort of description. of an entirely unsurious kind of guardsman militia type unit that is probably in for trouble if it ever has to encounter anything real. Indeed, you know, early in the book, it does. And I can't remember. Is it actually the Spartans or is the Argyves? There is a serious force

comes through. This is a Stacos that Argos attacked. Right. Right, right, right. Indeed. And, you know, a serious sort of savage military force comes through and destroys the place. And I raised this because I found, and I hadn't deployed or anything yet, but I, you know, it was a better part of a year into some pretty serious military training at the time. And I think it's a common experience of folks who have been in the military who read your books is a kind of shock of recognition of phenomena that we all know well. I mean, it's in the ancient world, you know, and so it's alien in a certain respect, but this notion of like, what does an

unserious unit feel like? How does it, how do these people talk? What are their added? how do they feel and what does it look like you know when you see a serious unit kind of from the outside which is how you present it for the first time in the book and then of course you know start to see how these things function how the training functions in the inside it feels so real it feels so familiar and i think that's one of the reasons why you have as many admirers as you as you do how there's a question here at the end of that how how did you achieve that and how do you achieve that I think a lot of it has to do with detail if you're as a writer, particularly physical detail. You know, like how much does a shield weigh if you're a hoplight in a Greek, you know, in a phalanx?

How do you carry it on your arm? What's the proper way to use it? And what does it like to advance in a phalanx with people, you know, to the right of you, to the left of you, your shield is covering the man on your right. and you're kind of that kind of thing. What's it like that be in a file of eight where there are eight people or seven people behind you and you're advancing? And so for me, you know, close order drill in the Marine Corps, Parasilin, you sort of extrapolate from that, you know, and you really can understand why, you know, you learn to march to

the flank and, you know, to about, to march about and so on and so forth. And if you were the Spartans, let's say, in a battle. battle and you're maneuvering a force of, you know, 1,500 or 3,000 or 4,500 on a battlefield, how do they maneuver? What if you suddenly have to go to the right? You can't break formation or the whole thing falls apart. So in other words, it's just sort of a, it's really a process of imagination from the writer's point of view of beaming yourself back into that time because people don't change,

right? Soldiers don't change. the same kind of profanity, the same kind of jokes, the same sort of gallows humor that modern infantrymen have. I'm certain that Roman legionaries and Macedonian phalanists and everything, they had that same sense of humor. So you're trying to imagine yourself into it in as much detail as possible. And each detail that you layer on as the reader reads it, particularly if it rings a bell, then the reader goes, oh, that's true. Well, that's true. Oh, that's true.

And then, you know, then as a writer, you've got them. Yeah. Yeah. Just a piece of an example to your point that things don't, as much as things change, some things don't. Your most recent book, A Man at Arms, we open with this view of the protagonist who's a, you know, professional, professional warrior type. And you're describing his gear, which is sort of this bespoke, you know, custom, you know, he's sort of got all the custom cool stuff, but not an ostentatious flash. way, you know, I should, I should find the passage and read it. But, you know, even though you're describing as, you know, arrows and swords and things that are entirely ancient, the way in which it is customized and the sort of style of it is absolutely of a piece of what you would find today, if you were to encounter, you know, a particular kind of special operator who's perhaps gone to

the private sector. You know, you would transpose all these qualities over to the different kinds of weapons and gear, but it's the same sort of attitude that motivates it. Right. And that's absolutely deliberate on my part or any writer that would write something like that, you know, everybody's going to customize their gear in a certain way, right? That, you know, they, they learned it from somebody. So I'm just transposing that to the ancient world. So I've gotten to know over the years folks who are fans of yours and you have, you have quite a following, you know, I think in particular there's Marines, but then also in the special operations community. There are folks who follow your work. And I've seen, I've seen volumes of you've and. for them in their houses. You know, how did you start forming these relationships? Do people seek you out once you started publishing these books? And then what have you learned from these, from talking to folks like these,

I won't name names here, but these green berets and folks who have become fans and I think correspondence of yours. Go for it. But you're right. It's certain people will reach out to you from time to time, right? As a writer, you know, that to say, you know, I read Gates of Fire when I'm, was on a deployment or something and it helped me blah, blah, blah, you know. And well, one guy in particular, it's a great friend of mine. His name is Jim Gant. I don't know if maybe he's on the tip of

your tongue, maybe too. And when, you know, he's a special forces, silver star recipient, et cetera, et cetera. We got in trouble. And there's a book about him by his wife called American Spartan, which is a wonderful book. His wife is a tries winning journalist and Scott Tyson. they're over in China right now. She's the Beijing Bureau Chief for the Christian Science Monitor. But I remember when I met Jim, he invited me back to Fort Bragg. And I came back and spent a few days with him there. And I felt like he was a character that stepped out of the pages of one of my books.

And that's a pretty weird feeling, you know? Yeah. I thought, I really want to get to know Jim. I want to really pick his brain and just get to know him because to say, see what does he think? What does a real life person that's kind of like what came out of my imagination? And so we have this sort of weird bond where he admires me, but I admire him 10 times more. And so anyway, that is kind of a parallel of the type of people that I've met in special forces and Marines. Yeah. Well, what have you learned from that you did indeed guess that

was definitely who I was thinking of? What have you learned from talking to Jim Gant over there? He came up, by the way, on a podcast a couple of episodes ago because I was interviewing Wesley Morgan, who wrote a book you're probably familiar with The Hardest Place about the Pesh Valley and covered sort of an early part of Gant's story. I didn't know that. Yeah, in the book. So he's kind of on a lot of people's minds, especially now that Afghanistan has all fallen apart. But what did you learn from him and people like him over the years talking to them?

Well, like, you know, nobody's ever asked me that. That's a really interesting. What I really learned from Jim was, you know, when you, when you, when you, you're creating a fictional hero, you want somebody that's willing to go to the absolute limit of something. A hero, I don't care who it is, can't be somebody that holds back at all, you know, that when the shit hits the fan, they're there there to do whatever needs to be done. And a part of my mind, I thought, are there really people like this like I'm creating, you know? And when I met Jim, I saw this is one of these guys. He will go as far as needs to go.

And in a crazy way, have fun while he's doing it. So Jim sort of really reinforced for me that the characters that I was sort of projecting in the ancient world were absolutely valid, you know, that I wasn't just operating on a comic book mentality or some crazy thing that, that, you know, he was, he was exactly like them, I thought. Yeah. His story is just incredible. I read, I think I wrote about Anne's book when it, when it came out.

Ah. and some years ago. And I remember being struck by, you know, what he went through, even setting Afghanistan aside, what he went through in Iraq, you know, he was paired up with, I think the Silver Star comes from Iraq. And he was paired up with this, you know, Shia unit in Baghdad, which was really, as I understood it, reading about it, kind of a glorified death squad turned government entity.

And it was his responsibility to somehow, you know, make it not only effective, but somehow respectable. And the episode that sticks with me is he gets attacked at some intersection comes back to the intersection, stands on the vehicle, and announces to the, you know, surrounding Iraqis that he will be returning to that spot in, I think a week. And anyone who wants to come fight him should come fight him. I'm paraphrasing here. But they probably won't because, you know, they're cowards who, you know, and then a series of, you know, things about their mothers, et cetera. mothers. Yeah, totally. Totally. And then he came back a week later, as promised. And indeed, they came, unsurprisingly, they came for a fight. And there was an enormous, enormous fight.

And, you know, you've been a Marine. I've been around a little bit, not as much Jim Gant, but a little bit. That kind of behavior is not super common in the armed forces. No, it's not in the manual. And then in particular, you know, when you go to a place like Eastern Afghanistan or I was, for that matter, where are they, these ancient tribal codes are still, you know, they're not the only phenomenon. There are modern phenomenon. There is the experience of a modern state. There's Islam itself, which is kind of a scrambling, complicated force.

There's the drug trade. There's all kinds of complexity to why people do what they do. But there is this faint, remaining, somewhat traumatized tribal ethic in the place. And something about the way that he sees or saw the world spoke to those people. and he was uniquely effective and basically punished for it. Yes. And I think that whatever was in Jim's heart, he really came into his own, I think, in that element. I mean, he sort of immediately related, for whatever reason, you know, to the whole tribal dynamic

and basically became the son of the tribal chief of the area and loved him like a son and would have given his life for him in a second, you know? And again, that's really not in the manual. not really training you that way at the basic school or any of the other places. But he was, so that's why I say Jim is kind of like a hero in a book, you know, that would do that or in a movie. Yeah. And he is evolving beyond that.

He's, I sort of, I'm amazed to watch Jim's life unfold because he's definitely in the post-warrier stage of evolution at the moment. I hope he's doing well. We haven't spoken in some years, but I hope he's doing well. Yeah, I think he is. He certainly, he's got a good woman. He loves her and she loves him. And, you know, he's going for whatever it is, he'll go for it all the way.

Well, whether it's his case specifically or more broadly, people, people like him, you know, it's not surprising, I guess. And this must be something you've observed that people who do come into their own in a place like, you know, tribal warfare in Afghanistan. in. It's not entirely surprising that when they come to perform on a different stage, like the sort of humdrum stage of normal life and suburban, you know, North Carolina or Washington, you know, the sort of politics of Washington, D.C. or something like that, that there's a struggle to adjust. That what works in one environment doesn't necessarily work in another. It's like that movie, the Hurt Locker really captured that completely, did it? You know, that great scene where Jeremy Renner's character comes back home and he's in the

grocery store and it's a mile long of cereal boxes you know yeah and he goes what you know yeah you know he's back there talk a little bit if you would about your most recent book about a man at arms that we're you know what would you like you know readers to know about it or future readers to know about it and you know we can start with how how you got the idea Well, there's only one recurring character in all of my books. And he's a mercenary warrior named Telemann, a Greek mercenary. He's in two books as a pretty big character and in another one just as a tiny character. And he's sort of an alter ego for me. I don't even know why I love the guy so much, but I do. And I've always wanted to sort of do a book that was only about him that would

kind of focus on his character. So he is, he is the man at arms of this book. And I thought of making him kind of like a samurai, like a solitary guy and, you know, that's a great swordsman or you from that ancient world and then see what would happen to him. And it took me about 15 years to kind of find the story of this thing. And it's set, you know, a few years after the crucifixion and the Romans are the bad guys and it's about Christian ideals and it's a Western basically set in the Sinai Desert with a big long chase like Butch Cassie and the Sundance Kid. But I really just wanted to examine this character. Let this character, you know, he's a, not to, I don't want to be too long and boring, but he's one of these characters that is forced to live lifetime after lifetime as a soldier,

even though that's not really hit very hard in this book. And so he's trying to move beyond the archetype of the warrior into whatever is next. A little bit like what Jim Gant's doing right now in real life. So I wanted to get into that and just write a book on that subject. So that's where a man at arms comes from. So that just sort of like a natural, having written about warriors as much as you have, this is sort of the natural as you think through. I mean, just to just to.

just sort of spell it out. I mean, you are, you are an author whose insight into how warriors think, act, look is so acute that you're on the reading list, these military training establishments. And that's not, it's not accidental. It's a really remarkable achievement. And so, you know, is this book sort of part of the progression as you think through what, what a person like this is, how they live their life? This is just the stage you've arrived at. Yeah, I think, I mean, like I say, what comes after the warrior archetype? I mean, Aaron, you're in that state yourself, I assume. You know, you've done your thing as a warrior in combat.

And now it's like, what comes after that, you know? People become fathers. They become, you know, involved in the community. They become leaders and teachers or something like that. But there are certain characters. like ancient samurai who are so steeped in this warrior culture that you wonder, how can they get beyond it? And what will, how will they get beyond? You know, what will be the next phase? And I think it becomes something spiritual. That's my instinct, you know. And,

but again, when you have a character like, like this character of Telemont is to me, he's a unique individual. He's not just not a not a real archetype. So I'm trying to follow or I'm curious myself. What's going to happen to him? You know, I'm actually writing another book right now that takes him another step farther. Can you share any? I don't know. We don't want to spoil anything. Yeah, I don't want to talk about. Okay. Fine. Fine. Fine. That's fair enough. That's the next thing. We'll look forward to it. So well then to step back a bit then on this question of You've written a book called the warrior ethos, you know, whether it's telemon as a specific fictional example or Jim Gant is a real example, you know, stepping back into the abstract,

you know, what characterizes a warrior? What is it about this kind of human being that makes them unique? Well, I think I'll kind of answer that in a little, going into a little Jungian psychology, You know, and I'm sure that our listeners are familiar with the theory of the archetypes. And one of the archetypes, you know, is the warrior archetype that usually kicks in, particularly in males, but I think in females too to a certain extent, you know, around maybe 10, 11, 12 years old, the youth wants to be on the football team. You want to, you know, when you start to get your driver's license, you want to drive fast, you want to jump off a roof. You want to blow things up.

It comes, I'm sure, from tribal evolution, from the hunting man, the tribal hunting man. And a person that's in the warrior archetype, a male is drawn to other males, and particularly to be in a group with other males, and to compete with other, the opposite tribe, whatever that is. And when you're in that warrior archetype, I think you're also, you're seeking a mentor. You're seeking a sergeant, a captain, a coach, you know, somebody that models manhood for you as you evolve. And when you're in that state of mind, you somehow are willing to take incredible risks of your bodily harm that you would never do when you were like 45 years old or something like that. So a lot of, I think, what, I mean, I don't know what drove you to join the Marine Corps, Aaron, but certainly it's probably a similar thing that your other brother officers did, you know, the desire to serve, but also to test yourself, I would imagine, you know, can I stand up to this,

right? Or something in comparison to maybe your uncles or your father, your grandfather, whatever, or if they served in Vietnam or Korea or World War II or something, have I got what it takes, you know, I need to do what they did. I have to stand up for our flag, for our country. So it's, I think it's in the blood. It's just in the blood to do that for a certain, for a certain era of our life before the next archetype kicks in. And the warrior ethos is when a moral dimension is added to that, an ethical dimension is added to that. And you're not just operating by the rules of a street gang or a terrorist organization or a gang in prison,

but you're trying to operate at a higher level, at a level like, say, the ancient Spartans would operate at. Yeah. Yeah. What you say certainly rings true. I mean, in my case, my dad was a career army officer. Actually, served in World War II. I was a late arrival in his life. And then 9-11 happened while I was in college. And those two things. you know, intersected pretty, pretty seamlessly and, you know, the Marines seemed like the natural thing to do. And there was definitely, there was a sense of, of wanting to test and of curiosity, you know, am I, am I up to that that absolutely helped to help drive my, my decision making? Do you, do you think that there's, there's a tension between this kind of human and, you know,

21st century American society or just modern democracy broadly? I mean, we're, we're not exactly Sparta for better and for worse, right? There we could identify, I think, pros and cons out of that. But we're not. So, you know, how is it that we find these people? Ah, that's a great question. And it is, there is a tremendous tension, I think. Because if you think about in our society, just as you said, if you think about ancient

Sparta or the army, which was basically everybody that was a male citizen, was a warrior society, but they were embedded within a warrior culture. culture where everything about the culture reinforced the warriors. You know, there's a classic thing about, you know, the Spartan mother that hands a shield to her son and says, come back with this or on it, right? And there are many other stories of Spartan mothers and Spartan women being sort of the enforcers of the code. And so there was really no conflict there for a young man that was going to fight or even a middle-aged man was going to go to fight. Everything in the culture supported it. But America is completely different. You have the ideals of the greater society are just in

general making money, having a life of ease, of pleasure, of individual freedom. In other words, the exact opposite of what the military is about. The whole concept of service to something greater than yourself, to the nation, is pretty much monopolized by the military. as you get out, it's every man for himself and everybody's cheating and stealing and robbing and et cetera, et cetera. So now you have a, the armed forces, a warrior society embedded within a consumer society, a commercial society. And you might say a totally plastic superficial society. And so that's a real challenge there to make that thing work. And no wonder people who are the military, particularly in elite units, feel like they're a world unto themselves,

that they can't really look to the greater society for any support. They have to be their own support and their own little world. So it's, yeah, it's a really tricky thing. And I don't know what the answer is. If you think back to, you know, my dad was in World War II like your day. And that was a whole different world of military service from today. That was really the citizen soldier, you know, which in the days of the draft, before the Army became an all-volunteer army, it was a whole other world where the entire society sort of went to war, but the individuals who were in the Army didn't think of themselves as lifetime soldiers or warriors. They still thought of themselves as civilians that were going to do their bit, fly the missions, you know, if you land on the beaches or whatever it was.

And then their greatest wish was just to go home. Just let me go home back to my wife and back to my family and raise the family. And in many ways, I think the citizen soldier is a more democratic ideal than sort of the semi-mercernary army that we have today. I mean, I think the army today is a better army. The Marine Corps, officers are better quality. People are, you know, you have majors in the Marine Corps. their PhDs, right?

Or had double PhDs, right? People that really are, you know, they know their shit, you know, and are very, very committed. Whereas in the, in the citizen soldier world, it was just, you know, how soon can I get out of here, you know? In a way, the citizen soldier was, was a, I don't want to say hire, but they, that was real democracy. It was like, this is your country. You got to go out there and protect it, you know? And if you don't want to do it, we're going to make you.

It's like what's happening in Ukraine. right now with the Ukrainians, you know, where it's like, hey, this is our country, you know, we're not leaving. And that's that, that's a great thing. I think the citizen shoulder, I'm really sorry that we sort of have lost that. You know, I mean, after Vietnam and all the turmoil that was in the streets, the fighting in the streets, you know, a draft sort of had to go. But it's kind of too bad, in my opinion. Yeah. You know, I had the view for a while. I'm curious to know if you agree with this, that the end of the draft was in certain respects, good for the military. I mean, I, I, you know, it's helpful in some ways.

Yes, especially if you're a junior officer, you know, you stand there, you know, people are always upset in the infantry. What do you have to be happy about, really? So you're all upset about something. You always just kind of look around and say, okay, well, raise your hand here. You know, if you're a volunteer, you chose to be here. Well, you know, everyone has to raise their hand. Makes a big difference. Yes. It's very helpful. And, you know, my father served at a time. I've talked to officers who served in a time where, you know, as you know, the officer of the day is armed as he patrols the battalion area. I was armed when I was the officer of the day, never had to have any, it was decorative, essentially.

There was never any need for that sidearm. I know officers who served in an era where you needed your sidearm when you were officer of the day because stuff just happened. You know, people, people attacked officers. People attacked each other. There was real unrest and unruliness and there were genuine disciplinary challenges in the period of the draft that were just, you know, not, not really factors at the same scale during the period when I served. But on the other, hand for all the for all the positive aspects of the end of the draft of the military i wonder if it's been bad for society as well those citizen soldiers cycling back into society did something for society and they had a kind of contribution they made to national cohesion that we've lost yeah that

i i really agree with that i mean i don't know if it's possible politically to do it or even if generation z whatever the young generation is now would sit still for it but i i i feel felt like, you know, for me, and I'm sure like for millions of other people, you're in the service and you meet people you would never meet. Yeah, totally. From parts of the country you never heard about, you know, a whole different, you know, ethnic backgrounds, whole different points of view. And you become friends. And when you go back home, you have a whole different concept. And you also feel like the idea that we owe our country something has kind of really gone by the board and it's really too bad.

Because we do. Oh, our country something. And I think when you, when you serve and you pay that, you feel better about yourself. You know, you feel like, okay, you know, I did my thing, you know?

Or maybe you say to yourself, you know, I should have done more. But certainly the idea that life is all about pleasure and making money and that's not a very healthy thing for any society. So when you're preparing to write these, these really rich works of historical fiction. What do you read? I mean, what does the research look like to, you know, for example, to write a man-at-arms?

It's a great question. I read everything possible from the ancient world, which there really is not very much. And a lot of that time, you're really reading between the lines. But then you read everything from the modern world. I'll give you, here's an example. There's a wonderful book that I have here. I won't try to dig it up. It's called Alexander the Great and the logistics of the Macedonian Army.

I have that book. Yeah, I do. I do. It's an Oxford paper bag, right? I can picture it. I read. Yeah, yeah. Hunter, do you remember who wrote it?

We should give him credit. I can't remember. Boss. I can look it up for sure. In any event, what he wrote about, and God bless him, he asked himself, how much can a mule carry? How far can a mule go? if it's carrying its own water and its own fodder. And he said, how did Alexander cross these spaces in what is today Iraq with an army of 50,000

fighting men and probably 200,000 camp followers and other stuff? How did he do that without trucks, without trains, without sea transport? How did he do it? And whoever wrote that book really went into it in great detail. Donald Engels. Colin, our producer, was quick. was quick with the Google machine. It's Donald Engels. Great. Yeah, I knew it started with an E. I was thinking Ellis.

Anyway, God bless him. And so, it's terms of doing research, you know, to understand that the mule is a huge part of an ancient army. That, you know, then you go in your imagination, you know, and how would that play out? And how would you get mules? Who provides the mules? How do you, Who takes care of them? Da-da-da-da-da-da-da. And one of my books, The Afghan Campaign, gets into that in great detail about these two young Macedonian soldiers

who are put in charge of mules and how they have to take care of them. And it gave a lot of sort of color to that story. So you try to research every possible detail that you can, and particularly anything that we in the modern world might not think of. For instance, in a naval,

naval battles in, let's say, the Athenian fleet against the Persian fleet, something like that. They would have a trirem, three banks of rowers, and they would have on the deck, which was very, very small, 16 Marines. And the Marines job was to sling javelins and fire and stuff like that. And when the trirem was going to ram another triene, all the Marines ran forward. to the forepeak so their weight would make the bow go lower when they rammed it into the ship. So I don't know where I discovered that reading somewhere, but I thought, so to incorporate that into a book, I think when somebody reads that, they go, oh, holy shit, I never would have thought of that,

but that makes complete sense. Yeah. So that's the kind of you're reading, looking for something like that, that will stand out. And then the humans that you're writing about. I mean, these are, get into how the imagination works, gets a little complicated and murky, but these are no versions of people you know and you've seen and you're sort of putting them in this research detailed world. Is that a fair way of describing it? Sort of, but I think actually, for me, at least, the characters kind of arrive on the page fully formed by themselves.

It's not like I'm saying, oh, let me pattern this. guy after Jim Gant. I'm really sort of thinking in terms of, I'm letting them kind of appear because although human nature doesn't change, people were different back then in a sense of just one thing that their ability to endure physical hardship was greater than than we have today because we're soft. We don't have to walk, you know, eight miles to, you know, get a drink of water. Yeah. So that's the kind of thing. I can't really. remember I haven't read the Afghan campaign and I it's silly of me that I haven't because I can't remember if it was the Engels book we were just discussing or there's another book called Alexander in

the East. In one of the two books, I remember reading and perhaps you talk about this in your novel about the timing of Alexander's progress up the, I guess he goes up the west bank of the Hellman River. Yeah. And it, okay, yeah. So it's time to the wheat harvest. Exactly. And I remember I had like a chill went up my spine when I read that because I was served on the West Bank. of the Hellman River in the middle of the winter wheat harvest. I mean, my deployment was from December to July. So we had the wheat and the poppy harvest while I was there. And just the sort of the thought, I mean, Alexander didn't march through right where I was,

because where I was Marja, which was this irrigated area, it was desert at the time Alexander passed through there, but just like a kilometer or two to the east, you know, that his army had marched through there and, you know, in tune with the, the sort of seasons of agriculture that was still governing life. in that part of the world in 2010 was kind of a mind-bending realization. Yeah, it is, isn't it? Yeah. So you also have one thing that this came also from reading the ancient sources, that Alexander had a choice of going one route where he would pass more populated cities

and another route where he'd sort of go through the country. And to get the wheat, he figured these cities are going to be defended. They're going to have garners with walls around them. But if I go to these villages, you know, I'll just terrorize them and take the stuff. Right, right. He took the long way around. You have this other series of books that you've published about writing and about work and sort of art and excellence. How did you embark upon that body of work?

What took you there? It's a great question. Let me just lean over, see if I can be right back. Sure. This is the one. book that's probably the most well known of the war of art. And it's really about the inner struggle that any artist, but particularly a writer has, just a simple thing of how do you sit down in the morning, you know, and not procrastinate and get your work done, that kind of thing. And the way that

sort of came about was, I'll give you kind of a long answer to your own. Sure. When you're, when you're a professional writer, you have friends, and they come to you and they say, I know I've got a book in me. Can you tell me, you know, what to do? And I would sit up with my friends to like two in the morning trying to kind of psych them up. And basically, I would tell them about this force that I call resistance with a capital R, this negative force that's trying to keep you from doing your work. and how if you want to write something, this negative force radiates off of this thing right here to try to keep you from doing it. And all you have, and the main challenge of a writer or any artist is to just sit down and do the work. The actual work isn't that hard. It's sitting down.

It's the hard part. So in any event, I would do this, you know, for friends and so on and so forth. And nobody ever listened to me. Nobody ever wrote the book they were going to write or ever did anything. And finally I just thought, I'm just going to put this down on paper. You know, I'll take, you know, a few months and then when somebody asked me a question, I'll say, here, read this. So that was how this evolved. And then there have been a bunch of other books that I've done kind of follow-ups to that. What sort of response have you received to these books? Great response. It took a while. What finally did it was I actually was invited on to Oprah Winfrey show a few years ago. And that's sort of helped the book get to sort of a tipping point where,

you know, but I have really found that out there in the real world, there are a lot, a lot, a lot of people that want to write or want to do or have a dream, have an artistic or aesthetic dream and are sort of faced with a question of, what do I do? How do I do this? You know, I've got a wife, I've got a husband, I've got kids. How do I do this? And so they, there is a, there's a hunger for any kind of wisdom on that subject, but particularly on the subject of getting your ass into the chair and doing what you need to do. Why is it, do you think that so many people find, you know, writing specifically, but just to broaden it, you know, sort of self-directed aesthetic enterprises so hard when, you know, a lot of people are really good at a lot of things. And, you know,

people show up to work every day and do the investors show up and invest doctors show up and treat patients you know mechanics show up and you know fix cars and like you know most people most of the time kind of do their thing and get on with it with varying degrees of excellence most people are not just failures and yet as you point out i think i think accurately of course a lot of people have this unfulfilled ambition you know why is this thing so hard it's because there's a huge difference between discipline and self-discipline. You know, when you were in the Marine Corps, when people were in any kind of service, you were disciplined. You had disciplined up the yin-yang, right? But it was imposed upon you from outside by your superior officers, by the whole code,

right? You woke up in the morning. It was a plan of the day. There it is. This is the uniform. You're summer A, you're going to wear it today. You're going to do blah, blah, blah. But as soon as you're out, all of a sudden you have unlimited freedom, right? You can sleep all day, you can do anything. So it's a real, they don't teach you in school how to discipline yourself, right? They teach you to stand in line and show up and go to lunch and go to class, but they don't teach you how to do that yourself. And that's the skill that's missing in anybody that wants to do a kind of a self-directed,

creative endeavor. So, you know, Alexander the Great Alcibiades, Spartans at Thermopylae, the early Christian period. What, you know, what, what other famous sort of periods or battles or historical figures are out there that are on your mind that you would like to write about, but you haven't to, you haven't gotten around to it? Well, there's a couple that I did get around, too, that I'll tell you about. One was the British Special Forces in North Africa fighting against Ramal. I have a book called Killing Ramal that's about the group called the Long Range Desert Group. Have you ever heard of this? Yes. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I have, you know, evolving at the same time as the SAS. And then I did another book about the Six Day War, the Arab-Israeli War of 1967. So pretty much there's not too many more

subjects out there that that i really want to tackle but but those were kind of modern versions of of the same sort of warrior challenges and and enterprises why um uh why no novel about iraq or afghanistan you know all these people who serve there you've served in the modern military albeit before that this most immediate period why not why not something about today days worse. I really feel like anybody that wanted to write about that should have been there. You know, I don't have the right to do that. You have the right to write that, but I don't. It would be presumptuous of me to, to, at least if I'm writing about the ancient Spartans, nobody can say to me, hey, it wasn't like that. And I'll tell you what, I say, hey, I wasn't there

and you weren't there either. This is my version of it. But, but like when I, when I, When I did write about the Six Day War in Israel, I went over and interviewed, you know, about 70 pilots and tankers and stuff like that. And then I wrote the story in their words. Right. And it was definitely a decision not to put myself into it because I wasn't there. And they were. Stephen Pressfield, author of most recently a man at arms.

Fascinating conversation. Thank you so much for joining the show today. Hey, thanks for having me, Aaron. And thanks for the great questions and thanks for, you know, creating this venue where we can talk about this stuff. And I know that our talk today is different from what you usually talk about on the podcast. So I take my hat off to you for being flexible and following the, you know, the river where it wanted to lead. No, this is great. I mean, I'm a big fan and I just very much appreciate you making the time.

All right. Thanks a lot for having me. This is a nebulous media production. Find us wherever you get your podcasts.