Tom Mowle confronted his past in writing about his Iraq experience

Tom Mowle is a retired Air Force officer who earned his PhD in Political Science with a focus on political psychology from The Ohio State University in 1996. Tom has taught undergraduate cadets at the Air Force Academy and in the graduate program at Saint Mary’s University, San Antonio. He is the author of “Allies at Odds? The United States and the European Union,” the editor of “Hope is Not a Plan: The War in Iraq from Inside the Green Zone” and the coauthor of “The Unipolar World: An Unbalanced Future.” He is the owner of Rampart Professional Solutions, a manuscript coaching and editing service in Divide, Colorado. 

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SunLit: Tell us this book’s backstory – what’s it about and what inspired you to write it? Tom Mowle: This book is a war story, a nonfiction account of my experiences as an active-duty military strategist in Baghdad in 2004. It takes readers into the Republican Palace in the Green Zone, where they will see the chaos of work and life through the eyes of a relative outsider who is helping shape the Commander’s understanding of the situation. 

After I returned, I collaborated with some of the people I served with to publish “Hope Is Not a Plan” in 2007. That book covers some of this material from a military-academic perspective, but it wasn’t going to reach a mass audience; furthermore, we had to pull a lot of punches to get it approved for release. It’s a good book, but I felt dissatisfied with it. 

After retiring from the Air Force, I got away from national security issues as I poured myself into other things, and I never really dealt with my experiences. Then in 2014, Islamic State began to capture city after city in Iraq, and it was a flashback from 10 years before. All these things I had worked on had been undone and I began to wonder: What was my part in all this? Could I have done better? What could we have done that might have produced a better result?

SunLit: Place the excerpt you selected in context. How does it fit into the book as a whole and why did you select it? 

Mowle: This excerpt begins three weeks after I arrived in Baghdad, just after I was reassigned to the unit where I would spend the balance of my time. It’s a reset of sorts, so it can be understood without knowing much of what came before. It introduces my relationship with the story’s main human antagonist, Colonel Vortex, and two of the threads that will stitch the narrative together: Fallujah and the upcoming Iraqi election. 

The excerpt displays the voice and tone I adopt through the book and illustrates many of the pathologies of headquarters that will persist throughout the narrative: lack of knowledge, being distracted from the main mission by side quests, and the rejection of conclusions the boss doesn’t want to hear.

SunLit: What influences and/or experiences informed the project before you sat down to write? 

Mowle: The immediate influence was a conversation I had with my friend Tom Ruby, who served with me in Baghdad. It was Christmas Eve 2014, I was picking up apple strudel at Boonzaijer’s Dutch Bakery on Fillmore in Colorado Springs, and I had to decide whether to write this book. I had put a series of “10 years ago today” posts on Facebook, so I had a lot of words written. 

But I wasn’t sure I really wanted to write another book, and if I did, I wasn’t sure whether I should fictionalize it or stick to what really happened. Rubes convinced me to write it as nonfiction so what it reveals would not be treated as exaggerations.

SunLit: What did the process of writing this book add to your knowledge and understanding of your craft and/or the subject matter? 

Mowle: This book is very different from my earlier ones because it is intended for more than an academic audience. I had to learn how to maintain a narrative while parceling out the facts and information people need. 

I was inspired here by the works of Erik Larson and the movie version of Michael Lewis’s “The Big Short.” I learned a lot about fiction techniques at the Pikes Peak Writers Conference in 2023 — for example, how to accentuate themes I had not even realized were there and how to set the atmosphere and setting of a scene with a few words. 

Oddly enough, writing the book added to my knowledge of my own experiences. My head canon was that certain things had happened at certain times, yet when I went back to my journal I discovered I was wrong. This taught me humility about my own memory!

SunLit: What were the biggest challenges you faced in writing this book? 

Mowle: Beyond having to learn how to write a story rather than a text, this book is so, so personal! I had to go back and confront my own feelings as they were at the time. And not just, “Oh yeah, I was scared then”: I had to relive them, summon them up into my present so I could bare them to the world. Sometimes, I had to stop writing because of all the emotions that were sparked.

I wrote the book because I needed to get all of this out of my heart and onto a page where I could look at myself as if I were a character in a book. 

SunLit: What do you want readers to take from this book? 

Mowle: On a literary level, I’d like readers to enjoy the story as a story. It has lots of dark humor and wry absurdity while being structured around the classic there-and-back-again motif: The protagonist volunteers to enter a strange world that he is unprepared for, encounters a variety of challenges, learns how to overcome some of them, and is returned to the normal world that has not changed as much as he has. 

Then, they should consider that a similar journey has been taken by so many others. On an educational level, I’d want them to develop a better understanding of what it is like in a wartime military headquarters and reflect on whether the United States has learned from the pathologies I illustrate.

SunLit: Do you think the general public realizes the extent of the official dysfunction during the Iraq War?

Mowle: No, no they don’t. Not until they read this book.

SunLit: Tell us about your next project. 

Mowle: For the moment, most of my writing is devoted to my weekly Substack, “From the Ramparts.” I am considering writing a fictional account of foreclosure investors during the Great Recession, drawing on my time as El Paso County public trustee.

A few more quick items

Currently on your nightstand for recreational reading: The latest issue of The Atlantic and “The Forever War” by Dexter Filkins. While writing, I was fasting from others’ accounts of the recent wars; now I am catching up.

First book you remember really making an impression on you as a kid: “The Phantom Tollbooth”

Best writing advice you’ve ever received: Just write, and write as yourself. Even if you don’t know what to write, write. Something will develop as you put words on the page; then, let those words take you to their destination rather than the one you expected.

Favorite fictional literary character: Lyra Belacqua from Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials series

Literary guilty pleasure (title or genre): I can’t say I feel guilty about it even at my age, but I enjoy a lot of YA, especially John Green’s work.

Digital, print or audio – favorite medium to consume literature: Print

One book you’ve read multiple times: Shelby Foote’s “Civil War”

Other than writing utensils, one thing you must have within reach when you write: The box that my cat Alibi likes to sleep in, because otherwise she lies down on my right arm and creates her own form of writer’s block.

Best antidote for writer’s block: Step away for a bit. Take a shower, take a walk, wash dishes, lie awake at midnight and let ideas swirl around. Even if it doesn’t work, at least the dishes and I are clean, I got some exercise, and I put myself to sleep.

Most valuable beta reader: Aw, don’t make me play favorites. So many people helped. But if I must, Laura Satin was very helpful early on regarding how much exposition was needed and where to put it in the story. As the book developed, the late Dennis Showalter and Justin Lincoln were the most emphatic about how much of myself to put into the book and when.

Type of Story: Q&A

An interview to provide a relevant perspective, edited for clarity and not fully fact-checked.