I didn’t start writing HUMINT Exploitation Team 10 because I thought I had a “cool war story” to tell. If anything, I started writing it because I was afraid of forgetting.
I served as a Counterintelligence/HUMINT collector with two tours in Iraq and one in Afghanistan. Like many veterans during the hectic deployment cycle of the GWOT, when my time came to get out, I was eager to put that time behind me and start a new chapter. Quickly packaging that chapter of my life up and filing it away into a drawer to reflect on later. Over the years, I’ve grown to have complicated feelings about our time there, and as I’ve aged, the pieces have begun to merge and grow fuzzy in my mind. Names faded. Details softened. But the weight of it all didn’t go anywhere.
That’s where this book began.
HUMINT Exploitation Team 10 is a work of fiction, but it’s built on real ground. The characters, the atmosphere, and the tension of the job all come from lived experience. I changed names. I adjusted details. Some events are compressed or reimagined. But the core truth, the way the work felt, the moral gray areas, the human side of intelligence collection, is something I tried very hard to preserve.
I started writing this back in 2017, not with a grand plan, but as a way to make it make sense. At first, it was just getting things down before they slipped away completely. But the more I wrote, the more I realized there was a story here that doesn’t get told very often.
When people think about Iraq, especially Operation Iraqi Freedom, they tend to think in broad strokes. Politics, strategy, headlines. What you don’t see much of are the small, human interactions that define HUMINT work. Conversations in cramped and hot interrogation cells. The uncertainty of who to trust. The constant balancing act between mission and morality. It’s not always dramatic in the Hollywood sense, but it’s intense in a quieter, more complicated way.
That’s part of why I kept going.
I also made a conscious effort to be fair, to show both sides as human. That doesn’t mean ignoring violence or pretending everyone was operating from the same place, but it does mean acknowledging that the people we encountered weren’t just roles in a conflict. They had their own motivations, fears, and perspectives. If this book does anything right, I hope it reflects that complexity and makes both sides proud.
More than anything, this book is my attempt to make sense of that time in my life before it fades into something less real than it was. Writing it forced me to revisit moments I hadn’t thought about in years, and in doing so, it gave them a kind of permanence they didn’t have before.
After years of work, HUMINT Exploitation Team 10 was picked up by Koehler Publishing and is now entering the editing and design phase. If all goes as planned, it will be released on December 15th.
That date still feels a long way from where this started, but I hope when it comes out, y’all enjoy it. I’m grateful to all who joined me on this journey and for all the love and support. I may have a few more stories in me yet, depending on how this all turns out, so stay tuned!