The Quest for the Perfect Weapon – with Jeff Stern

Danny Buerkli: My guest today is Jeff Stern. Jeff is the author of five books. His most recent is The Warhead, The Quest to Build the Perfect Weapon in the Age of Modern Warfare. Jeff is also a reporter. His work on the Ebola outbreak, the death penalty, Yemen, and much more has appeared in places such as Vanity Fair, The New York Times Magazine, and The Atlantic.

Jeff has also written and produced movies, and his second book, The Fifteen Seventeen to Paris, was turned into a motion picture directed by no less than Clint Eastwood — and I could go on. Jeff and I also went to grad school together, so this is extra delightful. Jeff, welcome.

Jeff Stern: Thank you, Danny. Great to see you, and thanks for having me.

Danny: Jeff, in your latest book, The Warhead, you open with this cockamamie story of Joe Kennedy Junior’s fatal mission in 1944 — a first heroic attempt at precision-guiding a bomb, as it were. Tell us that story.

Jeff: It’s a little-known story about Joe Kennedy, who was supposed to be the scion of the Kennedy dynasty. He was supposed to be the first Catholic president and all that. Towards the tail end of World War II, he volunteered for what was known to be a really dangerous mission: to try to take out one of the newer vengeance weapons that Hitler was developing in Nazi-occupied France. It was an underground bunker with a weapon from hell that was considered capable, if it got up and running, of obliterating London.

The Allies couldn’t figure out how to get enough firepower close enough to strike this bunker and still get back safely. So as they were trying to figure out how to destroy it, they broke down the problem to its elemental form: if the problem is we can’t get enough firepower close enough and still return safely, what if we remove “return safely” from the equation? From there came this idea to outfit war-weary bombers with torpedo explosives. They packed these things with 30,000 pounds of explosives.

They figured out a way to rig rods and levers to control and steer the plane, and then, using what was still pretty novel technology — television — mounted a camera on the front and figured out how to fly this giant plane remotely. So they had a steerable bomb. The problem was that taking off was still too complicated a maneuver to do with rudimentary rods and levers. The solution was to have a pilot and a copilot take off, and then once the plane was airborne and being controlled by the mothership, they would parachute out.

They tested it a little — you’re parachuting at something like 200 miles per hour, which you and I both have some experience with parachuting out of planes, but not going anywhere near that fast. What happened is that on the first mission, the plane detonated — this giant bomb went off before they could parachute out.

I set that up as the prologue for a few reasons. One is that it’s just dramatic. Two, starting a book with a Kennedy is a little bit of a cheat. But the real reason is that the arc of the story gets into the unintended consequences of developing what seems like a really perfect weapon. I didn’t want it to feel like an anti-war book. I didn’t want your first confrontation with this thing to be about how terrible it is or how evil the people who built it are — which I don’t think is true. What better, more noble, more unambiguous mission than trying to destroy a terrible weapon that was going to kill a lot of civilians during World War II? I wanted you to be leaning forward and rooting for a better weapon to be invented.

Danny: And then you go on to portray a number of characters. One of the main protagonists is Weldon Word, the Texas Instruments engineer who goes on to invent Paveway, the first precision-guided munition. He’s a very sympathetic character in the book. You really made me want to hang out with the guy — he’s absolutely brilliant and interesting. And I don’t think that’s wrong. But surely that was a conscious choice.

Jeff: A conscious choice, but also — the people I spoke to who knew him adored him. He was a very selfless, ingenious, personable guy who was not interested in glory or taking credit. He was really interested in promoting the people around him. Very quiet, but apparently had a very loud, booming voice, so when he did decide to speak up, people listened.

It was convenient that he seems like such a humane, likable person, because I think there’s a temptation, when something causes harm, to simply categorize the people responsible as evil villains. That’s rarely the case. Very few people who develop weapons are thinking, “I hope this kills more civilians.” In his case, he was initially animated by the risk both to civilians and to American pilots who didn’t have a tool they could use for the job they were trying to do in Vietnam. A lot of them were getting shot down, brought into detention, or killed. What he was trying to do was invent something that would both save the lives of pilots and cause less collateral damage on the ground.

Danny: You mentioned the war in Vietnam, and there’s another story in the book that forms the genesis of the quest for precision-guided ammunition — a bridge called the Dragon’s Jaw. What’s that story about?

Jeff: The Dragon’s Jaw Bridge was a really strategically important bridge that connected the North and South, and it was one of the ways the Viet Cong were able to move men and materials southward. It took on an almost mythical reputation because it was one of the important targets the Americans were trying to destroy. It was a steel suspension bridge, so very strong. It’s also a bridge — narrow, hard to strike. And it was very well defended. It became the locus of morale for both sides.

A lot of American pilots were sent to try to bomb it. There were other attempts at guided munitions that didn’t work well. The principal ways they would bomb were either to drop a ton of bombs from very high or, if they were trying to aim, to get very low, which brought them into range of all sorts of antiaircraft munitions. It was that bridge that really provided the impetus to finally try to solve the precision bombing problem.

Danny: So what did Weldon Word figure out?

Jeff: At the time, one of the weapon systems that the Army had some interest in was the laser. Einstein had theorized about it, and it had appeared in science fiction comics — this idea that if you could focus a powerful enough light beam, you could use it to destroy something. The Army, along with Martin Marietta, one of the defense contractors, developed some preliminary lasers and found that making them man-portable required so much energy that it was impractical. You couldn’t do significant damage.

But Weldon had that in the back of his head and was thinking: what if we use this new laser not to destroy something, but essentially to point at something? He combined that idea with basically off-the-shelf components to design the first prototypes of a bomb with a little photon sensor on the front. It just said: the photons are hitting this side, steer to correct; photons are hitting that side, steer the other way. You would aim a laser at the target, and the bomb would follow the laser reflection. Other attempts at guided bombs had used TV footage to steer, or required steering with a joystick while in the plane. This one was really easy to use — you just had to keep a laser pointing at the target.

It was also really inexpensive, which was partly a function of the fact that Texas Instruments was a sort of upstart electronics company. No one really took them seriously, and they couldn’t get the resources other defense contractors had. As they developed it, one of the people who came on board, a Navy veteran, kept saying: we have to keep this thing simple. It could be the best bomb ever, but if it’s complicated to use, the real decision-makers — not the generals and colonels, but the ground crews and the pilots — aren’t going to want to use it. They were able to develop a weapon that was very easy to use, very inexpensive, and very effective.

Danny: What’s fascinating about Weldon as a person, and you chronicle this in the book, is that not only does he come up with this genius series of insights and actually make it work, but over the years and decades he does two things: he keeps developing the bomb and making it more sophisticated — and of course this is a dynamic system, so the people on the receiving end adapt in response. Something that struck me, if you abstract away a bit from what we’re talking about, is just his apparent incredible ability to see into the future and keep repeating this trick. What accounts for his ability to do that?

Jeff: I don’t know. I think that’s a really good question. It may be that he had that stereotypical engineer brain, looking at the world as a series of problems and how to solve them. His outlook is consistent with the lore of Texas Instruments. The company that became Texas Instruments was founded as an oil prospecting company — Geophysical Services International. Their main product was a magnetic anomaly detector, a ball you held out of a car that would detect magnetic anomalies in the ground indicating the presence of hydrocarbons. But they incorporated the day before the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, and oil was basically nationalized. They founded a company that became obsolete the very next day.

So in company lore it was: we need to be looking for tomorrow’s market, not today’s. We’re willing to take a bet on something daring because we want to be in good shape for whatever comes down the pike. I don’t know whether Weldon internalized that at the company, since he came on board much later. But he personifies that ethos. He was constantly looking at different trends and seeing how they might converge in ten or twenty years.

Danny: Tell me more about the genesis of the book. You’ve done an incredible amount of reporting from war zones, Afghanistan and Yemen included. You had an incredible piece where you traced a piece of shrapnel from someone’s face in Yemen back to the unionized shop in the US where the ammunition had been assembled. Was that the nucleus of the idea for the book?

Jeff: Good catch, Danny. There were a few things. The most superficial was that in reporting the Yemen story, I found out the bomb used in the strike I was writing about was made by Raytheon but had been invented by Texas Instruments. Like everyone else, I just think of the calculator when I hear Texas Instruments. So this idea that the bomb was invented by the calculator company was a revelation.

The other thing was that what I was attempting to do with that story was collapse the distance a little bit. We’re launching strikes all over the world now. It’s very easy for one or two people in the Oval Office to say “let’s attack there” — we’ve got precision weapons on planes or long-range missiles, you flip a switch, and something’s exploding somewhere. It’s also very easy to view the people we’re attacking as two-dimensional, black-and-white figures on a screen, infrared output. But the thing is still exploding somewhere, and there are real people and real lives and real communities being destroyed.

I was trying to find a way to use this weapon — which symbolizes that remove — actually as a tool to bring people together, even if only as a literary device. Telling the history of how a calculator company revolutionized warfare, but also using this device of disconnection to connect a series of stories of people on every end of war over the past sixty years.

Danny: You’ve just touched on the central tension the book revolves around: are precision-guided munitions actually more humane because they let us do things surgically and precisely, or do they just make it easier to wage war? Each generation of the Paveway and similar weapons seems to expand the political appetite for using force.

Jeff: That is one of the hypotheses of the book — whether, if you have access to a weapon that is ostensibly humane enough, inexpensive enough, and precise enough, it begins to argue for its own use. One of the anecdotes I cite a lot is how, pretty quickly in the second Gulf War — the American invasion of Iraq, which was called the most precise air war in history, and by the proportion of precision munitions used, that is accurate — within six months or a year, more civilians had been killed in Iraq than in Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined. The statistics vary depending on who’s counting, but you have the nuclear weapon, which is the exact opposite of a precision weapon, and the precision weapon gives us the political cover to do so many strikes that we end up causing way more damage than we would if we were deciding whether to level a city with a nuclear bomb.

Danny: One of the counter-questions would be: what about the dog that didn’t bark? What about the wars that were not fought because of the dissuasive effect of those weapons?

Jeff: Do you mean nuclear weapons or precision weapons?

Danny: Precision-guided munitions.

Jeff: Another thing to think about is that if nuclear weapons set the terms of the Cold War, it was precision weapons with which we actually fought it and were allowed to fight it. There was this idea of “we can’t escalate, we need to be careful because this could lead to nuclear exchange.” Well, if you have the opposite of a nuclear weapon — a very precise, small weapon — then you can still go and meddle and intervene, ostensibly without as much risk of escalating. It’s another way having this weapon gives permission to engage when we might not otherwise have.

Danny: Given that they exist and it does seem difficult to put the genie back in the bottle, what is the correct way of using these weapons?

Jeff: With restraint. There probably are cases where being able to strike precisely is a net benefit. But it requires a lot of restraint that we are not demonstrating right now, because there is this illusion that we can fight wars very cleanly and surgically. One of the ways this manifests — and I think we’re seeing this now in Iran — is that yes, a lot of these weapons are astoundingly precise. However, even the most precise weapon is only as precise as the intelligence on the ground. What often happens is that aspect gets forgotten or ignored, and we fall into this almost intoxicating idea that the weapon is so precise it will necessarily hit what it’s supposed to hit.

In a place like Iran, where we don’t have a lot of intelligence on the ground — no embassy, not as much political reporting, very few spies who can go there under diplomatic cover — very early on, the day the strikes started, we saw this horrible thing where an elementary school was bombed. Even if you have a weapon that can go into a car window and kill just a terrorist leader and no one around him, you have to know that that’s a terrorist leader. Even though everyone knows logically that a bomb isn’t evaluating a person’s biographical details, there does seem to be this thing where the hardware capability almost convinces us that we don’t need the human intelligence.

Danny: Does that make you a technological determinist?

Jeff: I guess so. Because I really do think the trigger can pull the finger. If you have the thing, you kind of want to use it.

Danny: The thing I might push back slightly on is the adversarial dynamic — you do write about this in the book. Precisely for the reasons you describe, the opponent will react by trying to make it harder for you to collect that intelligence, or attempting to lure you into very precisely attacking an object you should not. And then, precisely because these are precision-guided munitions, you don’t have a good excuse for why you did that — it couldn’t have been an accident, precisely because it’s very precise indeed.

Jeff: That’s a really good point. It reminds me of two things. In the early days, when I was in Afghanistan, I would hear a lot of conspiracy theories about how the US was supporting Bin Laden. The reason was that everyone had heard stories of the mythical power of the American military — “you guys can read license plates from space.” So if you haven’t killed Bin Laden, it’s because you don’t want to.

I also think of the war in Gaza, where you’d often hear: “What are we supposed to do? Hamas is hiding weapons under hospitals.” I always thought that was the reverse of the framing. Often it’s not hiding weapons under hospitals to protect the weapon — it’s to invite the hospital being struck, for the exact reason you’re talking about.

Danny: And then military theorists would say you’ve moved the war from the physical realm to the information realm — the old “you may win the battle but lose the war.” I also want to say, we’re talking about this in very clinical terms, and it is interesting to be analytical about it, but as your reporting does really well: these are not just abstractions. These are not big analytical categories. As you just said, it does explode somewhere, ultimately at some horrific cost.

Jeff: It’s really hard to see that because of how we see footage of these wars. The first time we saw footage, in Desert Storm, we were seeing mostly targeting pod footage. It’s very clinical, looks like a video game. Even now, with cell phones and such, when you watch the news you’re seeing a building explode in the distance — smoke, dust, debris. You’re seeing violence, but it’s often violence to structures, to buildings. It’s very hard, when that is the footage available to you, to picture that happening in your own backyard to people you know.

We’ve been allowed this remove from the real impact. When these bombs go off — the Paveway’s warhead is often high-ferritic iron, really heavy iron that breaks into sharp shrapnel. You hold these tiny bits and they’re so heavy, flying through the air at thousands of miles per hour. The human body is no match for it. You can imagine how horrible it is to have these sharp, heavy pieces of superheated shrapnel flying through — the kind of horrible things they do to a human body. We don’t really see that. We don’t really understand that. We think of a roof collapsing on a terrorist leader, a bunker being destroyed. I don’t think we often attach the impact on human matter and minds to what we’re doing.

Danny: You strike me as some kind of mixture — in the best possible way — between Hunter Thompson and Ryszard Kapuscinski. Who’s your idol when it comes to reporting?

Jeff: Sebastian Junger. He has a profile of the kind of young hothead I was, just going to whatever place for glory. But he’s a brilliant writer and incredibly humane, which I admire and envy and am surprised by. A lot of journalists covering really horrible things have to be clinical, have to remove the humanity. It’s hard to be both in touch with victims as real people and do really excellent work. And he routinely does both.

Chivers is another. But most of the people I steal the most from are fiction writers. I’m trying to make things read more engagingly than clinical reporting, often to my editor’s chagrin — “why are you trying to use all these big words?”

Colum McCann, who is a brilliant novelist, a beautiful writer, but all of his novels are based on either a real person or a lot of research. There’s a saying a friend with a startup told me: the best technology disappears. If you develop a really good UX, you want the user to almost forget they’re using technology. I feel that applies to research in storytelling too. There are times you read something and think, this person is just flexing how much they know. People like Colum McCann and the best novelists — you know they’ve done a whole bunch of research, but it feels effortless. It feels like you’re just reading a story. That’s the goal.

Danny: How do you do this? Because your books have this very cinematic, novelistic quality, particularly the later ones. You tell us what’s happening in people’s heads, what they’re thinking, you recount dialogue that people had and that you cannot possibly have any record of. All of that cannot possibly be, strictly speaking, accurate. How do you deal with documentary accuracy versus atmospheric truth?

Jeff: We did aspire to accuracy. I went through a very rigorous fact-checking process with a fact-checker whom I really despised during the process — which meant he was good, and extremely patient.

One example is the section you helped me with, which was probably the most difficult. It’s a spy-versus-spy story set largely in East Germany in the early eighties. Of the two main characters, one was dead and the other was unavailable for comment. Both were working for spy services — heavily confidential, redacted — and both operated in languages I don’t speak. So I did what I often do: called my friend Danny and asked, “Can you help me find someone who can get access to some of these documents?” I ended up getting hold of some Berlin criminal court trial proceedings related to one of these terrorist attacks. There was a lot of information there, in German and redacted. So I called you again and had you connect me to another friend who could translate it.

Then there was a lot of cross-referencing, because many characters were referred to with code names, aliases, or were just redacted — sometimes all three. But pairing secondary materials like news reports with documentary evidence and heavily redacted documents, you can piece things together. For dialogue, there’s no made-up dialogue. For what was going on in the White House and the National Security Council, there are minutes — also redacted, but you can see this person reportedly said this, that person reportedly said that. You don’t have a whole conversation, so I have to provide filler. But all the dialogue can be backed up by either an interview or documentary evidence.

As for what’s going on in people’s minds — to have character-driven storytelling, if someone walks out a door and turns right, you need to know why they turned right. So it’s important to try to get into people’s heads. Even when it’s a person available for follow-up interviews, it’s really hard to double-check that. But we tried.

Danny: Speaking of the cinematic quality, it does feel like your latest book, and the one before it, The Mercenary, are constructed like movies. You’ve been involved in writing and co-producing films. Is that intentional — the structure, beats, and rhythm having that quality?

Jeff: I really appreciate you saying that. I strive hard to do it. It’s not because I hope some Hollywood person will take interest — that’s not the reason. It’s that I live in fear of someone getting bored. I’m not a great reader myself. If there’s too much technical information or if I can’t envision it, I get expelled from the narrative. So I’m constantly redoing things to make it tactile, to make it so someone can imagine themselves in the world. Anytime someone says they think I’ve partially achieved that, it’s way more validating than it probably should be. You need a spoonful of sugar to make the medicine go down. That’s why I start with Kennedy and Nazis and all that red meat.

Danny: You wrote in a very personal article that it was the end of a war that did you in. What happened there?

Jeff: I always prided myself — or maybe I should say I always had the illusion — that whenever I went to these different places, I was different from everyone else. I was really trying to identify with the people I was meeting and to see myself as no different or better or worse than them. I didn’t quite appreciate the fact that I had a passport; I could always leave. Even if there were times it felt like I was stuck somewhere, I wasn’t going to be there forever.

The place I spent the most time in, had the most people I loved, and most identified as a second home was Afghanistan. When the troops pulled out in 2021 and the Taliban were about to take over, everyone I knew was in danger. I wasn’t there, but it was all happening on my phone. I realized for the first time: I can’t leave. I’m not there. This is happening in my imagination. Of course it was real, but I had to picture all the people I really loved and was worried about and what they were dealing with.

That experience of trying to get some of those people out while the whole thing played out on my computer and my phone — it didn’t matter where I was, it was with me all the time. In a way, I think that was a bit of karmic retribution for all the places I’d gone and told myself I was helping by asking people to recount their most traumatic experience.

It was a crisis, both of conscience and of humbling, because I think — like a lot of journalists who cover war or tragedy — I licensed myself to meddle in other people’s trauma because I was a journalist, doing the Lord’s work. My attitude has changed, largely because of Afghanistan, where I was seeing the long tail of trauma. This time I wasn’t going and living with people for a few weeks to recreate something horrible and then leaving. It was just with me — the cost of conflict — and continues to be.

My attitude has shifted. Now it’s not that some horrible thing pops off somewhere and I think, “I’ll go and figure out why later.” Now it’s: is there actually something not being discussed that I can, in a very modest, marginal way, add a little insight to? The bar to clear for me to really want to take something on has become a lot higher.

Danny: Do you miss the adrenaline?

Jeff: I think I miss the adrenaline. I also miss problems that are external problems — how to get across the border, how to get the rebel group to not get in the way. Things that are real and external and proximate. Someone told me, because of the experience of trying to evacuate people during the collapse of Afghanistan: “You’re really good at making order out of chaos.” And I thought, thank you, but I’m realizing that if there isn’t chaos, I’m pretty good at making chaos out of order.

In my daily life, I create problems for myself. When you’re out there and the threats are real and external, and the problems are real and external, it’s almost a more natural place for me to be, where my mind can grab onto those things and try to solve them rather than the existential problem of what color shirt to wear.

Danny: You have an interesting sideline as a credited ghostwriter for — flippantly, you could put it — Republicans who get shot at. You wrote a book with Steve Scalise, the Republican congressman who was almost fatally shot by a domestic terrorist. And you also wrote The Fifteen Seventeen to Paris, the retelling of a 2015 story when three young Americans chanced upon an ISIS terrorist on a train from Amsterdam to Paris — a very unlikely story. You helped both Scalise and these three men write down their stories. How come?

Jeff: The 15:17 came first. These three young guys stopped a terrorist on a train and became mini-celebrities overnight. A talent agency signed them — speaking, TV shows, a book, a movie. For a minute it was pretty high-profile. The comparable at the time was Thirteen Hours, the book and movie about the annex security team in Libya where these contractors held off gunmen for thirteen hours. That book came about because those guys walked into publishing houses and told their story — it was clearly a book, there was a big advance, and they found a Pulitzer-winning writer.

This was different because it was ninety seconds on a train. It wasn’t clear how it was going to be a book. The publisher wasn’t going to give a big advance without seeing what the book would be. They couldn’t just get the most accomplished writer and throw money at them because there was no deal. So they needed someone young and hungry enough to do a fair amount of work without getting paid — writing a book proposal, figuring out how to tell the story. Because I was young and similar in profile to the guys, the agency asked if I’d take a crack at putting together a proposal. I did.

Through a long, convoluted course, that book became the movie. And the movie was just coming out when that same agency was trying to shop a book by Scalise — a memoir of him surviving. Because I was associated with this other “Republicans who get shot at” book, my agent was able to drop in our first call with Scalise: “Oh, and by the way, apropos of nothing, I just saw the billboard for the Clint Eastwood movie. Anyway, back to you, Steve.”

I took on the Scalise project because — and this may be another example of me deluding myself — the little I’d heard about the story involved all these different kinds of people coming together to save him. His Capitol Police security detail was a Black man and a Black woman. The woman was married to her partner — she was a lesbian. She literally took a bullet for him, and later they were both in rehab together. And there were all these other people: far-right Republicans, far-left liberals, the trauma surgeon who was this interesting philosophical guy, the helicopter pilot — all coming together for one purpose.

I thought: this is a way I can reach an audience I can’t reach through The New York Times or The Atlantic, and this could be an important, helpful story at a moment when we’re seeing all these people come together. I don’t know that it quite had that effect in the end. But when I pitched doing it as much about all the other people as about him, Scalise was really into it and supportive. He was really wonderful to work with, which made it a little weird to be with this lovely, thoughtful, caring guy in person and then see this other side of him on the news. It was a cognitive dissonance.

Danny: For those who haven’t read it — what’s the CliffsNotes version of what happened to him?

Jeff: There’s a tradition of the congressional baseball game, where every year Democrats play Republicans. It’s a big fundraiser. For a couple of months leading up to it, there are practices. Scalise was at practice when a gunman opened fire. He was shot in a way that should have been fatal — the injury ruptured a vessel and he was bleeding out internally. That’s an injury that’s really hard to identify because he was also bleeding externally, but the real problem was internal.

It happened that another member of the Republican congressional baseball team had been a combat medic in Iraq and had lost a soldier because of this exact injury — a grievous wound that was not visible. Something about Scalise allowed this guy, Brad Wenstrup, to identify that he had this other thing going on.

Then there were all these other coincidences. Members of Congress don’t have security unless they’re in leadership. There are only two or three who have a small security detail. Because Scalise was Majority Whip, he was in leadership and had two security officers. It’s only for that reason the gunman wasn’t able to just walk out and mow everyone down — Scalise being there saved all the other congressmen. Then there were all these other people being in the right place at the right time, and some genuine heroics that saved his life.

Again, a lot of politicians who write books do it as a branding and campaign thing — how great their ideas are, their own story. The book is set up as many profiles of all these different people and how they intersected to save him. The fact that Scalise was excited to do this in a way that featured him less — I thought that was pretty telling.

Danny: I’ll admit freely, it’s probably not a book I would have read had I not known you, but it’s an incredibly compelling read.

Jeff: A lot of people haven’t read it even though they do know me.

Danny: But what I wonder is: you tell this story in a really crisp way, but I assume at the outset it wasn’t obvious at all that that was the story, and there are a million ways of telling it. How do you find the thread that becomes the spine of something compelling?

Jeff: I’ve always been drawn to Rashomon-type stories. For some reason, I’ve always liked reading, watching, and trying to write stories where there’s some unifying thing or place or event, and then we see different people coming at it from different angles — in this case, literally from different angles. I’m often trying to find a way to do that and then backing into a reason for doing it.

With the 15:17, the problem was: there’s this really compelling event, but it’s a minute or two on a train. How do we turn this into a book? I was struggling with that, and simultaneously with: how do you write autobiography when there are three “autos,” three different people? At the same time, for some reason, I was watching The Affair, which does a Rashomon thing — the first half of every episode is from the man’s perspective, the second half from the woman’s.

At some point it clicked: tell the story from three different perspectives and you get a 360-degree view. Plus, when there’s trauma, there are literal physiological changes, including to the shape of your eye — when people describe tunnel vision, the lens is literally changing shape. So these three people see the same event from their different perspectives, very similar but with key differences. I tried to use that to play up the fact that when you experience trauma, it’s like a distorted video camera.

The same thing applied with Scalise. I couldn’t tell a story from his perspective about how the trauma surgeon saved him — he wouldn’t know that, and he was unconscious at the time. Being faithful to point of view required doing it from different viewpoints. And I always find it fascinating: how does the whole ambulance dispatch system work? This was an excuse to figure out how these different mini-worlds operate.

Danny: On The Fifteen Seventeen to Paris, we should briefly explain: the terrorist is in the bathroom, he has a rifle, he gets out and essentially immediately gets overwhelmed by the three men. His gun mysteriously doesn’t fire, so they don’t get shot, they overwhelm and subdue him, and then the police take over. Is that a reasonably accurate rendering?

Jeff: Yeah. Two other things: he also had a pistol and a knife, and he was able to shoot one person in the neck. That person survived partially because Spencer, one of the guys, was an Air Force medic and was able to identify and stop the bleeding. The other thing is that technically it wasn’t that the gun jammed — it was what I think is called a bad primer. That distinction matters because when a gun jams, there’s a way to clear it. In this case, he pulled the trigger, the hammer hit, everything happened like it was supposed to, and the bullet just didn’t go off. That provided extra time for Spencer and the other guys, who were on the other side of the train car, to get up, run down, and tackle him. Spencer’s hobby was jiu-jitsu, so he knew how to put the guy in a chokehold.

Danny: It’s a wild story. These guys are brave beyond imagination.

Jeff: I should also tell you, Danny: the guy who played the terrorist in the movie — who is, weirdly, a wonderful, kind, awesome guy — read the audiobook for The Mercenary and reads the audiobook for the part you helped with in The Warhead, the section about Wappen und Vastasi.

Danny: There we go. That brings us to The Mercenary, the book you published before The Warhead, which also has that Rashomon quality you’ve described. You tell the same story twice: your experience in Afghanistan, then retold from the perspective of your friend who was with you and helped you along. How therapeutic was writing that book?

Jeff: That’s a really interesting question. In some ways it was therapeutic. I think the reason it didn’t fully feel that way is because of how it came about. I love this guy, Amal. He was my first friend there, saved my life a bunch of times. He really was a brother, is a brother.

Early on I would write about some of our experiences without knowing what for. In 2021, when Afghanistan came back in the news and Biden announced we were going to withdraw — but before I realized how bad it was going to be — I started talking to publishers: “Afghanistan’s in the news, you might be looking for an Afghanistan book, here’s the story.” The publisher that did the 15:17 was interested.

My thought was I’d secure the deal and do it after The Warhead, which I was still in the middle of. Because I was still under contract for The Warhead, we couldn’t go out to different publishers. This one said: okay, we’ll do it, we’re going to give you a tiny advance, and it has to come out on the one-year anniversary of the collapse of Afghanistan.

I ended up trying to write two books while in the midst of evacuations. In a way, it was a real-life manifestation of what became part of what I’m struggling with in that book: here I am taking time away from evacuations to move my words around. The gulf between what we often license ourselves to do as journalists and our actual impact can be fairly large, and it felt really large there. I had a lot of ambivalence working on it — I need to finish this, it needs to be good, but also, why am I spending time on this and not that?

I think that preempted what could have been a pretty therapeutic process. There were aspects that were therapeutic — especially when we get into my mom, putting her in a memory care unit at the same time we’re trying to evacuate people. But the overall experience was a real-life manifestation of one of the things I’m struggling with in the book. The book is called The Mercenary, ostensibly because my friend becomes an arms dealer, but it’s also trying to hold a mirror up. I’m probably more the mercenary. I go to this foreign place and treat it like a theater for my benefit — to write about and make a career out of — and the book is me struggling with that.

Danny: Why did you choose to put your mom in both of the books?

Jeff: For The Mercenary, it was my agent’s idea. By that point, I knew the structure: the same rough period of time from my perspective, then the same period from Amal’s perspective. I didn’t know where it went from there. There was a period when I was supposed to be reporting the book that I could not get in touch with Amal. He’d disappeared. It turned out he was in jail — accusations of domestic abuse.

My agent, at some point when I asked him how to end this thing, said: “I think it’s Amal in literal jail and you in this kind of mental jail because of what you’re going through.” That set me off, because part one is from my perspective, part two is from his, and this allowed part three to go back and forth in a sinusoidal rhythm — me, him, me, him — me with my mom and him in jail. It became a way to visualize and articulate what is arguably an indirect result of the trauma we experienced, and a lot of the trauma he experienced because of me.

Danny: What are you working on now?

Jeff: Doing podcasts about The Warhead. I have way too many ideas for the next thing, which I’m trying to stop myself from diving into because I have family obligations I’ve been putting off for years. But you’ll be the first to know when I begin putting pen to paper, because I will probably need your help with some aspect of it. I should also say that the Yemen story too — you’re my first call. Why I thought you would have a connection there, I don’t know, but you did. You connected me to Ahmed, who turned out to be a very good friend and extremely helpful. So this whole thing goes back to Danny.

Danny: Thank you. Thank you, Jeff. This was a true pleasure.

Jeff: Thank you so much, Danny. I hope I get to see you in person soon.

Danny: I hope so too.

Jeff: Take care, brother.