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WORK TITLE: Bring out the Dog
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 1972?
WEBSITE: https://www.wmackin.com/
CITY:
STATE: NM
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY: American
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born c. 1972.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer.
MIILITARY:Served in the U.S. Navy, deployed with SEAL teams on assignments in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere.
WRITINGS
Contributor to the anthology The Best American Short Stories 2014. Contributor to periodicals, including the New Yorker, GQ, Tin House, and the New York Times magazine.
SIDELIGHTS
Short-story writer Will Mackin is a veteran of the U.S. Navy and draws on his service in the military for many of his stories. In an interview with New York Times Online contributor John Williams, Mackin noted that he liked to write from a young age. He noted that the impetus for his stories and his his first collection of tales, Bring Out the Dog: Stories, stems primarily from his time on missions with the Navy Seals in Afghanistan and Iraq.
“The idea for this particular book came out of the sensory details of the wars,” Mackin told New York Times Online contributor Williams, going on especially to point out how night vision apparatus affected him: “Nothing directly appears as what it is. Especially at night, when you’re seeing things basically in three different forms: the heat-and-light image in night vision; the silhouette in darkness I’d see in my peripheral or if I looked under the goggles; and the image I knew — like, if I was looking at a teammate, the guy I was familiar with, my memory of what he looked like in daylight. That sort of sensory confusion really stuck with me.”
Bring Out the Dog features eleven stories based on Mackin’s many deployments with a special operations task force. Many of the stories had their origins in notes Mackin made while on duty and sometimes jotted down on his forearm with a grease pencil. The stories present both the absurdity and mysterious poetry that make up life in modern warfare. Some tales take place in war zones while others are set at home in the United States, where the psychological impacts of war can continue long after the service member returns home.
In an interview with New Yorker Online contributor Deborah Treisman, Mackin noted he often became frustrated while writing the stories for Bring Out the Dog. Whenever that happened, he would do some other project for a time before he could return to writing. “These tasks lent themselves to planning: I could set a goal, make progress toward it, and take stock at the end of the day. I could enjoy the satisfaction that comes from physical exhaustion. Eventually, I’d go back to writing. My only plan toward the end was to try to capture the weirdness.”
In the story titled “Crossing the River No Name,” Mackin tells the story of a unit preparing to ambush a group of Taliban fighters coming in from the mountains of Pakistan. Although wartime can be boring and repetitive, these soldiers have a close call that seems to indicate that perhaps miracles do occur after all, although miracles do not always happen. In “Great Circle Route Westward Through Perpetual Night,” a combat team experiences grief after one of the Seal team members accidentally kills the team’s beloved bomb-sniffing dog and ends up ostracized by his fellow Seals.
The opening story in Bring out the Dog, titled “The Lost Troop,” is set in Afghanistan in 2008 and revolves around a troop of soldiers in the Logar Province. In an absurd scenario, the soldiers end up making up missions for themselves because they have received no intelligence or directives from command. The story’s narrator imagines that his group has been abandoned or that they are suspended in time like Japanese soldiers who hid underground in Iwo Jima after World War II, unaware that the war had ended. The narrator even fantasizes about an asteroid landing on the group and killing them all. When the group comes up with a final mission, they soon face a moral ambiguity.
Another story titled “Kattekoppen” features a man who ponders his commitments as a father and how this fits in with his commitments as a soldier. “Baker’s Strong Point” features a man fighting loss of control while his primary job it to make things come together. “Mackin turns in a virtuoso performance with this collection of loosely interconnected, military-themed short stories,” wrote David Pitt in Booklist. A Publishers Weekly contributor remarked: “Throughout the book … it is the language as much as the experience that drives the action, creating taut, almost terrifying suspense.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, February 15, 2018, David Pitt, review of Bring out the Dog: Stories, p. 23.
Publishers Weekly, November 6, 2017, review of Bring out the Dog, p. 58.
ONLINE
New York Times Online, https://www.nytimes.com/ (March 11, 2018), John Williams, “Q. & A. Tell Us 5 Things About Your Book: Turning SEAL Assignments Into Stories.”
New Yorker Online, https://www.newyorker.com/ (November 20, 2017), Deborah Treisman, “Will Mackin on Capturing the Weirdness of War,” author interview.
Will Mackin website, https://www.wmackin.com (August 5, 2018).
ABOUT
Will Mackin is a veteran of the U.S. Navy His work has appeared in The New Yorker, GQ, Tin House, and The New York Times Magazine. His story “Kattekoppen” was selected by Jennifer Egan for inclusion in The Best American Short Stories 2014, and his essay about being an extra on Breaking Bad, published in GQ, was nominated for an American Society of Magazine Editors “Ellie” award. Mackin’s debut collection of short stories, Bring Out the Dog, will be published by Random House in March 2018.
Q. & A.
Tell Us 5 Things About Your Book: Turning SEAL Assignments Into Stories
By John Williams
March 11, 2018
Image
CreditPatricia Wall/The New York Times
“I felt proud that I’d fought, or something like proud, but also glad it was over.” That’s the narrator of one story in Will Mackin’s debut collection, “Bring Out the Dog.” During his time in the United States Navy, Mr. Mackin was deployed with SEAL teams on assignments in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere. When he came home, he relied on notes he kept during his time in combat to write these stories, three of which have appeared in The New Yorker. Below, Mr. Mackin talks about the experiences that inspired the book, why he chose to write fiction, a Pink Floyd lyric that has influenced his life and more.
When did you first get the idea to write this book?
I’ve always wanted to write, as long as I can remember. The idea for this particular book came out of the sensory details of the wars. When I was deploying with a SEAL team in Iraq and Afghanistan, our mission was night raids, and we wore night vision. There was a disconnect between the actual image and the image I was seeing in the goggles, and in some of the transmission — I could hear the guy next to me speaking on the radio, and a few seconds later I’d hear his voice in my head on delay. The voice would sound different but all the words were the same.
Nothing directly appears as what it is. Especially at night, when you’re seeing things basically in three different forms: the heat-and-light image in night vision; the silhouette in darkness I’d see in my peripheral or if I looked under the goggles; and the image I knew — like, if I was looking at a teammate, the guy I was familiar with, my memory of what he looked like in daylight. That sort of sensory confusion really stuck with me.
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What’s the most surprising thing you learned while writing it?
Probably how much of writing isn’t writing. My work ethic prior to this, in terms of writing, was: More is better. I tried to sit at the desk and generate more. If I was stuck, I thought, “All I have to do is just sit here and think about it more.” But I learned that I had to take a break when it just wasn’t working. I did stuff around the house — things that were repetitive and didn’t require a lot of thought. We live out near Albuquerque, and we have grass, which is rare. Our sprinkler system was broken. I dug up a line to fix, and then another, and I ended up digging up the whole network of lines in the backyard. It was hard work. It was knotted with roots and all kinds of craziness. My mind was occupied with other things, and ideas came.
Image
Will Mackin
CreditElisabetta Mackin
In what way is the book you wrote different from the book you set out to write?
That’s pretty easy, because I set out to write nonfiction. I had this idea that there was some undeniable way of telling this story. What I had in mind was the kind of narrative you heard in the down time, whenever we just let our hair down and everyone was talking about how screwed up everything was. That’s what I was searching for. I really wanted to be able to create those things and have people agree with it: “That’s exactly what it was like.” I wasn’t reaching out to everyone I knew on the teams, but I wanted them all to agree, and I knew that was impossible.
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George Saunders has been my mentor since about 1998. I met him at a writing retreat in St. Petersburg, Russia, and we just stayed in touch after that. What he told me was, “You’re placing unnecessary constraints upon yourself. You have this perfect book off in the distant future, and you’re never going to finish it.”
So I wrote it in a way that didn’t necessarily unfold in the way things had happened. It gave me more leeway. I went through the back door but I still accomplished the same thing. I know some people will read it and say, “That’s not how it happened,” but I don’t care as much about that as I did in 2011. It felt like a crucible, each deployment. To misrepresent that ... I felt like I owed it to everybody to stay true.
Who is a creative person (not a writer) who has influenced you and your work?
Syd Barrett, one of the original members of Pink Floyd. When I was a kid I listened to a lot of Pink Floyd. I started with “The Wall” and went backward. I learned the story of Barrett leaving the band, and how he kind of went nuts, and how Roger Waters wrote “Wish You Were Here” as a tribute to him. That song really moved me when I was 12 years old — the tragedy and the loss that Waters felt. I didn’t understand at the time why Waters would care so much, it just felt wrong for Barrett to have left. Some of the lyrics — like “did you exchange / a walk-on part in the war / for a lead role in a cage?” — there are probably three or four moments in my life where I’ve made key decisions based on trying to avoid that fate.
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People often thank me for my service. I appreciate that but I don’t completely understand it. Life is difficult if you’re military or civilian, and eventually we all end up serving each other in one way or another. This book is my attempt to pay tribute to that service.
This interview has been condensed and edited.
Follow John Williams on Twitter: @johnwilliamsnyt.
November 20, 2017
Photograph by Betta Mackin
Your story this week, “The Lost Troop,” is set in Afghanistan between September and December, 2008. Were you there then?
I was between deployments and in Utah for most of that time. My job while deployed was to direct air strikes, so I’d train on bombing ranges all over the state. In addition to refamiliarizing myself with the geometry and pacing of an attack, I’d reacquaint myself with the targeting gadgetry: laser, G.P.S., infrared, and radio. These things took very precise measurements of the target location. It seemed, however, that the more precise the measurement was the less certain I became of the target’s location. Sometimes, I’d get so far down in the weeds that nothing seemed fixed. And it wasn’t until I’d leave one range for another—driving on the interstate for fifty miles east or west, with the desert speeding by on either side—that things would settle down again.
The story revolves around a troop of American soldiers at an outpost in Logar Province, who don’t have a mission or any intelligence to pursue and have to invent missions for themselves. Would that ever happen?
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While I was deployed, our intelligence was very good, so mission planning typically consisted of connecting a few well-defined dots. On those rare nights when the dots weren’t completely filled in, or didn’t exist at all, we’d have to extrapolate. Our mission was to hunt H.V.I.s, or high-value individuals. We’d take into account each individual’s so-called patterns of life. These were his habits, faults, and desires, converted into something like vectors. Occasionally, those vectors would triangulate. I wouldn’t call that process inventive, necessarily, but there was a creative element to it.
The narrator imagines his troop as abandoned or suspended in time—like the Japanese soldiers on Iwo Jima who hid underground for months, unaware that the war had ended—or else killed on the spot by an asteroid. Is he afraid of these possibilities or is he, in a way, fantasizing about them?
I think it’s more projection than fantasy. The narrator wonders how the war will end for him, and, if he survives, what life will be like without it.
There’s a certain lawlessness in this troop: we think of these men as decent people, but, at the same time, the final mission they choose has some moral ambiguity to it. I assume that’s intentional?
That fictional lawlessness has roots in reality. Of all the men and women who join the military seeking discipline, very few become true believers in it. Most, I’d say, simply figure out how to get by, while a very small minority learn how to weaponize their more chaotic tendencies. These are the ones who gravitate toward special operations.
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The American men’s relationship with Joe, their Afghani-British translator, is a complicated one, isn’t it? The narrator seems somewhat irritated by Joe, and his constant proximity, and yet Joe is the only person who tries to alleviate the guilt that he feels for the role he played in his fellow-soldier Yaz’s death.
My guess is that Joe’s attempt to alleviate the narrator’s guilt annoys the narrator, too. I’d say he doesn’t want to let himself off the hook that easily.
“The Lost Troop” will be part of your collection, “Bring Out the Dog,” which comes out in March, and some of the characters here reappear in other stories in the book, including “Kattekoppen” and “Crossing the River No Name,” which were also published in The New Yorker. Was it always planned as a story collection, or did you think about writing about this group of soldiers in novel form?
Whatever plans I made while writing this book were repeatedly undone, and the resulting frustration would throw me off for months. I’d have to launch some unrelated project in order to get back on track. So I rebuilt the engine in my truck, and I dug up and replaced all the sprinkler lines in my back yard. These tasks lent themselves to planning: I could set a goal, make progress toward it, and take stock at the end of the day. I could enjoy the satisfaction that comes from physical exhaustion. Eventually, I’d go back to writing. My only plan toward the end was to try to capture the weirdness.
*Do you have any favorite war stories by other writers? *
My benchmarks are Donald Barthelme’s “The Sergeant,” Isaac Babel’s “Squadron Commander Trunov,” and Barry Hannah’s “Midnight and I’m Not Famous Yet.” I know I’m onto something, writing-wise, whenever Hannah’s narrator starts reading my words back to me.
Deborah Treisman is The New Yorker’s fiction editor and the host of its Fiction Podcast.Read more »
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Print Marked Items
Bring out the Dog
David Pitt
Booklist.
114.12 (Feb. 15, 2018): p23.
COPYRIGHT 2018 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Full Text:
Bring out the Dog.
By Will Mackin.
Mar. 2018.192p. Random, $27 (9780812995640).
Navy veteran Mackin turns in a virtuoso performance with this collection of loosely interconnected,
military-themed short stories. In stories based on the author's own wartime experiences in Iraq and
Afghanistan, Mackin does a fine job of showing us not only the realities of living in a wartime environment,
but also the deep psychological toll the life of a soldier can take on a person. It would be simplistic to call
these war stories; they're about combat, yes, but they are also about what happens in between the scenes of
violence, when the combat is over, and professional soldiers need to figure out what to do with themselves
(one of the stories literally involves a group of soldiers trying to determine what they should do in the
absence of orders from their superiors). With vividly drawn characters and a strong sense of the absurdity of
war, this striking debut collection will evoke memories of Tim O'Brien's classic Vietnam stories, The
Things They Carried (1990). O'Brien's observation that "a true war story is never about war "is echoed here
again and again.--David Pitt
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Pitt, David. "Bring out the Dog." Booklist, 15 Feb. 2018, p. 23. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A531171517/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=25975231.
Accessed 14 July 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A531171517
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Bring out the Dog
Publishers Weekly.
264.45 (Nov. 6, 2017): p58.
COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
* Bring out the Dog
Will Mackin. Random House, $27 (192p) ISBN 978-0-8129-9564-0
In this spellbinding, adrenaline-fueled debut linked collection, Mackin pulls from his own time in the Navy
to follow a team of SEALs who, from 2008 to 2011, serve and try to survive together, primarily in Iraq and
Afghanistan. Each story explodes with dust and dread as the SEALs are sent to recover the bodies of
missing soldiers who were kidnapped south of Kabul; come to blows over chocolate milk in the mess hall;
and snub a fellow SEAL who, disoriented in a cornfield one night, accidentally shoots the team's beloved
bomb-sniffing dog. "We could forgive fear, but not the inability to control it," the narrator explains when the
unfortunate man sits waiting with his bags after the incident. Throughout the book, though, it is the
language as much as the experience that drives the action, creating taut, almost terrifying suspense.
Mackin's masterful prose is both poetic and aggressive. In one of the collection's most haunting stories,
"Crossing the River No Name," the men are preparing for an ambush against a group of Taliban fighters
emerging from the mountains of Pakistan, "the type of mission that earlier in the war would have been fun."
Before the mission's end, they will rediscover that, just because the war has become repetitive and futile, it
doesn't mean anyone is safe. In this story, and indeed in the whole unforgettable collection, the men fighting
this war know better than anyone how tragic each loss is. Agent: Esther Newberg, ICM Partners. (Mar.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Bring out the Dog." Publishers Weekly, 6 Nov. 2017, p. 58. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A514056580/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=f1ed51ca.
Accessed 14 July 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A514056580