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Speaker 1: On this episode of Newts World. I've been an avid

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Speaker 1: reader of Stephen Hunter's books for many years, following close

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Speaker 1: through the lives of his characters, Vietnam War veteran and

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Speaker 1: sniper Bob Lee Swagger, his father, Earl Swagger, a legendary

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Speaker 1: marine in World War Two, and Bob's son Ray Crews.

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Speaker 1: And the last time we spoke was when he released

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Speaker 1: his last novel, Targeted, a year ago, and he talked

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Speaker 1: a while working on his new novel, The Bullet Garden

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Speaker 1: and Earl Swagger novel. He sent me an early copy

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Speaker 1: of the book, which I read immediately, and I've been

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Speaker 1: looking forward to talking with them about it ever since.

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Speaker 1: So I'm really pleased to welcome back my guest and

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Speaker 1: somebody who I have come to consider a friend just

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Speaker 1: because he's so creative and so fascinating a person. Stephen Hunter.

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Speaker 1: He's written over twenty novels. He's the retired chief film

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Speaker 1: credit for The Washington Post, where he won the two

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Speaker 1: thousand and three Pulleitzer Prize for Distinguished Criticism. Also published

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Speaker 1: two collections of film criticism and a non fiction work,

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Speaker 1: American Gunfight. See welcome and thank you for joining me again.

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Speaker 1: On news World. Well, thank you so much New for

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Speaker 1: your enthusiasm for my work. It's one of the things

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Speaker 1: I look forward to nights when the book isn't going

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Speaker 1: too well. I'm thinking I can't let New down. So

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Speaker 1: here I am. That's the spirit. Well before we dive

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Speaker 1: into the new novel, which I think may have been

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Speaker 1: as complicated as anything you've written. And I'm really looking

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Speaker 1: forward to this session. But I do have to ask you,

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Speaker 1: since you were the film critic for both the Baltimore

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Speaker 1: Sun and then The Washington Post for years and Oscar

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Speaker 1: nominations have just been announced, do you still pay attention

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Speaker 1: to movies and watch a lot of them. No. I

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Speaker 1: pay attention to movies as long as they were made

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Speaker 1: before nineteen sixty. The modern film now and then one

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Speaker 1: will break through my reluctance and I'll go see a movie.

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Speaker 1: I went and saw Babylon, for example. I saw a

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Speaker 1: very good movie called Old Henry. And I go to

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Speaker 1: the movies, and I watched new movies very very seldom.

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Speaker 1: And it's what retirement is all about. Let's talk about

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Speaker 1: the Bullet Garden. Here. You tell a story of Marine

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Speaker 1: gunnery star Geant Earl Swagger during World War Two, but

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Speaker 1: you move him because most of his career of courses

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Speaker 1: in the Pacific. So what made you decide to go

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Speaker 1: back to Swagger as the main character in a book

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Speaker 1: which takes place in Normandy. Partly the challenge. I thought

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Speaker 1: it'd be great fun. Partly I really liked the plot

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Speaker 1: of this book and it allowed me to wallow uncertain

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Speaker 1: of my obsessions like World War Two and the fact

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Speaker 1: that Earl was in the Marine Corps was awkward, but

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Speaker 1: it seemed like it was solvable. And in fact, there

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Speaker 1: were a few marines attached to OSS who served in

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Speaker 1: the European Theater of Operations, the most famous of them

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Speaker 1: being the actor Sterling Hayden, who was a marine officer,

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Speaker 1: but because he was such a gifted small boat sailor,

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Speaker 1: he was recruited by OSS and he spent the war

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Speaker 1: delivering partisan supplies in the Adriatic Sea, so there was

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Speaker 1: some loose precedent. I also I liked the idea of

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Speaker 1: a marine in the army because it allowed me to

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Speaker 1: play a lot of jokes and have some fun, and

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Speaker 1: to see what Earl is going through with regard to

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Speaker 1: dealing with army culture and how he's got to handle

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Speaker 1: that as opposed to marine culture, and it was just

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Speaker 1: a challenge and there was a lot of fun, I

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Speaker 1: have to tell you. Well, I mean it's interesting because

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Speaker 1: you get into all these kind of cross geography, cross

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Speaker 1: cultural things, and then you make them even more complicated

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Speaker 1: because you get us involved in London with the OSS

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Speaker 1: while also getting us involved in Normandy with what was.

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Speaker 1: I didn't realize until I read your book that this

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Speaker 1: was a real problem. And you comment that the idea

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Speaker 1: about the book came from a discussion about something that

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Speaker 1: had happened historically in Normandy. Well, I love to set

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Speaker 1: the books against history for a number of reasons. Number

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Speaker 1: when they organized the book, I mean, you know what

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Speaker 1: happened big on what date, so you have to steer

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Speaker 1: the book in that direction, and then you have to

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Speaker 1: steer it towards another one. Number two is this basically

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Speaker 1: sound callous, But I've always loved World War Two, particularly

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Speaker 1: in a European theater, and it was a chance to

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Speaker 1: return My first book, The Master Sniper forty three years ago,

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Speaker 1: was set there, and it allowed me to pick up

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Speaker 1: some of those older characters and finished some of those

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Speaker 1: stories that I had left unfinished. Both in that book

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Speaker 1: in subsequent short stories that I had written, and the

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Speaker 1: whole thing was just like a return home for me,

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Speaker 1: and I hope I had proven that you can go

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Speaker 1: home again. Maybe you can't, but I sure tried. The

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Speaker 1: whole notion of the way in which the hedgerows actually

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Speaker 1: facilitated sniping, Yeah, it was an extraordinary landmark. It was

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Speaker 1: one of the great intelligence failures by the United States

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Speaker 1: in World War two, and that our war planners had

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Speaker 1: no imagination for the landscape, and they were completely unprepared,

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Speaker 1: and suddenly they found themselves and they spectacularly arranged. As

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Speaker 1: someone called it, a general who said it was like

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Speaker 1: a thousand Guadald canals. It was like a jungle warfare,

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Speaker 1: although the jungles were contained in the hedgerows, which were

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Speaker 1: eight foot tall, almost impenetrable, vegetable and mineral fences that

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Speaker 1: cut the land up into small postage stamp shaped meadows,

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Speaker 1: and getting through them without getting killed was really tough,

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Speaker 1: and it took us three months. That caused us great

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Speaker 1: many casualties. It was essentially a holding strategy by the

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Speaker 1: Germans that enabled them to get a lot of people

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Speaker 1: out of there that otherwise might have been caught behind

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Speaker 1: lines while we were trying to encircle them, which was

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Speaker 1: of course the classic battle maneuver of World War Two.

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Speaker 1: I mean all at all. It was a disaster, and

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Speaker 1: it just took a long time for us to work

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Speaker 1: out a strategy for dealing with the issues, and I

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Speaker 1: played with that. I can't say everything I wrote was

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Speaker 1: absolutely factual, but I think in terms of the milieu,

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Speaker 1: in terms of the despair, in terms of the casualties,

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Speaker 1: in terms of landscape, I got it quite correctly. I'm

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Speaker 1: curious because this is something you've written about very widely,

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Speaker 1: and I would say you're probably the leading writer. For

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Speaker 1: some reason, the sniper elicits a level of hatred let's say,

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Speaker 1: the machine gunner doesn't seem to elicit, even though the

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Speaker 1: machine gunner probably kills a lot more people. And as

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Speaker 1: you pointed out, you were triggered in part because General

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Speaker 1: Omar Bradley got so angry that at one point he

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Speaker 1: wonted to order that all of the snipers that they

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Speaker 1: could capture would be killed on the spot, and then

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Speaker 1: you talk to him out of it. You know, clearly

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Speaker 1: a war crime. But what is there do you think

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Speaker 1: that makes the sniper so much greater feared and more emotional.

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Speaker 1: I think it's the intimacy. He sees your face, he

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Speaker 1: sees whether you've shaved or not that morning, he sees

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Speaker 1: if you're scared, or if you're bold, or if you're strong,

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Speaker 1: or if you're weak. It's like he's right next door

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Speaker 1: to you, and there's something totally unsettling about that he

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Speaker 1: also sees you. Unlike modern war, which is machines that

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Speaker 1: gets machines with poor human beings caught in the middle,

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Speaker 1: this is definitely the most intimate form of killing, next

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Speaker 1: to say the bayonet, and that he's up close. If

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Speaker 1: you're in his scope, it's like he's in your pocket,

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Speaker 1: and that somehow has a psychological weight that is uniquely heavy,

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Speaker 1: and soldiers find that much more difficult to deal with

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Speaker 1: strategically or in terms of moorel than they might otherwise.

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Speaker 1: I'm not saying they don't mind getting killed by machine guns,

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Speaker 1: but at least getting killed by machine guns feels like war,

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Speaker 1: and you can adjust to the realities of war. Getting

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Speaker 1: killed by a sniper feels like murder, and nobody wants

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Speaker 1: to be murdered. There's just some higher moral and spiritual

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Speaker 1: weight that just attends to the sniper and the sniper's predations.

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Speaker 1: Despite the fact that we hated the German snipers, didn't

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Speaker 1: we have a fair amount of sniping on our side?

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Speaker 1: Oh of course we did. Everybody snipes as usual. Between

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Speaker 1: the wars, there's no money for sniper training, and so

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Speaker 1: I mean the saint patterns repeated over and over again.

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Speaker 1: We go to war and suddenly we're being sniped. They say,

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Speaker 1: the best thing to stop a snipers to have another sniper.

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Speaker 1: So we have to gear up a sniper training program

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Speaker 1: and we have to acquire sniper ordinance. And we did

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Speaker 1: it in World War One, we did it in World

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Speaker 1: War Two, we did in Korea, and we did it

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Speaker 1: in Vietnam. We were just slow off the starting line

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Speaker 1: and sniper war, and we had to make quick adjustments

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Speaker 1: to that reality. And indeed, eventually, but not initially, we

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Speaker 1: did field snipers because we want their soldiers to feel

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Speaker 1: that same unease and a morale crunching pressure that the

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Speaker 1: sniper brings to bear. So when you think of it

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Speaker 1: that way, to use the title of your very first book,

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Speaker 1: The Master Sniper, Yeah, people are like, that's in our

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Speaker 1: who killed three hundred and forty five men. On the

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Speaker 1: Soviet Front, you had Joseph Seppellerberger who shot and killed

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Speaker 1: two hundred and fifty seven men. Did we have anything

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Speaker 1: comparable with that in terms of our snipers effectiveness? I mean,

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Speaker 1: the Russian Front is somewhat unique in war, and that

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Speaker 1: they were in combat for three solid years every day.

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Speaker 1: I mean, it was like a job, not a campaign,

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Speaker 1: whereas in Americans there were lots of times when we

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Speaker 1: were not fighting aggressively. You know, it was definitely a

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Speaker 1: start and stop kind of effort. And so we never

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Speaker 1: had men who were exposed to combat long enough to

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Speaker 1: acquire three hundred kills, as some of these Germans did.

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Speaker 1: And the Russians had snipers too that had many hundreds

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Speaker 1: of kills, just because the conflict as it tends as

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Speaker 1: it was, wasn't as continuous, wasn't straight line through, and

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Speaker 1: no sniper here was credited on our side by World

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Speaker 1: War two, because I think that indicates our sort of

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Speaker 1: unease with the snipers. And it really wasn't until Vietnam

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Speaker 1: that we began to rehabilitate the sniper And it was

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Speaker 1: Carlos Haffcock, the great Marine sniper, who first attracted public attention.

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Speaker 1: Someone wrote an interesting biography of him called Marine Sniper

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Speaker 1: Was Sold and Sold and Sold. It's quite a good book,

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Speaker 1: even if I suspect that it's a little embellished, but

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Speaker 1: at any rate, sort of the idea of the sniper

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Speaker 1: as a hero and possibly a tragic character that didn't

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Speaker 1: emerge until Karlos Halfcock. And with all due respect, I

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Speaker 1: think that I had a lot to do with that.

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Speaker 1: I think one of the things the Bobbly Swagger books

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Speaker 1: have done if they had normalized the act of sniping

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Speaker 1: in war, and it made us understand and what great

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Speaker 1: soldiers these guys have to be to do this, and

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Speaker 1: how mentally tough they have to be to do this.

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Speaker 1: And as in Russia, you know, they're our duty every night.

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Speaker 1: They're not just waiting for the next attack. They're always

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Speaker 1: out there. They're always hunting, and they're always being hunted.

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Speaker 1: And it was in Vietnam that we really turns out

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Speaker 1: of Carl's Hathcock. Wasn't that the biggest sniper there? Someone

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Speaker 1: else that burns layer in the war with more kills,

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Speaker 1: and it became respectable at that point in time. As

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Speaker 1: you are setting up this whole story was the term

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Speaker 1: the bullet garden was that actually a term from the curator.

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Speaker 1: Is that something you made up? That was something entirely

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Speaker 1: that I made up, and I wish I had acknowledged

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Speaker 1: that in the acknowledgements. I needed something vivid. Generally it's

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Speaker 1: called the bocage. That's French for brush, and that's how

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Speaker 1: they describe that section of Normandy, the landscape. So there

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Speaker 1: was a thought I've had for a while I would

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Speaker 1: call the book pokage, but no one is going to

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Speaker 1: respond to that. And Bullet Garden just occurred to me

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Speaker 1: one night and I liked it very much, and so

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Speaker 1: I decided to enter it into the English language. So

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Speaker 1: that's why one contribution to the lexicon. And it's entirely fictional.

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Speaker 1: I had some modest knowledge about sniping in World War Two,

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Speaker 1: but nothing on the scale, of course that you have.

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Speaker 1: But the reason I think this is in some ways

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Speaker 1: your most complicated book is you have two different parallel

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Speaker 1: London stories at the same time that you have this

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Speaker 1: amazingly complex story in Normandy, and you have a marine

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Speaker 1: who's now working with the army and all of that implies,

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Speaker 1: and you have the OSS who are sort of dubious

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Speaker 1: when the oss was never fully accepted by anybody except

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Speaker 1: Franklin Delo Roosevelt. You have more things swirling in this book.

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Speaker 1: There's a lot of moving parts. I acknowledge that, and

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Speaker 1: one of my jobs is to keep that more or

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Speaker 1: less clear, or at least keep you so fascinated that

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Speaker 1: you will continue to read until it becomes clear. You know,

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Speaker 1: history will judge whether I brought that off or not.

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Speaker 1: It just sort of seemed to multiply on itself. It

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Speaker 1: was like some kind of strange effection that kept spreading,

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Speaker 1: and I ended up what I was done with it.

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Speaker 1: I was astounded to realize that it was much more

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Speaker 1: or as much a book of London as it was

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Speaker 1: of Normandy. And for some reason, London in wartime is fascinating.

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Speaker 1: Forty miles would separate men fighting dying from people at

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Speaker 1: swanky parties, and that contrast sort of between the decadent

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Speaker 1: and the heroic, and between the political and the liberal, well,

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Speaker 1: that was fascinating to me. And I just love to

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Speaker 1: play those games and move these guys from one universe

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Speaker 1: into another universe, and you do it vividly. I've always

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Speaker 1: thought that movies for example, that take place in London

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Speaker 1: during the war. There's something fascinating about the way in

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Speaker 1: which the British a were drowning in Americans and b

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Speaker 1: we're just sort of living through the war. Life went on.

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Speaker 1: People continued to go to dances and have drinks and

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Speaker 1: talk in the evening and exactly, and most of the

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Speaker 1: restaurants stayed open, and most of the nightlife kept going.

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Speaker 1: All the little worlds, once they found their war footing,

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Speaker 1: continued to evolve and develop, and there were all kinds

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Speaker 1: of you know, little subgroups in London, political and sexual

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Speaker 1: and military and completely oblivious and again evoking. That was

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Speaker 1: so much fun. I just really enjoyed that an intellectual,

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Speaker 1: literary intellectual. There was a very vivid group of intellectuals

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Speaker 1: in London during the war, and they all wrote bidingly

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Speaker 1: satirical and acidic essays in memoirs about that. I have.

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Speaker 1: One of the heroes of the book is George Orwell,

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Speaker 1: who puts them a small appearance late in the book.

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Speaker 1: And Hemmingway was there. All the New York radio writers

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Speaker 1: and magazine writers were there. Anyways. Two wives were there,

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Speaker 1: one of whom was a much better work correspondent than

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Speaker 1: he was, you know, And there were all kinds of

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Speaker 1: debauched American aristocrats walking around thinking that they were important,

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Speaker 1: thinking they were more important than the GIS. And just

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Speaker 1: as a social tapestry, it was just evoking. It was,

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Speaker 1: as I say, enormous fun. And I hope to give

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Speaker 1: my readers a taste of that fun. Well welcome, and

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Speaker 1: I think that piece of it is fascinating. But then

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Speaker 1: in addition, you get into a question about finding exactly

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Speaker 1: the right gun. That's exactly right. Yeah, explain for a

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Speaker 1: second in the way you're setting this up. Why did

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Speaker 1: they need exactly the right gun. I think it's the

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Speaker 1: nature of the enterprise, which has very little room for error.

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Speaker 1: And yet there were a lot of errors, and a

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Speaker 1: lot of the things they tried worked, and a lot

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Speaker 1: of the things they tried didn't work. When you look

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Speaker 1: back on the war, you'll find specific problems and specific

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Speaker 1: solutions on all sides. But what history doesn't tell us

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Speaker 1: much about is all of failures, all the times that

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Speaker 1: things were done to counter certain situations that failed utterly.

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Speaker 1: It wasn't a steady march to triumph. It was a

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Speaker 1: really stop and go, start and stop trial and error

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Speaker 1: kind of thing. Things worked out, sometimes they didn't. One

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Speaker 1: of the things, for example, that people don't know, and

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Speaker 1: I'm thinking about doing a book about this, was it.

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Speaker 1: In April of forty four the US and the Brits

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Speaker 1: decided to hold a rehearsal for the invasion, and they

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Speaker 1: held it on the Divon or the Devon coastline and

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Speaker 1: a place called slapped In Sands. And at the last moment,

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Speaker 1: soone said, you know, it'd be more realistic if we

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Speaker 1: fired live shells over the heads of the troopers who

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Speaker 1: were landing on this English beach. And someone thought that

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Speaker 1: was a good idea. What could go wrong? Well, what

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Speaker 1: went wrong was not only to kill a thousand men,

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Speaker 1: but German e boats somehow, I don't know if they

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Speaker 1: were alerted, if there was an intelligence failure, or if

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Speaker 1: it's just coincidence. German pt boats attacked this mock invasion

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Speaker 1: and sank a whole bunch of ships, and it was

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Speaker 1: one of the great disgraces of the war. And of

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Speaker 1: course it was covered up and the thousand men that

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Speaker 1: were killed, those losses were folded into the Normandy losses

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Speaker 1: so that the government never had to say, oh, by

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Speaker 1: the way we had a rehearsal and we killed a

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Speaker 1: thousand men with friendly fire. It's just, as I say,

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Speaker 1: the trial and error, and when you make an error

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Speaker 1: in war, it's a big error and people die. I mean,

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Speaker 1: one of the things which I think creates an interesting

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Speaker 1: kind of distinction for your writing. The American way of

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Speaker 1: war normally is sheer scale. Eisenhower designed Normandy so that

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Speaker 1: we were throwing so many different forces in so many

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Speaker 1: different ways that something was going to stick. And yet

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Speaker 1: sniping is in fact a very discipline, very focused, almost

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Speaker 1: elegant activity. So the difference between the normal American way

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Speaker 1: of war and what swaggers doing it's sort of breathtaking. Well,

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Speaker 1: that's true, and it's always an argument in military circles

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Speaker 1: between the theoretical and the practical. And the people at

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Speaker 1: headquarters are brilliant and they come up with amazing plans,

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Speaker 1: but the poor guys in the field have to try

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Speaker 1: and implement those plans. And as they say, confusion in

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Speaker 1: combat is normal. So there's such a gap between what

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Speaker 1: is expected and what happens. And unfortunately, because it's all politicized,

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Speaker 1: careers rise and fall based on whether or not these

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Speaker 1: strategims pay off, and when they don't pay off, there

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Speaker 1: are penalties to be paid. And so if you look

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Speaker 1: at particularly in any general staff in war, you'll see

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Speaker 1: people's careers sore or disappear, you know, And it's just

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Speaker 1: a very tough environment to make a living in, though

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Speaker 1: it's a great opportunity at least from the writer's point

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Speaker 1: of view. From outside, it's just fabulously into and it's

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Speaker 1: very provocative. And what I need to do this work

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Speaker 1: is something provoking my imagination. I get a sense that

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Speaker 1: you get excited writing and having the vision in your

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Speaker 1: head show up on paper, and that is one of

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Speaker 1: the great pleasures of it. And again in writing novels,

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Speaker 1: confusion is normal when you start out with certain ideas

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Speaker 1: and they just don't pan out, and you've got to

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Speaker 1: invent other ideas. You find yourself an emergency situations where

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Speaker 1: something you thought was obvious isn't obvious. You've got to

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Speaker 1: go back and figure out what you did wrong. And

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Speaker 1: it's the same sort of ad hoc trial and error

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Speaker 1: improvisational thing you go through that they went through, and

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Speaker 1: sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. It's one of

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Speaker 1: the things that I'm trying to get across to my

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Speaker 1: good friends up on the hill right now, that it's

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Speaker 1: not that everything's gonna work, but that you've got to

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Speaker 1: have a resilience to come back exactly. Getting up the

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Speaker 1: next morning is maybe the strongest talent and anyone who

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Speaker 1: strives could have. It's okay to get depressed when you fail,

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Speaker 1: but you still got to go back and do it

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Speaker 1: again the next day. I don't know if I said

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Speaker 1: this the last time we were together, but you have

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Speaker 1: Ray Cruz, the great grandson of the original Swagger. You

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Speaker 1: have him basically at the mall of the Americas in

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Speaker 1: a remarkable contemporary book, Oh well, thank you, and one

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Speaker 1: in which elegance does matter because he's the only guy

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Speaker 1: inside and the only guy who can take out the

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Speaker 1: bad guys. I just wanted to know what I said

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Speaker 1: them all a couple of weeks ago. I couldn't have helped,

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Speaker 1: But think about your book. I think that's one of

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Speaker 1: your best books. Well, thank you so much. Yeah, that

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Speaker 1: was a great deal of fun. The problem with it, though,

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Speaker 1: was that about halfway through it, I came up with

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Speaker 1: the idea for The Third Boy, and I wanted to

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Speaker 1: write that book even more so I said, okay, either

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Speaker 1: abandoned soft target or finish it really fast, and I

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Speaker 1: chose the second one. So it could have been a

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Speaker 1: little bit more polished, I'm afraid to say. But again,

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Speaker 1: as we've been discussing, things happen, you deal with them,

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Speaker 1: and you keep going. I remember the last time we talked,

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Speaker 1: you said that you really always wanted to write a Western.

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Speaker 1: Do you see the Swaggers out West as part of

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Speaker 1: your future? I do. I've actually considered it. It's probably

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Speaker 1: not going to happen. I'm working now in a series

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Speaker 1: of novellas, and it'll be three Swaggers and three different

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Speaker 1: generations in the nineteen thirties, the nineteen forties, in current time.

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Speaker 1: And because those stories are short, that can't be complicated

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Speaker 1: or shorter, and those three stories very much have Western structures.

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Speaker 1: The name of the book is a lone Gunman, and

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Speaker 1: they're always about a lone gunman coming to a corrupt

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Speaker 1: town and straighten things out, you know, which is the

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Speaker 1: classic Western formula. And they will probably be as close

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Speaker 1: to a Western as I can get, not quite Shane territory,

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Speaker 1: but one of them has a lot of cows in it.

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Speaker 1: I won't tell you how I got so many cows

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Speaker 1: into it. In fact, it basically takes place in mud

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Speaker 1: and cattle byproduct, if you know what I mean, I

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Speaker 1: think you do, and in corrals. And that was fun

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Speaker 1: too well. I hope when the novellas come out that

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Speaker 1: you'll join me. But I have to ask you in

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Speaker 1: your mind before they get to Arkansas, where do the

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Speaker 1: swaggers come from? They've been in Arkasau since seventeen eighty.

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Speaker 1: They are direct descendants of the great Scottish soldier Patrick Ferguson,

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Speaker 1: who is noted as being the best rifle shot of

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Speaker 1: the eighteenth century. And by some complicated political machinations, his

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Speaker 1: impregnated wife fled the British and with a new man,

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Speaker 1: went to Arkansas. And so what we're seeing is the

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Speaker 1: playing out genetically of the Ferguson line of Jeans. And

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Speaker 1: he was a very brave, very bold, extraordinary soldier, probably

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Speaker 1: the most heroic soldier in the British. That's a remnant

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Speaker 1: of a novel that I never wrote. You do have

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Speaker 1: that story in a novel. That story is included in Targeted.

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Speaker 1: I'm looking forward very much for your next book. I

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Speaker 1: can recommend wholeheartedly The Bullet Garden, which people are going

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Speaker 1: to find is endlessly interesting and has enough different subplots

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Speaker 1: that they will not at any point want to put

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Speaker 1: it down. I encourage all of our listeners to buy

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Speaker 1: a copy, and then if you haven't read Steve's other novels,

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Speaker 1: start with this one because it helps him currently. But

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Speaker 1: then go back and start with The Master Sniper. I've

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Speaker 1: read every single one of your novels, but I found

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Speaker 1: all of them fascinating, and all of them naturally build

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Speaker 1: on each other and create a fascinating genre. If you will,

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Speaker 1: We're going to have a link to all of your books,

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Speaker 1: including The Bullet Garden, on our show page at Newtsworld

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Speaker 1: dot com. And I really want to thank you once

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Speaker 1: again for taking the time to share with me both

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Speaker 1: the book but also your creativity and how you think

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Speaker 1: about these things. Well. Thank you very much for having me.

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Speaker 1: And it's too much of a pleasure for me to

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Speaker 1: yak about myself, and you let me indulge us. My

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Speaker 1: wife will let me do this, so I look forward

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Speaker 1: to this hystherapy. If nothing else, Thank you to my

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Speaker 1: guest Stephen Hunter. You can get a link to buy

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Speaker 1: his new Earl Swagger novel The Bullet Garden on our

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Speaker 1: show page at newtsworld dot com. News World is produced

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Speaker 1: by Gingwigetree sixty and iHeartMedia. Our executive producer is Garnsey Sloan,

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Speaker 1: our producer is Rebecca Howe, and our researcher is Rachel Peterson.

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Speaker 1: The artwork for the show was created by Steve Penley.

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Speaker 1: Special thanks to the team at Gingwidtree sixty. If you've

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Speaker 1: been enjoying Newtsworld, I hope you'll go to Apple Podcast

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Speaker 1: Right now, listeners of Newtsworld can sign up for my

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Speaker 1: three free weekly columns at Gingwidetree sixty dot com slash newsletter.

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Speaker 1: I'm Newt Gingridge. This is Newtsworld