As a veteran who writes about soldiers, I inevitably get questions about whether any of my stories are true. People find different ways to ask: Are your characters based on real people? Did this event really happen? And, my least favorite, are you really Colonel Butler?

Sometimes, if I’m being a bit of a dick, I say “It’s all true. I’m Colonel Butler, and I went to a distant planet and fought aliens.”

When I was teaching high school, my students were more direct about it. Once a year one of them would ask me if I’d killed anybody. Which was fine, because they’re students, and it gave us a chance to discuss why you don’t ask that question. Education, and all that.

I’m not sure if this is a phenomenon that just happens with military writers, or if it’s wider spread. Does a doctor who writes medical stuff into her book get the same questions? Certainly nobody asks award-winning crime fiction author Kellye Garrette whether she actually murdered somebody. Do they? I’ll have to ask her. And did I just name drop Kellye Garrette so I’d seem cool because she’s my friend? Yes. Yes I did. And hey, her new book, LIKE A SISTER, comes out on March 8th.

But I digress.

Better writers than me have addressed this. Most notably, Tim O’Brien wrote a whole short story about it (“How to Tell a True War Story”). So apologies if you’ve heard some of this before. Like everyone, I’m in some part a product of what I’ve consumed.

This topic came to mind yesterday when I was reading the first scene of Zac Topping’s upcoming debut novel, WAKE OF WAR, and it was so real to me that for a minute I wondered…’wait, were he and I on the same plane?’

And of course we weren’t. But we were on similar planes. We must have been, for him to describe it the way he did. So…is that real? In the purely literal sense, it’s a little real. Zac was, at some point in his life, probably on a rough plane ride with a bunch of soldiers. It wasn’t that specific plane, it wasn’t those specific soldiers, and it didn’t happen exactly as he wrote it. So parts of it are true, parts of it aren’t.

But in a practical sense? It’s all true. Because hundreds of soldiers or former soldiers are going to read it and immediately relate, and think, wait…were we on the same plane? Because it’s ubiquitous. He’s captured the truth at the center of it, even though he made some of it up.

I don’t base characters on real people. Check that…I’ve written two characters based on real people in my life. One was a super minor character in Planetside, named Sergeant First Class Belham. Even if you’ve read the book, you probably don’t remember him. But I based him on a non-com that I knew a long time ago, and who has since passed (He died of cancer, not in combat.) I changed the name, and nobody would possibly recognize him other than me. It’s just my tiny little personal tribute to a man who made an impact on me.

The second is in a book nobody’s read yet. In THE WEIGHT OF COMMAND, I based a minor character on Rebecca Enzor, my friend and one of my earliest critique partners. Spoiler alert: I kill her off in spectacular fashion. As one does. It was so spectacular that a mutual friend of ours was beta reading the book and immediately DMed Rebecca to tell on me.

As an aside, nobody likes a snitch, Keena.

What I try to do is write soldiers that other soldiers will recognize. Mac, from PLANETSIDE and COLONYSIDE, is absolutely not based on anybody. But everyone who served knew a guy like Mac. So is he real? No, but…also yes?

And I ramp that up in my upcoming novel, THE MISFIT SOLDIER (available in stores everywhere on 2/22/22!) Yes, I’m promoting my book that comes out in three weeks. Don’t look at me like that. You knew what this was when you signed on to read it.

In TMS, I created all kinds of real soldiers. I’ve got a really likeable guy who is also a total idiot. I’ve got a medic who soldiers trust more than most doctors. I’ve got a tech-head who has more gadgets than a 1990s Radio Shack. I’ve got a daredevil who will try literally anything just because it looks cool. I’ve got a quiet professional. And they’re all real, even though they’re completely made up. I didn’t base them on anybody, but soldiers are going to read this book and say ‘hey, I knew that guy.’

And that’s the thing with stories. They can be both true and invented at the same time.

The harder one to answer is “Are you Carl Butler?” It’s not hard if you make the question clearer. If you ask “Is Carl Butler an author insert” then the answer is unequivocally no. He’s not me. But I did create him. Butler’s sarcasm? It comes from somewhere, right? The words didn’t write themselves. Who made him? I suppose you could argue that Mickey Spillane and other noir crime writers had something to do with him. Maybe a little bit of Nelson DeMille. Gillian Flynn probably bears a bit of ownership. As I said, we’re all products of what we consume. My part? Well, I do like whiskey.

The most interesting discussion I ever had with a reviewer was an email conversation that I had with Chris Kluwe, who reviews books for Lightspeed Magazine, after he read PLANETSIDE. He reached out through my publicist because he wanted to know if I thought Butler did the right thing at the end of PLANETSIDE. I don’t know if that answer changed how he looked at the book or how he reviewed it. All I can say for sure is that he asked a question, and I gave him an honest answer. Essentially, though, he was asking if I was Carl Butler.

I’m not going to go further into that discussion, because it would spoil the book, and I’m still hoping that somebody who sees this post is going to read it someday. And besides, Carl Butler himself is already on record about whether he thinks he did the right thing or not, and you can read that in the first chapter of SPACESIDE. Which is what I told Chris. I basically gave him an advanced summary of that first chapter of the sequel, which I’d already written.

So, to answer the question: How much of this is real?

None of it. And all of it.