Sitting safely at the computer in his Chicago home, Ross Ritchell believed he was going to die. The 75th Ranger Regiment veteran didn’t know how or why — he just knew death would come before he could finish The Knife, a war novel influenced by his military experiences during a three-month period between 2007 and 2008.
Dying before finishing was unacceptable, so Ritchell wrote like it was an act of survival. “It was almost like I couldn’t write fast enough,” Ritchell says. “It almost felt like I was possessed.” He wrote every day for four to five hours, fueling himself on sensory memories of nighttime operations with his unit; he worked only in the evening, wearing his wartime combat boots, chewing tobacco, and sitting by an open window.
On many such nights, the war flowed through him. What emerged was the tale of Dutch Shaw, the leader of a special ops team taking out targets in a fictional terrorist organization called Al-Ayeelaa. The protagonist’s wartime experiences — from mundane to traumatic — lead the narrator to observe how Shaw’s “normal was falling apart into something foreign and unknown, like the runoff of a glacier melting into the sea.”
[For more of this story, written by Alexander Huls, go to https://psmag.com/war-of-words...b3dac812a#.9hy3x9z4s]
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