David Drake

Photo by Roger Brownell.

This picture was taken in July of 1970 when I was in the field with the 1st Squadron of the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment. I was at a firebase somewhere in Military Region III. The place didn’t have a local name that I ever heard; it was just a chunk of jungle bulldozed open to hold maybe fifty armored vehicles including six 155-mm self-propelled howitzers. I was an enlisted interrogator, part of the six-man Military Intelligence team accompanying the squadron.

The greatest single influence on my life was the Vietnam War. I wish that weren’t true, but it is.  continue reading…

Video Interviews:

In 2008  Blackfive TV did a six-part series of video interviews, sponsored by Baen Books. They are all posted on the Baen Webscription site, and at the Blackfive TV blog site.  You can also find them on YouTube.

Dave talks about his background, writers who influenced him including early SF writers, his military service in the Blackhorse in Vietnam and Cambodia, how he started writing military SF, working with Jim Baen, and generally about his writing career.  He ends with a message for the troops.

REDLINERS is possibly the best thing I’ve written. It’s certainly the most important thing, both to me personally and to the audience I particularly care about: the veterans, the people who’ve been there, wherever ‘there’ happened to be.

Having said that, Redliners isn’t a book for everybody. It’s very tough even by my standards, and to understand the novel’s underlying optimism you have to have been some very bad places. continue reading…

ROLLING HOT–the title is from military aviation, meaning the aircraft is moving to the attack with ordnance ready to fire–is based very loosely on Tet of ‘68. That’s an event I’m glad to have missed, but a number of the folks I served with in 1970 had stories and even photographs of what the Blackhorse had been doing then.

For those of you who weren’t around at the time, the Viet Cong made a massive win-the-war attack on US and South Vietnamese forces during the truce declared for the Lunar New Year holiday, Tet. Politically, it won them the war: Tet proved that President Johnson and the US generals had been lying when they claimed the VC was nearly finished as a fighting force. Such public support for the war as had previously existed vanished abruptly. continue reading…