By Elisabeth Egan

Reporting from Salt Lake City

Oct. 27, 2025

Updated 7:52 a.m. ET

On a stifling August night, an orderly line of more than 100 people, mostly men, snaked down the sidewalk outside Books and Greetings at a New Jersey strip mall.

Many wore camouflage. Still more sported tattoos — flags, anchors, skulls and wings — and facial hair, ranging from full Santa to neat goatee. Conversation was hushed but ardent.

“I cannot get enough,” said a visitor wearing a No Surrender T-shirt. “When I finish, I start over.”

A man in a trucker hat stitched with tomahawks agreed: “Same, bro.”

They were fanboying over Jack Carr, a former Navy SEAL turned No. 1 best-selling author whose eighth thriller, “Cry Havoc,” came out on Oct. 7. He was the guest of honor at the pleasantly chockablock bookstore that harks back to an era when indies were as plentiful as nail salons and “kindle” was merely a verb.

But this was a thoroughly modern book event. There was no reading or Q&A session; no fleet of plastic champagne flutes; no leaning tower of hardcovers. The price of admission ($29.99) included a professional photograph with Carr, downloadable via QR code. In two months’ time, attendees would receive a signed copy of “Cry Havoc” bearing the ultimate benediction: a bullet hole shot through the title page.

As fellow veterans traded unit designations, chatted about guns and waited uncomplainingly, it was clear that they were unfazed by delayed gratification. The real prize — reason enough to queue for a bookless book event in the middle of a heat wave — was the chance to meet Carr himself.

“At first we weren’t sure if people would come,” said Chris Paniza, a bookseller who handled crowd control. “Then they started lining up an hour before the event.”

Branded with a tomahawk

Jack Carr’s debut novel, “The Terminal List” came out in 2018. Since then, his books have sold more than 5 million copies.

“The Terminal List” spawned two Amazon Prime series starring Chris Pratt as James Reece, Carr’s Navy SEAL protagonist who is always, as the saying goes, kicking ass and taking names. The second of them, “The Terminal List: Dark Wolf,” launched this summer, starring Taylor Kitsch (a.k.a. Tim Riggins from “Friday Night Lights”) as Reece’s best friend.

Carr, 51, also has three podcasts, a book club, a newsletter, a blog and a line of merchandise — including beer steins, sunglasses, onesies, watches, sweatshirts, cutting boards and golf balls — emblazoned with his signature tomahawk logo. His prodigious output dwells on the knife’s edge of macho and manosphere, where tactical equipment is described down to the tiniest screw and adventure and annihilation go hand in hand.

Get him started on his fandom, though, and Carr turns misty-eyed.

“Someone comes through the line and says, ‘I joined the military because of you,’” he explained. “Or a parent comes through and says, ‘My son is off to boot camp tomorrow.’”

Carr, who writes under a pseudonym and takes his commitment to privacy very seriously, knew he wanted to become a SEAL from a young age. His mother was a librarian; his father was a lawyer. He grew up in Northern California, hearing stories about his grandfather, a Corsair pilot who was killed in World War II.

“I had his medals, I had his wings,” Carr said. “I had the silk maps they gave aviators back then, because if you had a paper one and you hit the water it would disintegrate.”

Like many a child of the ’80s, Carr was a voracious consumer of pop culture, devouring movies, TV shows and magazines that featured men in uniform and heroes battling villains. But books like Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan series and David Morrell’s “The Brotherhood of the Rose” were the real fuel for Carr’s SEAL dreams.

The more he learned about “the toughest training ever devised by the modern military,” Carr said, the more he realized, “that’s my goal.”

In 1997, not long after graduating from college, he went to BUD/S, or Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL training in Coronado, Calif.

“Those were prewar years,” Carr said. “We thought we’d do secret missions and come back in time for beers at the local bar. That wasn’t the case. There was really nothing going on.”

Then, he said, “Sept. 11 happened.”

A ‘carnivore’ for knowledge

Carr’s grand post-and-beam house is so high in the mountains, and so far from the upscale ski bummery of Park City, Utah, it requires two separate GPS addresses and two security gate codes to reach.

He and his wife, Faith, welcomed me like a returning hero, then introduced their older son, a warm, lanky adolescent who has a genetic mutation that manifests as a global developmental disability.

“He’ll require 24/7 full time care for the rest of his life,” Carr said, right off the bat. “That’s where a lot of this drive comes from, making sure his trust is funded in a way that, if I get hit by a bus tomorrow, he gets taken care of.”

The family exchanged hugs before mother and son headed down the hill to school.

Then Carr gave me a tour. The pinball machines in the basement. The home gym he rarely uses. The barrel sauna with a view of the valley below, including the gun range where Carr shot 8,500 title pages for “Cry Havoc,” and the warehouse from which two employees ship his merch.

The house has two offices: one for business, one for writing. Both are lined with thrillers, military ephemera, mementos from his TV shows and bottles of whiskey. The business center features a phalanx of hunting bows so elaborate, I mistook them for string instruments.

The creative lair is more sedate, with a marble-topped desk, a library ladder and a Royal typewriter once used by Ernest Hemingway to write “A Moveable Feast.” Carr got it as a gift, and used it to type a single sentence from that book. The line, still scrolled into the typewriter’s carriage, is also the epigraph to Carr’s third novel, “Savage Son.”

He recited it by heart: “There is no hunting like the hunting of man, and those who have hunted armed men long enough and liked it, never care for anything else thereafter.”

On Sept. 11, 2001, Carr was in Guam, two weeks into his second deployment. He watched the Twin Towers fall on television. He’d already read up on the responsible parties.

Carr was dispatched to Kuwait, then to Uzbekistan and Afghanistan. He completed seven deployments, including three tours in Iraq and another in the southern Philippines. He read voraciously the whole time, alternating between escapist fiction (Daniel Silva, Vince Flynn, Stephen Hunter) and nonfiction to prepare himself for what lay ahead.

“He was a knowledge carnivore,” said Clint Bruce, a fellow SEAL who was with Carr on 9/11. “Relentlessly curious, always writing or reading, learning about the culture where we went and trying to understand what was going on 50 years before we got there.”

Carr said, “I wanted to make sure I knew as much about warfare as I possibly could. That’s what you owe the team, that’s what you owe their families, the mission, the country.”

He wasn’t eager to get into the particulars of his time “downrange”— much of it is classified — but his pride was evident.

“It was a good run,” Carr said. “I feel fortunate that I escaped relatively unscathed, and made decisions that worked out under fire. Because you can make a good decision and the enemy still gets a vote and things can go sideways.”

But when he found himself in an a bureaucratic role, Carr realized it was time to switch gears.

“I knew what I was good at, and that is leading men on the battlefield,” he said. “I didn’t watch those movies back when I was growing up and say, ‘Oh, I want to be the paperwork guy.’”

At his 2016 retirement ceremony, he presented four gifts to his three children.

“I gave them a Bible and an old nautical compass,” he recalled. “I said, ‘These are to guide you.’ Then I gave them a leather bound Constitution. I said, ‘Here’s our natural rights, they’re written down in here.’ Then I said, ‘Here’s the means to defend those rights.’ And I gave them each a Winkler tomahawk.”

Carr held onto the tomahawks for safekeeping in the bedroom/office where he’d been working for a year and a half on the manuscript that would become “The Terminal List.” He wrote from 11 at night until the wee hours of the morning.

“It just so happened,” he said, “that all that reading I did my entire life, all that study of warfare, and the practical experiences of Iraq and Afghanistan coalesced at the exact right moment and time and place as I sat down to write.”

The path to stardom

For some authors, finding a publisher can be as daunting as becoming a Navy SEAL. This was not the case for Carr.

Sitting at his dining room table beneath a chandelier made of antlers, he recalled the SEAL buddy — he’s big on buddies — who introduced him to Brad Thor, a thriller author whom he admired. Thor, in turn, agreed to introduce Carr to his editor, Emily Bestler, when “The Terminal List” was ready for prime time.

“Ninety-nine percent of people say, ‘I’m going to write a book’ and they never do,” Thor said in an interview. “They want to chitchat and have a burger with an author.” Carr had a certain intensity, a laser focus that distinguished him.

Another SEAL buddy introduced Carr to Lee Child, who advised him to pick a single-syllable pseudonym, preferably one that started with a “C” (the easier to locate in a bookstore). Carr obliged, liking the idea of landing on a shelf alongside Clive Cussler, Tom Clancy and Child himself.

In November 2016, Carr sent “The Terminal List” to Bestler. A month later, after introducing Carr to four literary agents — he chose Alexandra Machinist, now at CAA — she bought the book.

“It was masterful,” Bestler said. “It did not feel at all like a first novel. It was very quickly clear to me that Jack would become a star. There was no doubt in my mind.”

Yet another pal put Carr in touch with Chris Pratt, whom he’d imagined in the role of James Reece. A few months before “The Terminal List” came out, Pratt optioned the book, which spent two months on the mass market best-seller list and five months on the audio fiction list.

Since then, Thor said, “Every time Jack steps up to the plate, he knocks the ball out of the park. And I’m the first one in the stands, jumping up and cheering for him.”

‘It was insanely emotional’

Carr has published (roughly) a book a year, including the first in a nonfiction series, “Targeted: Beirut,” about the 1983 bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut, written with the historian James M. Scott.

This led to poignant moments at his events, Carr said: “You had those guys coming through, and then the families — sisters who lost brothers, parents who lost sons. It was insanely emotional.” He expects a similar response to future installments in the Targeted series, including an upcoming one about the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103.

Carr’s writing is visceral. In the opening pages of “Cry Havoc,” Tom Reece, James Reece’s father, lies sweating on a jungle floor in Laos, his face “under attack by hungry, malaria-ridden mosquitoes while the leeches that had found their way under his clothing were swelling to the size of thumbs with his blood.”

But those with strong stomachs appreciate the authenticity of Carr’s unflinching prose, and the research behind it. The average author writing about, say, a sniper in Iraq in 2006 will have to piece together the experience through interviews, documentaries or books on special operations.

“I don’t have to do that,” Carr said. “I can just remember what it was like.”

Steve Matulewicz, who appears in Carr’s novels as “Mato,” was Carr’s command master chief in Ramadi in 2006. He recalled Carr heading out on a mission: “He’s got all his gear together. All squared away. Comes back four hours later covered in dirt, grime and the enemy’s blood, not a scratch on him.”

Matulewicz said, “The dude’s a warrior. His combat heroics you’ll never read about, even in his books. His accomplishments on the field against ISIS and Iranian I.E.D. makers will never be published, but are documented in the deepest vaults in special operations.”

Carr describes himself as a “student of history,” scorning hot takes on social media and, for the most part, avoiding the partisan fray (although he tips his hand in prefaces to his books and in podcast conversations with Joe Rogan).

“I would rather talk about something where I can provide a little context,” he said. “Talk about lessons learned that maybe we can apply to a current problem set.”

Carl Phelps, who brought his infant son to a Carr event in Scottsdale, Ariz., described the novels as genuine, fast-paced, action-packed. “He doesn’t just say, ‘The guy shot the gun,’” Phelps explained. “He goes into the details of what attachments, what optic, what caliber the rifle is shooting. He’s very specific.”

Phelps added, “I used to read book a year, and then my wife picked up ‘The Terminal List’ at Costco. I was enthralled. I crush through all Jack’s books. He made me a reader.”

But the highest praise comes from Clint Bruce, who said he now gives Carr’s books to friends and family members to help them understand what he went through during his own time in the military.

“A very small percentage of the world will ever experience those moments,” Bruce said. “You do it scared. You find the courage later. There’s a loneliness, a weight you carry. There are things that I want to share but I don’t know how.”

Carr, he explained, has figured out how to to do it in fiction.

Dedicated to a special-ops unit

Eight weeks after the New Jersey bookstore event, “Cry Havoc,” which debuted at No. 3 on the best-seller list, arrived by mail, right on schedule.

The book, a prequel, is dedicated to David Morrell, the author who created Rambo, now Carr’s buddy; and to the men of MACV-SOG, a classified special operations unit which conducted covert missions during the Vietnam War. James Reece’s father, Tom, the hero of the novel, is a member.

There, on the title page, was the bullet hole, shot with a CAR-15 rifle, a gun favored by the special ops unit.

Carr included the unit’s unofficial motto as an epigraph. “You have never lived until you’ve almost died,” it reads. “For those who have fought for it, life has a flavor the protected shall never know.”

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5790472&forum_id=2!#49379324)