MWSA Interview with Bill Riley

Date of interview: 27 October 2019

Bill Riley is a writer and retired US Air Force lieutenant colonel with interests in space exploration, coffee roasting, global communication, intelligence activities, and ancient ruins. Bill was an intelligence analyst during the Cold War. Later, he specialized in strategy and communications. During his career, he’s worked with intelligence and special operations professionals from every service, virtually every intelligence agency, and several friendly foreign governments.

Bill’s deployments took him through combat zones across the Middle East where he played significant roles in Kuwait and Iraq, supported joint coalition operations, and helped nations rebuild after wars. He was the first US electronic warfare officer in Iraq for Operation Iraqi Freedom, he led the air force’s largest network operations and security center, and he was the first cyberspace operations officer to receive the Air Force Combat Action Medal.

He holds degrees in literature, public administration, and strategic leadership, and he is a graduate of Air Command and Staff College and the Air Force Space Command VIGILANT LOOK program.

Bill lives in Idaho, just outside Boise, with his wife and two sons.

Find him at billrileyauthor.com
Look for him on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter at billrileyauthor

Interview

MWSA: How has MWSA helped your writing and/or marketing skills?

Bill Riley: I've been a member for less than a year, and MWSA has already directly helped me in two ways. The biggest is networking. In a short time, I've had the opportunity to meet many writers willing to answer my questions and discuss both the art of writing and the struggle to make writing a career. Very well established authors have been generous with their time and advice, and both new and experienced writers have shared valuable tools, perspectives, and approaches with me.

The second benefit has been feedback and recognition. These go hand-in-hand, and the review process MWSA offers is phenomenal. The volunteers who conduct book reviews are professional, constructively critical, and provide notes that provide feedback on what worked and didn't. This dovetails into the MWSA Awards program, which represents the genre of Military Writing in the United States. It judges each submission against professional literary criteria, not against the books submitted in a given year. This means we compete against the best standards of writing and storytelling, not each other.

Baghdaddy won the 2019 MWSA Founders Medal and Gold Medal for Memoir, and I was blown away. It was exciting and humbling. As a writer, it was a moment I'll never forget. Now, being able to market Baghdaddy as an award-winning author has opened up speaking and media gigs that were difficult to get before. So please submit your work, the feedback is excellent, and you never know what'll happen.

MWSA: Baghdaddy is an intensely personal sharing of your life’s journey. At what point and how did you decide it needed to be written?

Bill Riley: I witnessed the effects of Saddam’s rape of Kuwait and his failure to honor the terms of his surrender. Later, I was stationed in Iraq and experienced the unique challenges of trying to rebuild that country while some of its people were trying to kill me.

My father tried to prepare me for the worst that life could throw at me. He taught me hard lessons that often hurt, and I resented them. After he passed away, I tried to put things in perspective. I realized that there wasn’t a lot of difference between the skills I needed to survive my childhood, be a father, and go to war. I met some amazing people along the way, and connecting those dots brought me to Baghdaddy.

MWSA: What attracted you to intelligence and national security?

Bill Riley: I wish I could say I had a noble purpose or a higher calling, but I didn’t. I was the stereotypical enlistee, in a bad situation without other good options, and the air force offered me a way out, an opportunity to prove myself, and a fresh start. Funny story: I entered the air force without a guaranteed job. I was an “open general” recruit, which is another name for “whatever the air force needs most.” A.k.a my recruiter Jedi mind tricked me into meeting his quota.

Halfway through Basic, our military training instructor lined us up and said, “I have to send five volunteers to the new special ops pre-qualification course. Who thinks they have what it takes?” You’d think everyone would want in, but no. He got four volunteers, and I was “voluntold” to be the fifth. I was annoyed. It was just one more thing I had to do. But I said, “YES, SERGEANT,” on cue. I figured it would be obvious I wasn’t into it, nature would take its course, and I’d be out. The thing was, it wasn’t bad. Yeah, it was chaotic and exhausting, but there was no yelling, I ran and swam, and avoided the most tedious aspects of basic training. Our ability to observe and improvise was tested, and we wrote short essays to answer unanswerable morality questions as our group got smaller and smaller.

When there were five of us left, we were given our final task. Dive in the water, reach the other side of the pool, pick up a mask from the bottom of the deep end, clear it, put it on, and swim back to where we started. All underwater, all in one breath. Problem was, when I’d almost gotten to my mask, some asshole with a padded stick hit me and knocked the mask away. I grabbed it, but another stick knocked me in the head, and I let go. I was running out of air, but surface and you lose, and I was pissed. I swam to the wall just above the mask, and the sticks came at me again. This time I grabbed both and kicked off the wall as hard as I could. One stick came free in my hand, and there was a big splash. I grabbed my mask, cleared and donned it, and swam to the finish line. When I broke the surface to gasp for air, a hand the size of a ham grabbed my head and hauled me out of the pool. It was a huge, unhappy sergeant in soaking wet fatigues. I figured I’d screwed up. I just hoped they’d let me finish Basic.

They congratulated me. I finished first in that class and was offered a spec ops class slot. But there were only two slots, and there were three of us. In the pit of my stomach I knew I wasn't the right man for the job. I didn't want it like the other candidates did, and I figured their passion had to mean something. I declined the Pararescue slot I was offered, got yelled at by a major, for what seemed like a long time, then the big sergeant I dunked in the pool came in. He told the major that while he questioned my decision-making skills for not going in the program, I had integrity and grit and he recommended me for an intelligence job that just felt right. No one had ever told me I had grit or integrity before.

I stayed because there’s a sense of community in the military that, for me, was like family.

MWSA: Your book’s cover art elicits strong reactions. What were your thoughts behind it?

Bill Riley: The Baghdaddy cover is polarizing, and I love it. I wanted it to cut to the heart of my story, and with one glance it does. I wish we lived in a world where there weren’t child soldiers, but we do, and they’re a part of this story. The art also captures the warlike aspects of my upbringing, and it feels personal. My father once said, “One definition of adult is surviving your childhood,” and I never forgot it. Each story element meets on this cover. You know the moment you pick it up.

MWSA: Baghdaddy provides a firsthand view of war; what are the most common misconceptions held by many Americans?

Bill Riley: We see war mostly in snapshots, and not everything gets the coverage or the attention or focus it deserves. There’s been a terrible war in Yemen for years, but the media
barely covers it. The same was true of the atrocities of Saddam’s occupation of Kuwait and the campaign of rape and terror employed by Slobodan Milošević during the Bosnian War. Few were interested in investigating and reporting until the world couldn’t look away anymore.

The first time I was in Iraq was just after President Bush declared victory. We absolutely met and exceeded the first phase objectives of the war, but even at the highest levels of power, there were misconceptions over what “victory” meant, and unfortunately, an agenda often drives what gets reported and what the public sees.

I was with an army signals unit on the outskirts of Karbala, about fifty-five miles southwest of Baghdad. There was a friendly village just off the major supply route, and we encountered a news crew at the burnt and twisted remains of a blown-up semi-tractor-trailer. People from the village were rummaging through the blast field, looking for salvageable spoils. We waved, the Iraqis waved back, and the reporters were busy setting up their shot.

We pulled over, and I went to touch base with the news crew just as they were assembling a group of men and boys with slung Kalashnikov rifles in front of the still-smoking vehicle for a picture. Back then, if a supply truck fell out of a convoy along the route, the driver detonated the vehicle and cargo so it wouldn’t fall into enemy hands. The vehicle in front of me, and the reporters was one of those. We knew it, they knew it.

The title that ran on the picture in a scathing news story was, 'Insurgents Destroy Military Supplies.' It was a good picture, and insurgents did destroy military supplies, just not that time. If you look closely at the picture, you can see all the boys smiling for the camera.

Don't get me wrong, there is still great reporting. Unfortunately, we've also reached a point of manufactured and skewed news saturation. The difficulty in separating the truth from the lies has, more than anything, led to misconceptions.

MWSA: You're currently writing a YA series. What can you share about the series, and does it have a connection at all to Baghdaddy?

Bill Riley: Absolutely, it does. Thank's for asking about this, I just finished the first book in my new Cypher series. In it, I draw on my military background and time in secret organizations, and while I was raising boys when I was often away doing things I couldn’t talk about. I’ll take readers to places they haven’t seen before in Young Adult Fiction, and it will be a wild and surprisingly moving ride.

The first book is called Ashur’s Tears. In it, near-future technology collides with magic in a vibrant world where the government has a lot to hide. An apocalypse-class artifact has been stolen, powerful factions have emerged, and demons are poised to invade the world if a disgraced temple guardian and the three Cypher children can’t find their father and stop it.

I love this story, and I can't wait to share it, probably late 2020/early 2021. You can check out billrileyauthor.com for updates and events.