We Can't Take Iraq Neat, We Need a Chaser

Who was his source was for the Special Operations background and the fighting scenes?

"When I worked on [the political website] Intervention Magazine," he said, "I befriended Stewart Nusbaumer, a former Marine Recon guy with combat experience in Nam. I learned from him that adaptability was [key]."

Meanwhile, "most guys who've served in the Special Forces are seldom eager to admit it, much less talk about it." But while visiting friends in Lima, Peru he met two guys in a Starbucks and asked what they did for a living. "'We did some security type work,' one of them said. After doing an eye-to-eye, the [other] finally admitted, 'We did military recon in Afghanistan, then Iraq.'"

"In the first drafts of 'Mojave Winds,'" Biskeborn continued, "I'd made Klug a regular grunt in the Army. But after talking about it with these guys who [had] a certain edge about them, they really opened my eyes as to how to characterize him and were happy to give me some pointers."

He pointed out that "you go to the shopping malls and see these big, muscled, tough guys walking around with tattoos and bling, trying to look intimidating and badass. They wouldn't even recognize a Spec Ops guy walking by who could do serious damage in the blink of an eye. Appearances are deceptive."

Klug's disenchantment with the Iraq War is obvious. Does "Mojave Winds," we asked Biskeborn, have a progressive agenda? "Personally, I'm neither Republican nor Democrat [but circumstances today] make it difficult for any forward-thinking American to be anything but progressive or liberal." But, he added, "the characters have their own political views."

For instance, while lost in the Mojave, one character says: "Kris is our Moses, leading us out of the desert. You know he listened to a bush and then walked his people through the wilderness for forty years. The last time Americans listened to a bush, the sent years wandering and struggling in the deserts of Babylon."

Political agenda or not, "Mojave Winds" reinforces the notion that Iraq creates terrorists who are more than capable of finding their way here. It also makes clear that our Special Forces do the most good when fighting actual terrorists -- not when they're in Iraq screwing up its citizens' lives as well as their own. Finally, "Mojave Winds" helps raise the bar on thrillers by requiring that they not only thrill but engage the heart and intellect.

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