SOFREP RadioWhat’s It Like to Hold the Nuclear Codes? Doug Norton Tells All
Doug Norton drew on both experience and research to pen the Code Word novels. As a warship captain during the cold war, Doug held launch codes for nuclear weapons and was prepared to use them, but he also participated in high-stakes international negotiations to reduce their numbers and the chance of nuclear war. In Geneva, Brussels, London, and Washington he experienced diplomacy and politics in tense meetings, glittering receptions, and deadline-driven all-nighters. A graduate of the Naval Academy and of the University of Washington, Doug was a Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellow and Director of International Studies at the Naval Academy. After serving more than twenty-five years, Captain Norton retired from the navy and was an executive recruiter for fifteen years.
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Hey, what's going on?
And welcome to another wonderful episode of soft rep Radio. I am your host rad but you already know that, and today's special guest has a slew a huge resume. But before I introduce you to him. Let me talk about the merch store. So we have brand new hoodies, brand new coffee mugs, all sorts of merch that has the soft Rep logo on it. So please keep purchasing the merch. It really helps us to keep the fireplace going. And that is natural gas, by the way, so it needs to be paid. Okay, let's just keep that real. So the second thing that we have is our book club, and that is soft rep dot Com Forward Slash Book hyphen Club, and that's where you can find all sorts of fun books to read that are curated by the special operations teams behind the whole soft Rep movement. And today is just a wonderful day. You know, I have a skipper, an author, a human being on this earth that walks with us. Okay, we're so happy to have Doug Norton on the show today. Welcome Author Doug Norton.
Thank you, glad to be here.
Thank you.
So wow, Doug, let's just dive into what Doug and who Doug is. And I'm just gonna read your breakdown right here, So give me about two minutes to bust this out.
Okay, sir, Author Doug Norton.
Armed with plot ideas and characters from his naval career, Doug writes the Code Word series of thrillers. His first in twenty twelve was codeword Paternity. The sequel word Pandora was published in twenty seventeen. Third in the series was code word Persepolis, published in twenty twenty one. His latest, code Word Precipice, was published in twenty twenty five. Doug draws on his experiences in command, at sea and in diplomatic assignments to create exciting, authentic novels. Let me just kind of go over some of your things that you've responded to in your career, such as responding to the North Korean seizure of USS Pueblo in nineteen sixty eight, the evacuation of Saigon in April nineteen seventy five under the Operation Frequent Wind, locating a sunken Russian merchant ship of high value to the Soviet Union in nineteen seventy five, rescuing Vietnamese refugees at sea in nineteen eighty one, and you had a reunion with them back in twenty sixteen, searching for the black Box of flight Korean Airlines KL zero zero seven after the Russian shot it down in the Sea of Aksht in September nineteen eighty three. I hope I said that see correctly, you were close blomatic assignments in Geneva, Brussels, London and Washington during the Cold War. So as a warship skipper during the Cold War, Doug held launch codes for nuclear weapons as was prepared to use them. He also participated in high stakes negotiations with the Soviet Russian officers to reduce the risk of nuclear war. Thank you by the way for that. He brings these experiences to his latest novel, Code Word Precipice, a tale of high stakes brinkmanship that vividly plays out on the high seas and in the high set in the high seats of power, a Chinese invasion of Taiwan looms.
What could we do? What should we do?
And what would it feel like to be one of the men and women whose lives are on the line. So after graduating from the Naval Academy in nineteen sixty five, Doug served twenty six years aboard vessels ranging from a small rescue salvage ship to a huge aircraft carrier. He commanded the USS Reclaimer ARS DASH forty two, USS Eliott d D DASH ninety sixty seven, and Military Sealift Command Europe. Doug earned a Navy sponsored degree in foreign policy from the University of Washington and had several shore assignments of a diplomatic nature in Geneva, Brussels, London, and Washington. He was a Counsel on Foreign Relations, International Affairs Fellow, and served as Director of International Studies at the Naval Academy. Executive recruiting became his second career. He worked in the field for fifteen years, primarily with corn Ferry International. During this time, his interest in writing began to grow, stimulated by his work as a recruiter, evaluating and describing senior executives. Writing has enriched Doug's life, but not his wallet, and he welcomes opportunities to encourage and assist others to write, especially veterans. He loves interacting with readers, and he has signed books in bars, hospitals, hotels, as well as in bookstores and book club meetings.
Doug and his awesome wife.
Jane live in Annapolis Annapolis, Maryland, where he volunteered with the Coast Guard and search and rescue and at the local hospital in the emergency department. Now, if you want to follow Doug, which I encourage you to do his writing at events, please follow him at author Doug North, And again, welcome to the show, Doug Norton, Skipper, Sir, welcome aboard.
Well, thanks very much. I certainly am not a special operations guy, but I'm glad to have the chance to speak with you and your followers because I'm really interested in I wrote the books for veterans, and I wrote the books from people who have not served, but I think should know more about what it means to serve. You know, I think many of your listeners who are veterans or who are on active duty have had people well meeting people say to them thank you for your service, and probably in the back of their minds, as it often is in the back of my mind, you don't really know what that service was, what it really demanded. So one of the things that I try to do in my novels is bring that out so that people will understand what it means to serve, what the demands and costs of duty are not only to the service members but very much to their families as well. So I'm very glad to be here.
I love that you have taken your thoughts and put them into a writing, into a book, you know. And I have a lot of authors that come on the show, and some of the things is that, you know, there's always a brick wall of writing or they're just like some of them like to handwrite everything out and then have it, you know, reput it into print format so that they can read it. And I mean when you were sitting here in nineteen sixty five and you're getting commissioned as probably an ensign, Is that right?
Is that how that works? Right?
You're just a young man. Did you ever write prior to twenty twelve? Were you always thinking? Like you know, I have a little bit of an artistic side to me.
Well, like most people who who have a career, whether it's a military or a business. As you sort of work your way up the ladder, you find yourself having to write, you know, more and more just about your business or about military plans. In my case, I got interested in writing and I wrote some nonfiction stuff, some book chapters and some things in the Naval Institute proceedings, all of them pretty much focused on military strategy and alliance policy and that sort of thing for a pretty you know, for a pretty narrow audience. When I retired from the second time, I thought to myself, gee, I wonder if I've got a novel in me. And so I was looking around figuring out, you know, how might I get started. And I looked at the course catalog from our local community college, which is only a few miles down the road, and lo and behold there was this course there titled how to Write Fiction Like a Pro. And I thought, Aha, this is for me. I'll take this course and I've got it. Well, it wasn't quite that simple, but the course really did get me started writing. And that course is still available today, by the way, it's it's put out by a company called ed to Go. That's ed number two in Goo, and it's one of many courses out there to introduce people who think they might want to write to the actual mechanics of how to do it.
And that's ed to Go and it's still going today.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, novels are kind of like houses in the sense that, you know, a house has got a lot of stuff in it that you don't see you're not conscious of it as wiring and plumbing and framing and things like that. And if it didn't have those things, then regardless of how nice the carpeting and the interior walls were, you wouldn't want to live in that house. Well, novels are the same way. There's a lot of stuff inside a novel that the reader just sort of passes over, but would would make it a much poorer book if they weren't there. So you just, just like building a house, learn how to you need to learn how to build a novel, but you don't have to know how to build it before you start. You can start writing without having the intention of writing a novel. And I really recommend that to people because I think writing real enriches your life. It can make you enjoy your reading more. It can make you enjoy your interaction with other people more because you find yourself thinking, gee, how would I describe that person? What words would I use to describe the conversation that I just heard part of? Or why does that person look friendlier? Why does that person look faintly menacing? So there's a lot to it, and I really encourage people to get started, especially veterans because we usually have had some interesting times. Everybody has stories to tell, but perhaps veterans have some of the ones that are more suited to writing thrillers and suspense.
You know, I've been asked to write myself by some friends.
Like rad why don't you write something about what you know?
I do a lot of wargames here in Utah, where we go out in the desert and do all these different wargame scenarios, and they're like, why don't you write about that? And I thought, okay, So I sat down a few years ago and I started to write the beginning of an airsoftk of wargames is wargames here. And so what I found as someone who is trying to write this is I was going off on different.
Exit ramps.
My thought was, I'm going to talk about x X is the mark, right, I'm going to talk about war games. But all of a sudden, it's like, well, how did I even get into wargames?
Well?
Was that a conversation between me and my wife when I said, Hey, I want to play war games and she is like, well, you better make it something that can produce to the family.
And then I'm like, do.
I start writing, you know, all of these different lanes. You know, it's like, you want to focus on the war games, but there's so many intricacies from our perspectives, Like what you've done on so many boats, you know, vessels, aircraft carriers, names that they get themselves. You know, you've you've seen so many intricacies of all these vessels.
It's like, how do you just ride about a boat?
Well, I got a couple. I got a couple of suggestions for you as you tackle your writing project. Yes, there's no really one right correct way to write, and well known authors some produce an outline of one hundred or more pages before they start writing scenes. Others like I listened to the fellow who writes the Jack Reacher stuff, Lee Child, in an interview, and he swore that he had no idea what was going to happen until he wrote it. My suggestion to you is start out by outlining what you want to do, because that'll keep you from going down blind alleys, and it also allows you to step away from it for a while, you know, to do other things, and come back maybe a week later, and you're not lost. You know, you know where you need to pick up.
Sounds like you've been there.
Yeah. I mean the thing about this course, the product of this course that I took how to write fiction was a completed outline for a novel, and I wrote my first novel from that outline. Since then, I've tried writing it without the outline, just sort of letting the characters go where they wanted to go and seeing what that produced. But you know what, what I found out was that, at least if you're writing a thriller or suspense where things have to fit together at the end, somehow I had to outline it to find out if I had done that. So for me, there's no escaping from an outline, whether I start for one or start one, or whether I pick it up later, I've got to have an outline.
Do you ever find yourself stuck on the science of what you're talking about? And like, is anybody going to like try to, you know, bring up you know this or that versus what you're saying it is?
You know, Am I making sense there? Well?
Yeah, I mean I think I think what you're getting at is that, for instance, in in you know, in my in my naval service, I was I was somebody who served the board surface ships, not submarines. I didn't fly, and yet in my novels I have characters who fly, and I put I put the put the reader in the cockpit, and dog fights and in night carry your landings and bad weather. Well, I don't have any idea how to do that. But fortunately, again, like a lot of veterans, I know people that have, you know, thousands of fixting hours, five hundred carrier landings, and they're always happy to take what I write and say when they stop giggling at my first attempt, no, that's really not what it's like. And they helped me fix it, and we go through this process and in the end I end up with something that that knowledgeable readers seem to think is pretty authentic, judging by the things that people post on Amazon and elsewhere.
And that's exactly what I was getting at, right, And so it's like, okay, well, you're just going to bring to life your imagination onto paper the best you can and just hopefully the reader can pull out of it the connection between your characters and the outline that you draft it up.
See.
The reason why I like talking about this so much is we have so many folks that listen to this show who are dreaming of being you. They want to write a book, they want to be an author.
Even me.
You hear me saying, Hey, you know, I was encouraged to try to start writing as well with the lane that I know, like my space. Yes, and so you know that's something just to put out there for someone listening to us. Yeah, you've got a few books out there and you're continually writing. But they if they want to start writing themselves, you would just say, focus on your lane and just start writing it.
Huh, Well I would, And I mean I have a presentation that I like to give called why you Yes you should start writing, And I talk about that, you know, the pleasure that it gives, how it helps, and how to start and and just just various little things and tricks that I've that I've learned along the way, you know, what to keep myself going. I Mean, one thing that I like about having an outline is that you can well I've never made a quilt, okay, but I know a little bit about the process of making quilts. So if you have an outlined and you wake up and you decide you want to write the Dogfight scene, or the love scene or the reconciliation scene. That's just what you're in the mood to write that day. You know what that scene has to do from your outline, So just go with the flow, go with your mood, write the scene, and then, like a quilt square, put it aside. When you've got a whole stack of quilt squares, you're going to take them and you're going to stitch them onto the backing material to produce the quilt. And you might stitch them on and you might look at it and say, or maybe a friend looks at it and says, eh, you know, maybe this ought to be there and that ought to be there. Well, with writing, you can do the same thing thanks to word processing. I move stuff around all the time when I'm sure a first draft. So again, outlining is a pretty good way to go when you start. And for me anyway, it's it's inescapable and it allows you to step away and come back and not get lost. That allows you to write what you're in the mood to write without having found out that you've just hike thirty miles up a blind canyon and now you're stuck.
Right, bro, you got so many cool stories that I could just like start picking on you about, and I.
Just don't know where to go.
You know, I usually have a pretty good concise level of what I'm going to talk to my guest about, but you're just mesmerizing to me. First of all, Skipper, Right, you've earned the title Skipper. Did you have a coffee mug? And if you did have a coffee mug, did you ever clean it?
Yes? And I still have the coffee. I still have coffee mugs from both of those ships. And I was just having a cup of coffee out of the one from Reclaimer a little while ago. That coffee mug was made in the Philippines and hand painted in nineteen seventy five, and so it's completely irreplaceable. I treasure it, and yes I do clean it, but not off.
Not off.
I love that I've learned that that you guys have coffee bugs.
I have many shipmates, particularly my friends who are chief pety officers, who scold me for cleaning it at all. They say, you never ever ever clean your coffee cup.
Never.
No, like they want it lacquered on the inside, like you can just pour like two drips in it.
It's so You're like, where's the coffee even gonna go with?
This? Mugget's so schlacked with so much coffee residue. But that's like the taste, the luck the sea, you know. I always say that, you know, joining the Air Force was a cool idea I did, But my dad was a Navy guy.
So my dad was Yeah, my dad.
Former Green Beret Special Forces Prior to that though, at seventeen years old, he enlisted in the Navy out of Wisconsin, went through his summer in the Navy boot camp, came back to high school, and then straight to Vietnam as a radio engineer Morse code operator on a frigate. The frigate was at one point dead in the water in Chinese water somewhere, and they were being encroached by Chinese vessels.
And all I know is my dad would.
Tell me I had a marine with a bullet with my name on it, so if we were to be captured, I was to be just burned, like we were burning all the papers. So he said that they so they were burning everything in the boiler, they were burning all documents. They were getting ready to be you know, boarded by the Chinese and Scottie down below in the engine room. Whoever's running that Star Trek vessel, He's given her all she's got, and all of a sudden, he said that the prop started kicking on and they just like were able to like creep out of Chinese waters into international waters, and it just saved their day.
Yeah, in yours since he got back.
Oh, you know, and he joined the Green Berets.
After his navy tenure in Vietnam, he became army and went s f in the seventies, eighties and nineties, and so it's there's just so many things that I just I wish I knew that his boat's his ship's name, you know, I know, it was a frigate, and I just would always, you know, I forget that. But I was like, oh, what if you were on it. That's what I was thinking about last night before we were gonna have our interview. Was like, I wonder, you know, because yeah, I mean, you're in in sixty five, sixty six, sixty seven, he went into sixty eight, sixty nine.
Yeah, yeah, you know, at the height of all of it.
And he said, the first thing he noticed when he knew he was in war is that he was getting off the ship to get into Vietnam, and there was like five hundred people sitting in black pajamas, sitting in the Indian style, and there was two Marines with sixties overwatching all of them. And he said, at that moment he knew that he was in a war zone, was getting off that boat to go to do whatever. I just can imagine, yeah, yeah, yeah, When did you know that you were now in Vietnam? When did you realize that this is real?
Well? I was, first of all, I had I had five deployments to Vietnam, but they were they were very easy deployments in the sense of that they were they were shipboard. I was hardly ever ashore, and you know, and and yes we got shot at, we would, we would duke it out with with North Vietnamese shore batteries, but frankly, it was nothing at all like what it was like in ground combat ashore. So I guess the first time I realized that was was was in Tet Tet nineteen sixty eight, when we were the ship that I was on was on the gun line and we were right near the mouth of the Quaviette River. There's a bridge across there across the river that a that uh a marine named Ripley got the Medal of Honor for for managing to blow up before the North Vietnamese tanks came across it. But we were, we were in close enough to be shooting at that at that bridge before he got there, and they were shooting back at us. And so I guess that's when I when I really realized that. That's when I when I discovered that the incoming shells actually do sound like they do in the movie. They go whoosh and they go boom. Oh yeah, but but none of them hit us. So so so those tours were, as I say, there were five of them, but they were they were they were really the life of Riley compared to the guys who were who were ashore, that's for sure.
And who what what kind of a ship were you on that was returning fire?
Well, at that time, it was a destroyer, the d d G. I was on a couple of other ships that were out there doing doing similar things. But I'll tell you a little let me you're talking about your your dad, yeah, and that let me just I'll tell you a little sea story. So when I was on the Salvad ship reclaimer. Uh. We got sent up to the Yellow Sea off North Korea to a location that actually was pretty close to where the Pueblo got captured. And this was about five years now. This was about now, this is about fifteen years after that, but it was still fresh in everybody's mind, and our job was to search for a US Air Force fighter that had crashed while operating doing it. It was a fighter that was part of what they call the Red Flag Squadron, that the aggressor squadron that flew Soviet tactics and aircraft that mimicked the Soviet aircraft performance. And this guy hit something that happened that he had to bail out and he was fine. But the Air Force either wanted that airplane back or they wanted to know that nobody could find at one or the other. Well, unfortunately, what we proved was that nobody could find it because we spent a month up there in rotten weather and kind of worried also occasionally about about what the North Koreans might do. They didn't do a thing, but we finally got permission to leave and we were headed for a port in Taiwan called kaw shong that it's a really good liberty port bod. He was very happy. And as we headed south, we passed a Russian ship sort of like ours, called a Print class salvage ship, followed by a cash and class destroyer, both of them really rusty and looking just beaten to death by the weather. We just started exchange the international flag symbol flag equivalent of have a nice day, and we passed each other. Well. Shortly after that we got a message that said go to latitude X and longitude y and locate a sunken merchant ship. Well, we thought that was nuts, because in those days we didn't have side scan sonar. We had really nothing to look for a ship on the bottom, but orders as orders, So grumbling away we went, and sure enough, as we got closer, we spotted on oil slick, and we followed the oil slick and we made a couple of passes over the top of it, just with an ordinary phabometer, but the bottom was very flat, and sure enough the phatometer trace produced something and looked an awful lot like a merchant ship lying on its side on a flat bottom. So we reported this up the chain of command and immediately got a flurry of messages saying, you know, stay where you are, don't lose it, don't dive on it. And that was a laugh because it was way too deep for us to dive on and when the Russians come back, give it to them. So we stayed there for a couple of days, and sure enough over the horizon come the same two Russian ships, this front class salvage ship in this cash and class destroyer. And I couldn't help thinking, those poor bastards. They must have been almost home and got turned around and told to come back to this place where they'd been searching for over a month. Yeah, so they came back, and we were given a prescribed message to send them. We did, and then we went off to Kashon for liberty and left them looking there. So what was it? We really don't know. I mean somebody does, but they didn't tell us. In those days.
They just wanted you to triangulate the coordinates exactly and say it's right here, we're on it. You're basically like, we're not diving it. It's how deep do you think it was? Three six?
No, it wasn't.
It wasn't that deep. We had in those days. We had only we were just air divers, hard hat divers on air so this thing was only about two hundred and a little over two hundred feet deep, which would be a piece of cake now, but but was impossible for us at that time with the gear that we had aboard. So in those days, it was the Soviet Union that was North Korea's main supporter, not China. And so the rumors are that, you know, everything from you know, a shipload of gold billion to pluck prop up their currency, to some kind of a weapon. Never knew, but it was something that they really wanted to get back and we were We somehow got into the middle of some high level negotiation about this thing and probably about some other things as well. That's one of the interesting things that happens in the military sometimes is you get you're told what you need to do to do your job, but you don't know the big picture, and some of the speculation can be pretty interesting.
They know the outline and they send you to go figure it out, and you're like, but there's all of this intricacy going on in between, like one mission leads to another three missions.
Yeah, yeah, and now and then that that event is something that I was in my mind when I wrote code word Precipice, because one of the characters in Code Word Precipice is the skipper of a cruiser out in the Indian Ocean was on a mission that he's so that's so secret. He hasn't been told what it's actually supposed to accomplish, and he begins to suspect as he goes along that he's being set up for failure by his own boss because this is part of some much larger scheme.
That's that's incredible, Yeah, because you probably had some intuition while you're doing this, because I mean, a skipper has to be able to be a skipper with like, you know, knee jerk reactions, you know, and so you have to be able to be like, you know, all hands full, you know, right rudder, now face the torpedo, you know. I mean, you got to think, you know about you have so much going on in your head.
Well you do, but you have if you're fortunately as I was, you have a whole lot of help from officers and chief petty officers and senior petty officers are what the Army would call senior n CEOs, all people who know a whole lot about what they do, and a lot of times the best thing to do is just to trust them and let them do their jobs and help them do their jobs. Yeah, there's some things that only the captain can decide, But you don't have to do everything yourself, that's for darn sure. And I certainly couldn't have done everything myself. An awful lot of people were doing things to support the ship that I could barely even understand, but they knew.
And it was your job as a manager, yeah, to make sure that they managed their their lanes, their sections appropriately. And then you know, everybody would report back to you. Hey, you know, give me a readiness on level three, deck three, give me readiness from the machine gunner, you know, from the Bozeman's mates.
You know all of this. How are colms doing right?
They're all going to report back to the skipper to say, Skipper, this is what's now?
Did they call you skipper? Is that something that you were called? Skipper?
Uh? I love it on this The Salvad ship was h Do you remember a TV show called McHale's Navy starting.
In I sure do remember McHale's Navy.
The Salvat Ship was really part of McHale's navy. Okay, it was definitely not spitting polish. Nobody really cared about us. As long as we showed up when we could put and did our job. We put out a fire, we hauled a ship off a reef, we picked up aircraft, wreckage, whatever it was. As long as we did that, pretty much nobody cared. So we were. We were very informal, and I was also very young. The ship was older than I was, and I found I found out later that that one of the senior n CEOs, who was probably yeah, he was older than I was, had written to his wife one day and said, hey, shortly after I'd taken command, and said, hey, we really liked the new skipper, but he's so young. When we see him, we don't know whether to salute him or burp him.
Well, I mean it's real, that's real.
Yeah, yeah, so you know. So so they they usually called me captain, but occasionally called me skipper on the destroyer, which is in in what i'll call big navy, where you've got a lot of oversight and a lot of spit and polish and everything. It was captain.
It was captain. Yes, I got you. I love that. I think you're awesome. I just want you to know that you just.
Came on the show to get some affirmation today and just be told that you're You're super cool and you'd have a lot of cool baseball cards if you had had someone make baseball cards of you throughout the years of your of your tenure. You like your rookie card, you know, three years in what's his era? I think that's awesome. Uh, when you were in high school, was there anything that drew you to the Navy? Was it like, were you a boy scout prior to anything? Did you swim all the time? What was it about the Navy that just pulled.
You in to the Navy?
Well, I grew up in a Navy family. You know, you grew up in a military family, so you know something about that. So you know, I admired my dad. I thought that what he did was worthwhile and honorable.
What did he do?
He was a Navy pilot. He flew from the carrier Enterprise in World War Two, flew from Gualacanal, was shot down once and survived.
So he was holy cow.
He went. Yeah, he went through the whole one, through the whole thing. I never talked much about it. I actually learned more about the things that he did from the guy who was his tailgunner when they had a memorial service after he died. This guy was lied about his age. The tailgunner lied about his age, enlisted at sixteen, rode back there in the ball turret behind him, and you know, talked about all the stuff that they had done that my dad never talked about. So, yeah, I started. I grew up in the Navy. I really, you know, I really didn't much hear doing anything else.
You are the Navy today, you are the Navy.
Well, you know, there's there's an awful lot outside the Navy too. I mean, I enjoyed my second career as an executive recruiter. I'm enjoying life now, and I really, again I encourage people who have served. When you get to a certain age and you've got gray hair, you start thinking about, you know what, his life. Yeah, there you go, I see it.
I'm pointing out my hair, my beard, But it's nowhere near the stripes.
That you've earned in your hair.
As my dad would say, He's like, these are my stripes, and I've earned every single one of them.
So anyway, so I encourage people to, you know, to write about their experiences, both for their own enjoyment. I know several friends of mine who have written about their naval experiences and this just for their families. Maybe published five or six copies of the book and that's it. You won't find it on Amazon. But their experiences are recorded for their children and grandchildren and great drink grandchildren. I really really encourage that because not only for the knowledge that it passes on, but also for the pleasure that it probably gives each one of them to recall these things and write them down.
Yeah, one hundred percent.
I mean again, growing up in a military family, my dad was always trying to achieve, you know, his next level of education. So he went in he had a bachelor's degree in the army, didn't get his mission, uh, but he went to his master's, got his master's done, and then he's.
Working on a doctorate before he passed. And again that's writing a book. You know.
He was really writing a lot. And my dad was really more of a typewriter guy. Yeah, you know, I would always watch him sit there and just Remington Raider all the way, you know, and just sit there and type it out. I still have his typewriter downstairs and uh, you know, just in his chair, right, those types of things, and I sit in it and I'm like, geez, you would write on this.
We have keyboards. It's like oh yeah, yeah, no more white out.
He would sit there at his desk and I'd like, He's like, just tab it out the white out on that typewriter. You know, these are official documents.
Yeah, that's the reason why, you know, becoming a writer is, you know, is not as hard as you might see because of word processing. And yes, it's just so much easier than then. You know, you see those movies of the of writer in the old days, you know, rolling the paper into the remington and typing away and then discusting love crosses his face and so he rips it out and throws it away and starts again. Well, life's a lot easier than it now.
Yeah.
Yeah, it's true, because it would be like rip that paper out, crumble it up, and toss it into a pile that falls down. There's more, you know, like all of these like I gotta start over. I gotta start over.
But you know, a.
Great boxer, Muhammad Ali said, you don't have to be great to start, but you have to start to be great.
Yep, yep, you know.
And so because I go boxing just about every single day, okay, and it's like, you know, I go in at forty seven years old thinking I'm going to be a professional. That's my mindset. I'm going to give it everything I've got. I'm going to listen to the coaches. I'm gonna if they tell me to move my feet a certain way, I'm going to try to work on that, you know, off the clock, even at home, you know, shadow boxing, the whole nine yards. So when I go back to class, my coach is like, hey, that's right, you did that right this time.
You know.
It's just like, you know, I just really find something good about just pursuing an activity or just you know, it kind of clears.
The brain, sure, you know.
And and writing, I think, after talking to you right now, I'm gonna go ahead and try to write some more, you know, and just be inspired by you.
I want you to know that, and I just want you to know that.
Well, please give it a shot. I'm sure I'm sure you'll you'll hit your stride, you'll find whatever, whatever your technique is well, we'll eventually emerge. Just keep at it.
Sometimes it's just like verbal diarrhea. I don't know how to say it. Otherwise, that's okay.
That's what that's why you that's why you revise, you know. I mean, yeah, I live in terror of not being able to finish the first draft. I just struggle to finish the first draft. After I finish the first draft, I'm completely happy because I love to revise. I know that. You know, Okay, I've managed to figure to make this thing fit together. So now I can relax and work on making the characters better and the pros better and so on. So yeah, you'll have just.
Tried, you know, Doug, your website is really easy to navigate, right, and it's Doug Norton, author, Doug Norton dot com.
I'm just gonna plug it right.
We're here to let everybody know that you have this out there, and I'm looking at you know, right here. When you look, you can see code word paternity, code word pandora, code word persepolis, and code word precipice. Okay, and so precipice. Thank you. No, you're very much remind me of my dad right there. Thank you so much so, But paternity isn't paternity about like Iran and Israel in the Middle East?
Isn't that that book, isn't it?
No, that's the one that's That's the one that's about about North Korea.
And I could have sworn I was reading something about.
Well about is about the Middle East.
It's a little confusing because they all begin with p.
I noticed this and so, and I may have got that confused. But Persepolis is the one that I was mentioning. Sure, kind of like foreseeing some things here were you.
Well, you know, I I try to write about current events. I try to take a fictional look at real problems, real issues that face the country in the world. I think there's a lot of value in a fictional look at these things without getting it straying into fantasy, but because with fiction you can help people really understand how difficult it is to make the decisions that have to be made, whether it's whether it's presidents or whether it's squad leaders ashore. So I try to I try not to have silver bullet solutions. I try to try to be absolutely realistic and recognize, you know, use equipment that really is is the equipment that's out there. It's not some magic new death ray that that solves the problem. It's not a silver rulet. And realize that there are no silver, golden solutions either. There's there's a downside to every course of action you can think of in any kind of a problem, especially when some one of my main characters is a president of the United States, and by the time a problem gets up to that level, all of just about everything anybody can think of has been has been tried and discarded, So you basically are facing uh, you're picking the worst, the least worst choice a lot of the time.
Right.
Wow, you know that's a good way to put it, because there's just going to always be like something's tried something, you know.
Now it's to the main man.
He's got to make a decision do we go full scale this because all the all the things that you've thought of that you've tried to squelch it. But again, like you said, I like that you're not writing about a ray gun, not that there's not a purpose for a ray gun to be involved in in in books and storytelling. There you're more like, hey, this is the equipment that.
We have today, Yes, exactly.
And how can we thwart whatever with what we currently have or you know, engage with the current mechanisms that we have, for example, like you know, Iran and America getting along. What would you think today, as someone who wrote a book about you know, you know, you've dug into it, what do you think would help diplomacy right now in the Middle East?
What do you think about that?
Well? I mean, I'm certainly not a Middle East expert. I'm just I'm a guy who writes, who's written one novel about it. But I think certainly there's got to got to be some way to you know, to end the fighting that's going on right now in Gaza.
Yes, and.
We just have to recognize that there are a lot of a lot of nations in the Middle East that don't much like each other, and they're and gonna They're gonna have to sort things out. And I think probably less less chest beating and more negotiating is the way to do that. I I my experience in negotiating is that when you have a problem that you can't just order somebody to solve for you, or you can't just order some other nation to take a certain step, you have to negotiate, you have to horse trade. You have to recognize that they have their own interests and they have their own power, and you can't just tell them what to do. One of the interesting things that I found when I was in the Salt negotiations was I shuttled back and forth between Washington and Geneva along with a bunch of other young people. I was one of those ones that you see if you see a picture of two senior diplomats meeting sitting at a table, you may notice over in the corner there are a bunch of people squeezed into little chairs along the wall. Well, I was one of those people squeezed in the little chairs along the wall. And I would do that in Washington, and then I would come go over and do that in Geneva. So I got to watch a lot of things, and it was interesting to see that sometimes people in Washington would forget that it's a negotiation. They would say, well, just tell them they have to do that. But then when you go over there and you tell them and they say, well tell me why I should do that, what are you willing to give up, they'll do that. It's very interesting. I spent many hours talking with Soviet officers about certain technical details of muscle systems, and well, look, we want you to give up this, and they say, well, we want you to give up that, and you know, you have to work it out because in that case, neither side had the power to say, hey, this is the way it's going to be, do it my way or else, right, right?
You know that that brings me to kind of the current situation. You know, I know, I have you for a few more moments. But with Ukraine, you know where they did give up all of their stuff for their negotiations in nineteen ninety two, they gave up the nuclear arms and they said, hey, we want to be just a sovereign nation, leave us alone. We're our own entity now. And the agreement was there, and the negotiations happened, and now it seems like those negotiations have been forgotten about and they're not being you know, honored.
Yep, at all, absolutely, at all, at all. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's the other thing. I mean, things change, power, relationships change, technology changes. Nations are always looking out for what they perceive or what in Russia's case putin perceives is the best thing for them. So nothing is nothing is ever really permanent either.
No, And and that battlefield is a completely interesting, cryptic digital battlefield going on right now with so many technologies.
That are involved.
Oh yeah, let alone, let alone boots on the ground, guys and gals strapping up boots and bayonets.
That's happening. But it's a lot more tactical.
And strategic going on over there, with these drone systems and all of these fiber optic cables following the drones and the spider webs that are being laid all over the ground from the drone attacks from both sides.
Yeah, there's a lot of a lot of that's happened there, and it's going to filter out across the world to other battlefields as well.
Yes.
Yeah, it's because they're kind of creating it, Yes, and others are watching it and they're like, oh hey, let's implement that into us. Bro Oh man, Now, I hope that you have just the best success with your book series. Okay, with the codes and and again Precipice, Yes, code name, Precipice, Your your latest your latest creation, your latest book. Where can we find it? Where when does it come out? If it's already out talk to us about it just a little.
Bit more so. So the book launched in March, and you can get it just about any place, as they say, wherever, wherever books are sold, any bookstore can get it for you. You're not going to find it on the shelf in a bookstore because shelf space and bookstores goes to books that are are best selling books by well known authors. And that's and that's not me. But any bookstore can order it for you. I hope folks will support local bookstores. I think they're really an important part of the community. You can also order it from Amazon. You can get it from Barnes and Noble. It's available in Milk and Kindle and who knows what other electronic forums that I don't understand. So yeah, I really hope people will. We will seek it out and enjoy it. And and I'll say I'll speak on behalf of every author that I know. You know, most of us are not gonna get rich from writing, that's for sure. Only only a few people are good enough to do that. But we all enjoy getting feedback. So when you read a book, if you're an online person at all, go post somewhere about it, post a post a review on Amazon, post a review on Goodreads, you know, tell us how we're doing. That's really where I get a huge amount of my of my enjoyment out of publishing books, right is when some when I read a review and I can tell somebody, gosh, she got what it is that I was trying to say. That's a really good feeling for an author to have. So I really encourage people not only to buy books and read books, but to review them.
Yes, and on the platform where you purchase it, especially so if you do go onto the River or the Amazon's or these other places, you know, just and you bought your book there.
Read it and just leave a review right there.
Yeah, just say, hey, read the read the book, thought it was great, took me into another world, whatever you felt like, just and like, like Doug said, he reads that he sees that and it makes him inspired to or even fulfilled.
Yeah, I don't know.
Yeah, I just think you know, you're like, hey, you read my book, you know, thank you exactly right, just straight respect.
Yeah, you know, one hundred percent. I'm the same way.
I have a couple of movies I'm in and whether they like it or not, if they leave feedback. I'm like, Okay, yeah, I guess, I guess I could have been better, or hey, yeah I was, I was better than that.
I was. I did really great.
Yeah.
So it's just the it's just like you know it, just we read it, we see these things, and when I write my book, I'm gonna have it out there, so you guys can all comment down below as well.
Exactly exactly right, but right now.
The main man of the hour who took his precious time to spend with us is Doug Norton, And you know, on his website he says, support local independent bookstores like Old Fox Books, Park Books, the Last Word bookstore. Here in Utah, we have Weller's Books down on Main Street, So go check out Weller's. You know, support the local guy, the mom and pops that are out there who have been making these gyms available for our minds for years. Believing in books, Hey books one percent, and so you know, with that, I just want to say thank you so much, and I want to let you know that you're welcome back on the show. There's so much more I would love to talk to you about, Like was there any waves that took you down or was there this or was there that you know, there's just so much I mean, I mean, I just hit you with the coffee mug.
You know, now you have to you have to be careful about about inviting inviting a former naval person to tell sea stories. They can go on forever, as your father probably would would tell you.
He would, yes. And I want to know all about the kraken, yeah, yeah. And I want to know about Davy Jones and why he has a locker and why is it at the bottom of the ocean.
Okay, thank you very much. I've really enjoyed being here. I hope that some of what I've had to say will encourage others to sit down in front of the word processor and write, because we've all got stories and us that's for sure.
Well, well, Doug Norton, uh selfless service to our nation and to your fellow neighbor and to your family. I already know that's how you're built. I can sense it from you, and everybody that's around you is blessed.
And fortunate to have you in their life.
And I also would like to see the war stop in Gaza at some point soon, so that you know, we can move forward with a normal life in our world. And Doug Norton Code Word Precipice out now. The next chapter in the Code Word series is waiting for you, so go check it out and buy it and support my Skipper, my main man, my bro right here, Doug Norton, what a pleasure to have you on the show. And thank you to Charlotte Okay for arranging all of this. Let's give her a shout out on the show.
And Charlotte publicist, wonderful person.
Yes, thank you Charlotte, and thank you again. And on behalf of Brandon Webb at Soft Rep who was in the Navy.
Gotta shout him out right.
This is based off the Navy seals here, you know, that's what these guys are so, you know, and myself and my producer and Doug, I just want to say peace.
Peace, and thank you very much, my pleasure to be here.
Yes, yes, sir, thank you Skipper.
You've been listening to Self Red Radio.
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