Where skating, combat and fiction meet: the many chapters of Elliot Ackerman ’98

From his early years as a Californian expat amid a crew of London’s South Bank skateboarders, to leading Marine platoons in Iraq and Afghanistan in his 20s, to serving in both the CIA and the Obama White House, Elliot Ackerman ’98 has lived a life of remarkable range. The 2017 ASL commencement speaker and a prolific novelist and journalist for more than a decade, Elliot has carved a path from the Undercroft to the battlefield to his writing desk at home in Manhattan—and somehow, it all makes sense.

“Whatever I was into, I was very into it,” Elliot Ackerman ’98 says of his childhood passions. “For years, I was very into skateboarding.” A Los Angeles transplant in London from age nine, his year-round swimsuit suddenly exchanged for waterproof layers, Elliot got into skating when a fellow Californian moved to London soon after he had, joining Elliot’s Grade 5 class at ASL. The two skated together often, and soon they were regulars at “the Undercroft,” a well-established skating haven nestled beneath the Southbank Centre’s Queen Elizabeth Hall.

Elliot’s original skater friend eventually left London, but, by then, Elliot was good friends with a large crew of predominantly British kids who skated together at the Undercroft: the South Bank Locals. He had his ASL friends; he had his skater friends; and in Grade 10, Elliot and his family returned to the US—this time moving to Washington, D.C.—and he made new friends. 

When Elliot thinks back to the “cadre of British kids” he skated with some 30 years ago, he finds it interesting that so many of them—himself now included—ended up in creative careers. “I think maybe what attracted us to skateboarding was that we were young, athletic kids, but it’s a very self-expressive sport,” Elliot muses. “But Washington was where I decided that I wanted to go down a different path.” He no longer pictured his 25-year-old self as “a baggy pants-wearing, long-haired skater dude”: so he set about becoming the person he wanted to be.

“When I was really little, I painted toy soldiers; I made models. I always thought military history was fascinating,” Elliot recalls. Once he realized it was time to change trajectories, he looked into what it might take to turn this lifelong fascination of his into a legitimate career path.

Enlisting in the US military requires passing a physical fitness test, so Elliot decided to test his own abilities as a baseline. He attempted the requisite push-ups, sit-ups and pull-ups, and found that he could do “about three” push-ups, 10 sit-ups, and zero pull-ups. 

The summer before his last year of high school, he changed that. 

“I went from being able to do nothing, to being able to basically max out all of the tests. I went from never having played a varsity sport, to lettering in three. It took a lot of intense work to get on that path—but there are a lot of parallels between being a skater and being a Marine.”

Elliot stood out among his high school classmates for enrolling in the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) in university. “The idea that someone was going into the military was very jarring for them,” Elliot says of his D.C. high school’s student and faculty population. “They sort of came to embrace it.”

Elliot earned his dual bachelor’s and master’s degree in international affairs at Tufts University and its Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy in 2003. From Tufts, he went on to graduate first in his class at Quantico in Northern Virginia, and then joined the US Marine Corps, where Elliot led a platoon in Iraq.

“As a skater, I was all in, hanging out at the Undercroft. That was my whole world, and I loved it,” Elliot says. Suddenly he was 24 years old, and fully immersed in a brave new world once again: this time, the Marines. 

“When you’re 24 and you show up to your first platoon of 46 Marines from all over the place, who have different levels of experience and are all different ages, how do you convince them that you’re in charge; that they’re going to do what you say they need to do? How do you navigate group dynamics? I started learning that as a skateboarder,” Elliot says. “It was something that transferred directly into military leadership.”

For six years, Elliot was a dedicated Marine: He served five tours of duty between Iraq and Afghanistan, and over the course of his Marine career, received a Silver Star Medal and a Purple Heart for his actions during the Battle of Fallujah in Iraq, among other decorations for bravery in action.

At the end of his sixth year, a close friend of Elliot’s from the Marines who had moved over to the CIA suggested that Elliot follow him from the Marines’ Special Operations unit to the equivalent department at the CIA. Elliot’s work there was interesting, and felt like a natural extension of what he had been doing in the Marines. But after two years at the CIA—eight total spent between deployments to combat and war zones—he felt his military chapter coming to a close.

“My mother once imparted a bit of wisdom to me, and it is very true,” Elliot says: “‘The secret to life is that you can do everything you ever want to do, but you can’t do it all at the same time.’ For me, it came to the point where I knew if I stayed, the opportunity cost would be all these other things I knew I wanted to do.”

So Elliot returned to civilian life eight years after his university graduation, landing first in a political startup, and then in a White House fellowship. But while he undertook the latter—an intense, prestigious fellowship for high-level, mid-career professionals—his first-ever novel was also taking shape. Mostly in secret, and under the cover of night.

Writing wasn’t new to Elliot. He’s a lifelong reader, and as he points out, “All writers start as readers.” He wrote throughout his years as a Marine, often sending pieces to the Marine Corps Gazette. “I had this impulse to communicate,” Elliot reflects. “When I wrote those articles, I didn’t think of them as, ‘Because I’m going to be a journalist.’ It was more, ‘I think I need to do this.’”

But when friends and colleagues encouraged Elliot to write after he finished his service, their general presumption was that he would, or should, write a memoir. He wasn’t interested. 

As a 17-year-old about to enroll in ROTC, books about war meant a lot to Elliot—novels, more than memoirs. “Books like Jim Webb’s Fields of Fire, or Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, or—I love a good Hemingway—For Whom the Bell Tolls, were the ones that always felt like they had the most soul,” Elliot remembers. “I write nonfiction, too,” Elliot adds. “I’m not diminishing that.”

His first book idea was “close to the bone,” as Elliot describes it. It would be about war: in fact, while he worked on the bulk of it during his time at the White House, the “first little baby steps” of the book were taken during his final deployment in Afghanistan. 

“Saying, ‘I want to write a book,’ or ‘I want to be a writer,’ felt a bit silly when I had nothing to show for it,” Elliot remembers. “It felt like saying, ‘I want to dance!’. So he waited until he had a finished manuscript. 

With his first novel draft finished, Elliot sent it to the only person he knew from the publishing world at the time—a retired executive in the field, whom Elliot had met while working in politics. The man was surprised by the quality of Elliot’s draft, and helped him find an agent, who in turn felt confident that the book would generate a huge bidding war. But nobody bit.

By that point, Elliot was already at work on his second novel, and feeling increasingly confident that writing books was the next chapter in his life. His agent told him to finish his second book, which he did—this time, publishers bought it. “So my second book is actually my ‘first’ book, and it’s called Green on Blue. It’s the story of an American who is killed by an Afghan, but it’s all told from the perspective of the Afghan.”

Since Green on Blue, Elliot has published eight more books, including, in August this year, Sheepdogs: a caper/thriller/buddy comedy in which the protagonists are an American ex-CIA operative and a former Afghan fighter pilot caught in the aftermath of a high-stakes plane heist gone awry. The novel was picked up for television adaptation by Playtone Partner’s, Tom Hanks’s production company, and Apple TV. Elliot is writing the series, with his longtime friend George Nolfi as executive producer.

“Being a Marine is fantastic preparation for being a writer,” Elliot has said for years; much as being a skateboarder is, apparently, excellent preparation for being a Marine. The throughline (through all of it, perhaps) is a certain unshakeable discipline. 

“There’s something about the everyday-ness of showing up and doing the work, and pushing through the tough patches, that is very helpful if you’re going to take on a book project,” Elliot says of his transition from active combat to authorship. He acknowledges that, for writers, inspiration is half the battle (so to speak), but adds, “The inspiration only shows up with the perspiration and the discipline. If you show up every day, you get the inspiration.”

Elliot and his wife—Lea Carpenter, an accomplished novelist, screenwriter and editor herself—have four children between them, and their days begin with making sure each one gets where they need to be, when they need to be there. 

“And then I climb whatever stage of the mountain I’ve got to climb that day,” Elliot says. Heading into each day’s metaphorical “hike,” he generally knows, from the prior day’s work, where the story will turn, and he writes to a strict daily word minimum: a self-imposed rule that holds him accountable, and keeps the inspiration flowing.

While Elliot’s fiction often centers on the conflicts and organizations that shaped his own life, his novels cannot be slotted neatly into the category of “autofiction.” He resists dissecting which parts of his books directly mirror his experiences: “That’s sort of like the magician telling you how he does his trick. Just enjoy the trick.”

“Human beings are 98 percent the exact same,” Elliot says. “We want a good life for our kids; we want to live in peace.” He shares quite a bit in common with Aziz, his Green on Blue protagonist who kills an American: crucially, both fought in the same wars. He is proud that in the reviews of Sheepdogs, readers show they understand that no character is wholly “good” nor wholly “bad.” 

“There aren't a lot of mustache-twisting villains—or saints—walking around this planet. We have the mustache-twisting villain and the saint inside each of us, and the human experience is the battle between the two in our souls,” Elliot says. “Charting that is what you try to do as a writer.”

“Fiction is this assertion of our shared humanity—across geographical, racial, sociological, you-name-it differences. We all have similarities, and we can all imagine what the other one is feeling. That is an incredible act of optimism,” Elliot believes. “If the story rings true, I think your job as a writer is to prove something powerful: that we are all human beings.”