Longform

Will Mackin is a U.S. Navy veteran who served with a SEAL team in Iraq and Afghanistan. His debut book is Bring Out the Dog. “I wanted to write nonfiction and I started writing nonfiction. And the reason I did that was — first of all, I felt all the people did all the hard work, and who was I to take liberties? And the second reason was, I just felt an obligation to the men and women who I served with not to misrepresent them, or what they’d been through, or what it had meant to them, or how they felt about it. I kept piling these requirements on to myself: Well, if I present this particular event in this light, this guy’s going to get his feelings hurt. Or, I don’t know how this guy’s family will feel about me talking about this. And it became debilitating, all those restrictions, I kind of kept layering on myself. I was talking to George Saunders at one point about this, and I was like, ‘I don’t know if this book is going to happen. I’m just stuck’ And he pointed out, ‘You’re putting all these restriction