I’m the slowest writer on earth. I make sloth look blurry with speed. First thanks therefore go to Crown and the very patient Rachel Klayman for letting this whole process take as long as it needed to.
Thanks to Mark Zwonitzer for expert research, assistance, and yet further calm, good-humored patience. With Mark: book; without Mark: no book. And thanks to Sierra Pettengill for appropriately ferocious fact checking.
If I ever write a sequel to this book that’s just about the inadvertently hilarious policy and culture of nuclear weapons, it will be thanks to the early and very fun research I did on that topic with my friend Shelley Lewis.
Laurie Liss at Sterling Lord Literistic has been a stalwart pal as well as an extraordinarily effective noodge; I’m thankful also to the SLL office staff for letting me essentially take up room and board in their conference room on Bleecker Street for months at a time.
My boss at MSNBC, Phil Griffin, my executive producer, Bill Wolff, and the whole staff of The Rachel Maddow Show have been more than indulgent with the time, brainpower, and stress diversion this book entailed. Special thanks to Lauren Skowronski and Julia Nutter for making impossible logistics work as if by magic.
Thank you to Penny Simon at Crown for deftly ushering the book into the world in a way that I’d have no clue how to arrange on my own.
But mostly I am thankful to my beloved Susan, for letting this project and my obsession with these ideas take up so much space in our lives. Without family support, I never would have been able to do this.
And without the genuine inspiration I get from my generation of veterans, I never would have wanted to do this. Iraq and Afghanistan veterans are less than 1 percent of the US population. But they are a huge part of why I’m bullish on America’s capacity to adapt, lead, and succeed in the twenty-first century.