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We want to welcome to VeteransRadio today Michael Plunkett.
He is a Marine.
We're going to talk about his service and we're going to talk about an endeavor that
he's involved in called Literature of War Foundation.
Michael, welcome to VeteransRadio.
Hey, thanks for having me, guys.
Well, you know, it's interesting.
This is a topic we've talked, touched on a few times, and that is military service
does give some guys and gals an opportunity to read some literature that they didn't
do in high school or college.
And so this is an area of interest to me.
But before we get there, tell us how a nice kid from Long Island ended up in the Marine
Reserves.
Yeah, of course.
Kind of, I did a lot of things a little bit out of order in my life.
Graduated high school, 18 years old.
I told my parents I want to join the Marine Corps.
And they were like, absolutely not.
We want you to go to college.
So I looked around, didn't really like what I was seeing too much.
But I applied to Gettysburg College because I was a big Civil War guy.
And I said, if I don't get in here, I'm joining the Marine Corps.
And I got in, which looking back on it, that would have been 2009.
I think my life would have been a lot different if I had not gotten into the Gettysburg.
But I did.
I went, I took a look at ROTC, decided it wasn't really for me and kind of had four
years of college.
I had a wonderful time, really enjoyed myself.
Got out, I was an English teacher for a hot minute.
And then, I don't know, the desire never left me.
So I ended up bumping into a family friend who he had just gotten back from a deployment
as a reservist in the Marine Corps.
And he was telling me all about it.
And like I said, the desire just never left me.
So I put my papers into my teaching job.
In June 6th, I left for Parris Island to go become a machine gunner.
They tried talking me into looking at becoming an officer.
And I just, I don't know, I envisioned being an enlisted Marine that always appealed to
me.
Specifically, the infantry was something that I thought was, it had a certain appeal to
me.
And I went for it.
It doesn't sound like that came out of sort of a family history of military service,
though.
Well, actually, it's funny you mentioned that.
The reason I picked the Marine Corps is because of my grandfather.
He served in the Marines early in Korea.
He was actually at Incheong.
He was on the streets of Seoul.
And then he was up at the Chosun Reservoir when the Chinese came in.
So he didn't speak about it that much.
He was a 19-year-old kid when he went through that experience.
But he was a rifleman.
And towards the end of his life, he kind of opened up about it.
So I grew up hearing about the stories of what it was like to serve in the Chosun Reservoir
and being surrounded by the Chinese and all that.
Not that he didn't really idealize it.
He didn't romanticize it, but that was his lived experience.
So I definitely internalized some of that as a youngster.
And as I got older, it stayed relevant to me.
Well, that's interesting because those Marines, those young Marines, the frozen Chosun, wow,
what they went through is really quite incredible.
And so many people have forgotten about the Korean War and what all those guys went through
against the communists is something that we should not forget about.
So that sort of planted a seed.
But I'm wondering whether or not that maybe was also the seed for your going to school,
becoming an English teacher, moving on to be a writer.
You have a master's in creative writing from the College of Charleston, South Carolina.
Where did the writing bug come from?
Well, it's a great question.
Writing and more so storytelling has always been a big part of the way I communicate with
people is the way that my family communicates.
My grandmother, some of my most clear childhood memories are the stories that my grandmother
would tell me at the Christmas party or when we would go out to visit her over on summer
vacations.
And that's the way we transfer our history from one generation to the next.
And I don't mean to make it too serious, I mean, most of these stories were very funny,
but she had a way of just making it so interesting.
Everything from her parents to, like honestly, like most of my grandfather's Marine Corps
stories came through her because he told all of them to her when they were younger.
And even though he was part of that generation that didn't talk about it that much, my grandmother
talked about everything.
She could make a monk talk.
And so she would relay these kind of stories to me.
And that always stuck with me.
So when I was a typical writer kind of kid story, even when I was in elementary school,
you give me a paper and pen, I would be scribbling away writing all sorts of stories that came
into my head.
And that just never really left, right?
So when I ended up going to get my master's in creative writing, it was one of these,
at that point I was the reservist, I was doing my once a month drill weekends, and I'd actually
switched over to working in finance.
I hated it.
I was really miserable.
The whole time I had kept writing.
I'd finished an entire novel in the odd hours early in the morning, late at night.
And I was finally like, you know what?
It's time to either do this or don't do it.
I'm going to take the next step.
And for me, that was getting a creative writing degree.
Well, I normally joke when I talk to my Marine interviews here about how a Marine thought
they could write something with crayons.
But obviously you were a writer before you became a Marine.
So I think that gives you a pass.
So let's turn to this idea of the literature of war foundation that you started with an
active duty Marine Lieutenant Colonel that you should talk about.
But get us started.
How did this happen?
Yeah.
So Lieutenant Colonel Tom Schumann, a good friend of mine, he had served, he had taken
an appointment as an English professor at the Naval Academy a couple of years ago.
He's kind of a unicorn in the Marine Corps.
He has done quite a few different billets.
He's had some interesting experiences.
And kind of on a whim, he'd applied to get a graduate degree through the Marine Corps.
They were offering a special English degree program.
And he was able to get that degree.
And then because of that, he was offered this appointment at the Naval Academy.
And he spent a semester or excuse me, a year teaching there.
And those experiences had a profound impact on him.
He was working with these young cadets and they were talking about literature, specifically
war literature.
And he started this Instagram account called literature war, war lit of war for short.
And he was just posting quotes, little red square with quotes from some texts that had
an impact on him.
And it took off, right?
And that's where he pulled me in.
And he said, you know, he's still an active duty Marines.
We had active duty Marine things to do and he's like, I can't be hanging out on Instagram
all day.
So why don't you take this over?
And it continued to grow.
And we ended up incorporating as a 501C3 nonprofit, right, through the IRS, with the idea of how
do we take this to the next level, right?
Like how do we have immediate impact on our active duty serving men and women?
And all the branches, like what is the best way to do that through literature?
We did some book drives.
We've done, you know, a couple of little things like that.
But when we did our book drives, we sent a lot of probably around 400 books out to various
active duty units.
And it was great, except we don't know what happened to the books after they were received.
You know what I mean?
Like we don't know if there's in a library somewhere or they shoved in a closet.
We don't know.
So we had to go back to the drawing board and we came up with is a book club, right?
Like a book club is you sitting down with your teammates, with the people in your platoon,
with your friends, and you're reading the same text together, right?
And this came about because a pretty motivated staff sergeant reached out to me, a Marine
Corps staff sergeant, part of an artillery battery.
And he said, I want to do a specific book with my platoon.
He wanted to do Matterhorn by Carl Barlandtus.
And he's like, can you send me just this book instead of like a whole bunch of random books?
And at first I was like, ah, it's not really the way we work.
But the more I thought about it, I was like, that's actually a really good idea.
So I said, how about this?
We'll get you 25 copies.
We'll get you some notebooks.
We'll get you some merchandise from it, like, you know, with our logo on it and everything.
You guys do the book club on your own and then we'll meet up with you and we'll talk
about what the experience was like.
And that created our platoon book club initiative, which has been going for four or five months
now and doing pretty cool things within the community.
Well, it's a really interesting idea because it's a military book club, right?
It's a platoon.
Right.
You're operating it here at the platoon level, but it could be shipboard.
It could be a department.
Now we all probably have heard about, you know, these three and four star generals and
animals who have a list of books they recommend you read.
Right.
How is what you're doing different than that?
Right.
That's a great question.
I mean, those lists are essential, right?
Those started coming about in the last couple of decades and they definitely serve a need.
Where we see that we separate ourselves as we're coming at it, sort of from outside the
community a little bit.
Like I'm out of the Marine Corps.
I've got maybe a different perspective.
You know, I'm coming from more of an enlisted background, right?
Like a lot of those, the commandant's reading lists, it's coming from a more top to bottom.
I like to see this as stuff that maybe these guys wouldn't have been exposed to if they
hadn't partaken in this program.
You know, it's literally, they might not have ever even considered reading if they hadn't
gone through this program.
You know, we try and meet the needs of the unit.
We also ask like, what do you want to read?
Right?
So we will take that suggestion as long as it has literary merit and we think it's, they
have a reason for wanting to read it.
It's not just some random book, but something that can help them bond as a platoon.
We're okay with that.
And we also have a curated list.
And these are authors that have either done some work recently or ancient classics that
we think are of value to the community.
So in that way, we're looking to support, like tell us what you need as well as like
here's a curated list.
If you're looking for something to choose from.
It really sounds a little less stuffy to me, if you will.
Those are your words, not mine.
Okay.
You don't want to get in trouble with the generals.
I get it.
I don't care.
But as you say, you're coming to meet the unit, the platoon, the department where it's
at, something they're interested in reading.
So it's kind of ground up rather than top down, isn't it?
Yes, exactly.
And the idea here is it's not just explicitly military fiction all the time or military
poems or it can be about stuff that at first glance you might think like, I don't see how
this relates to the military or my experience in the military.
But then once you, if you sit there and you read it, you're going to start to see that
like these experiences that we're listing there are not exactly, they're not too far
removed than what you're going through.
Maybe it's a different time period, maybe it's not exactly a war, but there's something
you can get out of there that you can relate to your own experience in serving in the military.
Well the word literature is going to scare some folks off.
They're going to go, I'm not reading the classics.
I'm not reading the Greek and Roman classics here.
So help us understand what you're talking about in terms of books that have literary
merit.
So give us some examples of what's on your curated list.
Yeah, of course.
We've got, for instance, we just did our first actual debrief session where once the platoon
reads their book, right, they get a chance to sit with us on Zoom because keep in mind
these units, they're coming and going, some of them are halfway across the world.
So we sit down on Zoom and we say like, what do you think of the book?
How was the experience?
What did you learn from bonding?
And like we just did our first one with Gates of Fire by Stephen Pressfield, which is a
novel that came out a couple of decades ago and it's about the Spartan 300, right?
It's about the famous battle where they faced off against insurmountable odds.
They were completely outnumbered and they held against them for a prolonged period of
time.
Now these were probably 1920, 21 year old infantry Marines in Okinawa and they were
looking at this and it was interesting.
The group was all divided, right?
Some of them were like, this was amazing.
There's a lot of action in it, right?
There's a lot of combat, ancient combat.
While like the other half of the room was like, this has no bearing on anything I'm
doing here.
Like I'm serving in the 21st century Marine Corps and it was interesting to see the division
there because in my mind it's like one of the guys said, you know, there's a scene where
this one character, he's basically standing in a field being rained on and he's looking
up at the gods kind of like contemplating his, you know, his fortune to be sitting here
in this kind of uncomfortable, unpleasant situation.
I'm like, that's relatable regardless of what time period you're serving in the military.
It doesn't matter if you're serving today or a couple of thousand years ago, you can
relate to that experience of being uncomfortable and being like out of your comfort zone in
the elements, right?
So and look into the god, whoever that is for you and sing, what the hell am I doing
here?
Exactly.
And that and that I think that's a perfect example of how it's like, okay, so that's
an example of empathy, right?
When you can suddenly bridge that connection between your situation and yes, it's a fictional
character, but it's based on a real occurrence, right?
The Spartan 300 were a real, a real historical event.
Steven Pressfield just turns it into historical fiction, right?
He adds drama.
You're bridging a connection there and I think that's the power.
One of the things, one of the great things about fiction is like you can take yourself
out of your mind a little bit.
You can realize I'm not the only person who's been through this situation before.
This is something that's a tried and true experience of, you know, in this particular
example of the infantryman, the boots on the ground.
What would give me maybe a more recent example that's on your curated list that, you know,
was written about maybe more modern times?
Yeah, of course.
We've got the fifth acts was on there by Elliot Ackerman, who is a Marine Corps veteran
as well.
He had, he served, he's decorated.
He's a good friend of mine and he's written quite a wide variety of books.
He's written fiction.
He's written kind of thrillers.
He's written more literary stuff.
But this book, the fifth act, was written very quickly.
It's kind of like sprung from an essay that he was starting at the time when Afghanistan
was at the fall of Kabul, right?
So he had served.
He had emotions about that experience and he started writing it out as writers do and
then the situation got exasperated.
We all know it was happening at that point.
Everybody was trying to get out of there.
We had the bombing at the Abbey Gate.
A lot of horrible stuff and he wrote about it and very quickly overnight it turned into
a book, you know, and he was able because he was an author that had a reputation ready.
That book sold very quickly.
A publisher wanted it and we've got some cadets up at Norwich University in the United States.
They're reading that book right now and that's his, he does an interesting job of blending
his personal lived experience with having served in the global war on terror.
While also providing like a wider context for a war that's very controversial, right?
It's like providing some political context, some socioeconomic context for this event
that's going to shape future generations, right?
So cadets right now are going through that book and discussing this very relevant experience.
Now, like I said, they're cadets.
They didn't serve in that war, but that war, that legacy is hanging right over them and
they have access now to this book, to this author who's giving us thoughts in almost
real time.
We're talking to Michael Plunkett, a Marine writer, author, part of the startup core group
of literature of war foundation.
And it sounds, Michael, that you're not just looking for the unit, the platoon, the group
of cadets to kill a few hours reading, but you're trying to promote and stimulate conversation
and maybe as deeper thinking by them on some topics.
How do you get that going?
Because you're not in the room as you would be as a teacher asking those questions on
a daily or weekly basis.
Yeah, no, that's the challenge, right?
Like I said, when we were doing these book drives, it's one thing to pass books off,
right?
And a couple of units that we did the book drives with were kind of like, listen, we've
done this with other foundations before, but we literally got boxes of used cookbooks
and romance novels that nobody wanted to read.
That's not good programming, right?
So in addition to providing good curated list of books, right, where we're working
with the unit to see what they actually need to read, we provide external support as well.
So that comes in the form of discussion questions, first and foremost.
So you're trying to figure out, how do I even talk to these guys about this?
How do we even get the ball rolling?
Well, we'll give you 10, 20 discussion questions to kind of use as you're going through the
book to stimulate conversation, you know?
Like I said, I taught high school briefly after I first graduated from undergrad.
I realized that people don't all learn the same way.
Not everybody's going to sit down and read a book cover to cover and be able to talk
eloquently about it or get something out of it.
They need other stimuli to kind of push them a little bit in one direction or another.
So we will source some podcast episodes, some interviews, maybe there's a film version of
the book and maybe that helps you if you can read and then watch the film.
Maybe that kind of informs some of your perspective as well.
So we provide those support materials as well as once they're finished and we do that debrief
session on Zoom where we sit down and we talk to them.
I'm trying to encourage guys to write about their experience and this way we've got a
couple of connections to some publications that are geared towards the military community
and we want to try and get a couple of people to publish whatever their experience was,
whether that's more of like a book report about the book itself or maybe even just the
experience of having sat down and discuss these books with their fellow soldiers, sailors,
marines, what have you.
So that's some of the ways we do it.
It's an interesting, as I say, military book club if you will.
Do you see this springing up from an NCO who says, I need something like this to help pull
the guys, have them on a common ground or is it an officer down kind of thing?
Where does that first, hey, can we do this?
Can you do this for us come from?
It's been kind of scattered, honestly.
We have 50 units that are working through it right now.
We have successfully funded about 20 of them and we've got another 30 waiting for funding.
But we've got, when I look at the list of who's requested it, it's everything from your NCOs
to your officers.
It's mostly the younger guys though.
We have our younger NCOs who have just taken on that ability, who have just taken on that
responsibility to the young lieutenants who are just coming out of academies.
They're coming out of training and they're looking to make a good impression on the unit
and figure out ways to motivate the troops.
It's been an interesting kind of spread between rank but definitely more on the younger side.
Well, certainly it's like they're more likely to say, let's try something different.
We don't have to do what we've always done.
Let's do something different.
This is a great segue to, you got 20 funded, you got 30 waiting.
Let's talk to the veteran radio listeners about how funding works, what's it cost, maybe
how people can help out.
Yeah, of course.
So if you go to our website, litofwar.com, you'll see that we've got some of the units
that are looking for funding up.
There's ways to donate.
It's a simple click, click a button.
And listen, at this point, we're accepting any level of donation, what I will say, just
to give some clarity around how those funds work.
If you are willing to sponsor a platoon, an entire platoon, that's $1,000.
Now that takes care of getting the books to them, all shipping and charging costs and
all that, as well as merchandise.
That takes care of any incidentals, any hiccups along the way.
And it goes to supporting this foundation, keeping our website going, keeping the whole
thing up.
We are all volunteer here.
So nobody's taking a cut of any of this money.
It goes entirely to the program.
Now down from that, if you do about half of that, let's say $500, that's about maybe
a squad or two.
That helps out about half a platoon or so.
Down from that, if you go to like 250, you're looking at like a fire team.
And even if you want to just donate $25 or $50, you're getting down to the individual
Marine Soldier Sailor that you're supporting.
And you can earmark.
If you want to see like, hey, what units are out there?
And you want to see like, hey, I want to donate specifically to this particular Army unit,
this Marine Corps unit.
We can earmark that.
It's there.
Your $25 will put it in the bucket for them.
And when they get fully funded, you're part of the support for that specific unit.
This is a great idea.
I think it's a great way to get quality literature out to the troops and help them build some
commonality by reading the same thing, having those support questions to get the conversation
started and then debrief afterwards.
So let's give it again, Michael Plunkett, Marine.
I'm the co-founder of Literature of War Foundation.
What's the website?
Litterofwar.com.
And before we get out of here and run out of time, because this always goes too fast,
did I read somewhere you've got a debut novel that's going to get published maybe next year?
I do indeed.
Yeah.
Just a little while ago, we signed a contract.
My debut novel, Zone Rouge, which is a modern reimagining of the Sisyphus myths set in the
fields around Verdun.
They're over there.
It's kind of crazy.
But today, they are still cleaning up all the unexploded ordnance from World War I.
The French government literally has paced people to go out there and take care of that.
And I wrote a novel about what keeps a person going in a profession where they think it's
going to take another couple hundred years before they're able to really clean the land
from this war that was fought over a century ago.
And it's coming out through unnamed press sometime next year.
Well, that's great to hear.
We're glad to be able to plug it a year from now, get back to us.
And maybe we can have a discussion about that.
What a wonderful connection, almost kind of a full circle thing here from your grandfather,
your grandmother, the storyteller, his time in Korea, storytelling in the family.
And that's now worked through your life to where you're helping passing along the love
of storytelling to other troops.
Absolutely.
It really is a full circle moment.
Michael Plunkett, thank you for taking some time today to talk to Veterans Radio about
this really cool operation and literature of War Foundation.
Yeah, thanks very much, guys.
I really appreciate the support.
Thanks for having me on.
And I want to thank everybody for listening to Veterans Radio today.
I am Jim Fausone.
It's been a pleasure to be your host.
I'm a Veterans Disability Lawyer at Legal Help for Veterans.
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