Kids & Family

Ridgewood Author Visits Troops Overseas

October authors tour stopped at bases and hospitals in U.S., Europe and the Middle East.

Ridgewood resident Harlan Coben’s job is to tell gripping stories.

But the fictional stories the popular author writes are no comparison, he said, to the experiences he encountered from soldiers he visited on a recent overseas trip with the USO.

From Oct. 24 to Nov. 1, Coben trekked with writers Phillip Margolin, F. Paul Wilson, Kathleen Antrim and Heather Graham to military hospitals around the D.C. area, Ramstein, Germany, and bases in England and Kuwait.

Find out what's happening in Ridgewood-Glen Rockwith free, real-time updates from Patch.

It was the fourth year that International Thriller Writers, a professional group for authors in the genre, teamed up for the trip with the USO, an organization that works to support the American military.

They met servicemen and women, and though, in contrast to the comedy and musical performances famously sponsored by the USO, they did not read from their work, they discussed their literature. 

Find out what's happening in Ridgewood-Glen Rockwith free, real-time updates from Patch.

“When someone says, ‘Your books really distract me when I’m over here,’ that’s a tremendous honor,” Coben said.

That, he said, is the purpose of the USO - to break up the difficulty of life in the military with a taste of home.

“We mostly talked about how we would write books,” Coben said. “If the soldiers were writing books we would talk about that.”

But the interest was mutual, with the author finding some fellow writers among the hospitals and bases they toured in the four-country stop. One, a fantasy writer in Ramstein, particularly impressed him.

“Many of them are natural storytellers anyway. The experience was mostly just humbling and gratifying. Pretty much every man and woman in uniform we met was insightful, interesting, intelligent, modest, brave. It was a remarkable experience.”

The tour, though undertaken by fiction writers, related to them the powerful realities that those on the ground have faced, said Coben, placing tremendous value on the opportunity not to tell, but to listen to stories from those he met.

“I met one soldier who was injured in an IED October 2010, and in the last three years has had 49 surgeries,” he said. “And he’s standing there looking me in the eye, and making me laugh and cry. That particular soldier will probably stay with me the longest.”

He would return, he said, “in a heartbeat.”

“Meeting the soldiers was both a thrill and it was humbling,” he said. “I make up heroes for a living, but these guys are the real heroes.”



Get more local news delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for free Patch newsletters and alerts.

We’ve removed the ability to reply as we work to make improvements. Learn more here