Former Army pilot and FBI agent to speak at Hillsdale College
HILLSDALE — Author Don Bentley, a former Army pilot and former FBI special agent, will share with an audience at Hillsdale College how he developed his writing career.
The talk will be at 7:30 p.m. May 4 in Lane 124, on campus, and is free and open to the public.
Bentley, who flew an Army Apache helicopter in Afghanistan, is coming at the invitation of the Dow Journalism Program and its program director, John J. Miller.
“While I’ve never visited Hillsdale before, I have wanted to for some time,” said Bentley. “I love the idea of an institute for higher learning steeped in the tenets of classical education and buttressed with a love of our nation and its founding ideals.”
In addition to his own novels, Bentley has also made contributions to the Tom Clancy franchise and its Jack Ryan Jr. character.
Miller said he has been following Bentley’s writing for the past couple of years.
“A couple of years ago, I wrote an article for National Review about veterans of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq who had turned to writing military thrillers,” he said. “That’s how I came across Don Bentley, whom I featured prominently in the piece.”
Bentley is now coming to Hillsdale as a part of a book tour for his newest novel, “Forgotten War,” which is the fourth novel in the “Matt Drake” series.
“I jumped at the chance to organize it,” Miller said. “This is an excellent opportunity for students and people in the community to meet a successful author, hear how he broke into publishing, and what advice he has for them. I especially hope that veterans and students who are thinking about careers in the military will attend — and learn about this amazing career that is only just getting started.”
Bentley used actual events that recently happened in Afghanistan to write “Forgotten War,” a military thriller and spy novel.
“The novel takes place during our 2021 withdrawal from Afghanistan. It is fiction, but many of the operations depicted were real or based on actual events,” Bentley said.
He also draws on his own personal experiences to write his books, said Julia Borcherts, Bentley’s publicity manager.
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“All of (his) experiences inspire and inform his propulsive, complex and well-crafted fiction,” she said.
Bentley said this book is very close to his heart.
“As an Afghanistan veteran, this book was deeply personal to me,” he said. “The conversations between fellow veterans which take place in the book form the novel’s emotional core and are reflective of texts and phone calls I had with fellow vets as we tried to process what the fall of Afghanistan meant for our individual service and the brothers and sisters we lost in America’s longest war.”
— Elyse Apel is a correspondent for The Hillsdale Daily News. She can be reached by email at ehawkins@hillsdale.edu.
This article originally appeared on Hillsdale Daily News: Former Army pilot and FBI agent to speak at Hillsdale College
