"Stephen Coonts" is an American Thriller (genre)/thriller and suspense novelist.

Coonts grew up in Buckhannon, West Virginia, a small coal-mining town, and earned a Bachelor of Arts/B.A. degree in political science at West Virginia University in 1968. He entered the United States Navy/Navy the following year and flew an A-6 Intruder medium attack plane during the Vietnam War, where he served on two combat cruises aboard the USS Enterprise (CVN-65)/USS Enterprise (CVN-65). He accumulated 1600 hours in the A-6 Intruder and earned a number of Navy commendations, including the Distinguished Flying Cross (United States)/Distinguished Flying Cross. (His flight officer/navigator-Bombardier (air force)/bombardier was Lieutenant, junior grade/LTjg Stanley W. Bryant, who later became a Rear Admiral (upper half)/Rear Admiral and deputy commander-in-chief of the US naval forces in Europe.)

More Stephen Coonts on Wikipedia.

It's just people from various walks of life in Cuba and what might happen to them.

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I had already done a two-chapter subplot on the second Cuban revolution in the book 'Under Siege' in 1990.

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I think there's a lesson there for all story-tellers. It's the same human themes and values from Day One. They're still exactly the same. You just play with them in different settings, change them around to entertain the audience today.

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When I got into it I realized that it needed Jake Grafton to give it an American center of focus that wouldn't be there without a strong American hero.

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She said, 'You know they just might have read 'Under Siege' down there,' ... 'I don't want any phone calls from the State Department that you're locked in some jail cell down there.'

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'The Odyssey,' by Homer.

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War in the Air: True Accounts of the 20th Century's Most Dramamtic Air Battles by the Men Who Fought Them.

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That's all it's meant to be, ... This is not a literary fiction. This is page-turning fiction that you take to the beach and read for diversion. If I do that, I've done my job.

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