Elliot Ackerman

Early life

At the age of nine, his family moved to London. The family moved back to Washington, DC, when he was fifteen.

Ackerman studied literature and history at Tufts University, graduating summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa in 2003, in a special program to earn bachelor's and master's degrees in five years, rather than the usual six. He holds a master's degree in International Affairs from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, and has completed many of the United States military’s most challenging special operations training courses.

Career

Beginning in 2003, Ackerman spent eight years in the U.S. Marine Corps as both an infantry and special operations officer. He served multiple tours of duty in the Middle East and Southwest Asia. As a Marine Corps Special Operations Team Leader, he operated as the primary combat advisor to a 700-man Afghan commando battalion responsible for capture operations against senior Taliban leadership. He also led a 75-man platoon that aided in relief operations in post-Katrina New Orleans. He was also briefly attached to the Ground Branch of the Central Intelligence Agency's Special Activities Division.

Ackerman served as Chief Operating Officer of Americans Elect, a political organization founded and chaired by his father, Peter Ackerman, and continues to serve on its Board of Advisors. Americans Elect is known primarily for its efforts to stage a national online primary for the 2012 US Presidential Election. As one of its officers, Ackerman was interviewed extensively, notably on NPR's Talk of the Nation.

Ackerman has served on the board of the Afghan Scholars Initiative and as an advisor to the No Greater Sacrifice scholarship fund. Most recently, Ackerman served as a White House Fellow in the Obama Administration. He currently lives in Istanbul with his wife and two children and writes on the Syrian Civil War.

Ackerman's fiction and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New Republic, The New York Times Magazine, Ecotone and others. He is also a contributor to The Daily Beast, and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. He has been interviewed in The Washington Post, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal and appeared on Charlie Rose, The Colbert Report, NPR's Talk of the Nation, Meet the Press, CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, Al Jazeera and PBS NewsHour among others.

Ackerman's first novel, Green on Blue, was published February 17, 2015 by Scribner. Reception has been positive, with Publishers Weekly noting that the novel "is bleak and uncompromising, a powerful war story that borders on the noir." An early critical mention in the Los Angeles Review of Books describes the novel as a "radical departure from veterans writing thus far" due to his choice of a first person narrator, the lowly Aziz, a poor soldier in a local militia. In Stars and Stripes, Green on Blue and Phil Klay's Redeployment were described as carrying "the sting of authenticity and the sensory expression of experiences lived".

Awards and honors

Ackerman is a decorated veteran, having earned a Silver Star and Purple Heart for his role leading a Rifle Platoon in the November 2004 Second Battle of Fallujah and a Bronze Star for Valor while leading a Marine Corps Special Operations Team in Afghanistan in 2008. Ackerman is also a recipient of the Major General Edwin B. Wheeler Award for Infantry Excellence.