Sid Balman is an author, Pulitzer-nominated journalist and writer in residence at Sul Ross State University in Alpine who—as a war correspondent and national security advisor—has covered extremism and violent extremism for much of his career.
He has covered wars in the Persian Gulf, Somalia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo, and has traveled extensively with two American presidents and four secretaries of state on overseas diplomatic missions. At Sul Ross, he heads a small journalism program and oversees the online student newspaper, the Skyline.
His Seventh Flag Trilogy has received numerous awards for best-selling novels, and his most current work—a fictional account of characters and their experiences surrounding the Uvalde school shooting, titled The Mural, will be released in February.
On September 25, Balman penned an op-ed for Big Bend Sentinel on what’s needed as a “wakeup call, one that demands new thinking on how to deal with violent extremism.”
The Sentinel sat down with Balman to talk about his past experiences, how he views the conflicts in our country today, and his upcoming novel.
Your trilogy deals with West Texas characters confronting an increasingly dystopic landscape. What in your background brought out these themes?
I was based out of Washington, D.C., for 25 years. I served with the Diplomatic National Security Force, the United National Wars conflict, traveling with presidents and secretaries. I covered extremism and violent extremism around the world.
A lot of what I covered was efforts to mitigate that extremism. I consulted on a number of projects where national agencies wanted to find non-kinetic alternatives to stopping this growing wave of violence. There were scientists, psychologists, journalists, and spooks involved.
After my kids were grown and had moved out, I realized that I had this book—like all of us journalists do—in our back pocket, and that was the trilogy of novels I wrote. All three of them were on the common denominator of radicalism and violent extremism and how it is creeping into America.
It’s not just ISIS and Al-Qaeda in foreign lands. We’re seeing community indicators of that sort of extremism in America.
The trilogy, while fiction, is based on some real locations and people, right?
It’s all based on two families out of Dell City. A buddy of mine has a ranch out there, an off-the-grid thing. We’d go out there for years and just fill a pickup truck up with power tools and beer and spend some time building things. We built a few houses, had a pistachio field. One of the families out there was Laura Lynch’s, one of the founders of the Dixie Chicks.
So these two families are the [core] of the books. One is fashioned after the Lynches. The other is a Syrian Muslim family. These two families built this empire behind farming. And the trilogy goes from just after World War II to 25 years into the future. That’s the last book, and in the last book, sadly enough, some of the things that I’ve written about are coming true right now.
Writing about fictional West Texas characters is one thing, but looking into the Uvalde shooting had to be difficult, right?
A friend of mine, Kleo Belay, one of my editors, said, “You know, that’s a topic that needs to be written on in a way that looks at this issue of violent extremism in the United States.” Where’s that coming from and how’s that happening? What could be worse than the murder of 19 children and two teachers? Both of those teachers, by the way, were Sul Ross graduates. How do you tell that story?
I spent some time there, and I was really taken by the murals they had in the town square. I came up with the idea of doing the story through the experiences of one of the artists commissioned to do a mural. If I had to say what the book is about, it’s about trauma and healing from trauma. And it looks at this phenomenon of violent extremism in the United States when these people are radicalized in various ways. What are the red flags? Alienated individuals, sexually abused as kids, bullied. They often have an emotional problem or physical handicap. They have single parents, and they spend a lot of time in these back alleys of the Internet. So, Ramos, the shooter in Uvalde, had checked all the boxes, all of them.
Did you have any concerns about fictionalizing such a horrific event?
I had a lot of concerns about it inspiring other people. In dealing with the shooter, I don’t use his name. So, in the preamble of the book, I write a few paragraphs and use only pronouns of him, he—for a couple of different reasons. One is to do my best not to popularize the person. But I also don’t want to dehumanize him. I spent a lot of time with the families trying to explain what he is. I’m not trying to excuse his behavior. But we don’t understand what’s motivating these people, we can’t stop it. You have no prayer of stopping a lone wolf shooter. But if you can work with the community around them, you can prevent it.
I’m gonna go there, to the Uvalde library to talk and sign books. And I wonder how it’s going to go over when they see it. What are these families gonna think? None of them are named. So, yes, that does concern me.
But, hey, wake up America. We’re flooded with this every day, so let’s dissect it.
What’s an example in the book about trying to heal from the trauma?
There’s the twin sister of a girl who was killed in the classroom, who happened to be at the dentist that day. And she feels horrible guilt, and she comes in and helps with the mural. It’s a cast of characters all having their own trauma, some violent, some emotional. What is it that heals them? And I hope that it comes through as this kind of a message of hope. It sounds hokey, me talking about it, but it’s a love of humanity that is missing. In the end, that’s the message of the book.