Meet Jake Caffey

Every good work of adventure or historical fiction needs a protagonist readers are willing to follow into danger.

Like Jack Aubrey, Caffey is most fully himself in an operational world, where professional skill and instinct matter.

Like Richard Sharpe, he possesses a practical intelligence that comes alive when plans collapse and survival depends on reading the ground in front of him.

And like Jack Ryan, he is a thinking man’s protagonist—an observer who gathers fragments, recognizes possibilities others miss, and acts decisively when events leave no safe choice.

But Jake Caffey is his own man.

For Call Sign Blackjack, I created a protagonist whose story begins long before Vietnam.

Jake is a U.S. Navy lieutenant and A-6 Intruder pilot flying combat missions from the USS Hancock in 1968. But to understand the man in the cockpit, you have to go back fifteen years—to a twelve-year-old boy growing up in Montana’s Flathead Valley.

Jake learned about danger on rivers before he ever encountered it over North Vietnam.

He grew up around cold water, mountains, changing currents, and the knowledge that a bad decision could become permanent very quickly. The river taught him something he would carry into war: when the plan fails, you adapt.

Jake is not fearless. I never wanted him to be.

He knows fear. He understands what a surface-to-air missile can do to an aircraft. He knows what capture means. He knows that some missions do not bring everyone home.

What sets him apart is what he does after fear arrives.

Jake is observant, stubborn, resourceful, and intensely loyal. He is not a man who makes long speeches about friendship or duty. He simply has a deeply rooted belief that you do not leave your people behind.

And for Jake, that belief becomes personal.

When his navigator and lifelong friend Sam Hunter falls into enemy hands, Jake faces a choice no training manual can answer. He can accept what the war has taken from him—or he can do something no sane pilot would attempt.

Jake’s greatest strength is also his greatest weakness: he does not know how to walk away from someone he loves.

That loyalty pushes him beyond orders, beyond the expected rules of war, and eventually toward Hanoi itself.

What I like most about Jake is that he is not invincible. He gets tired. He gets hurt. He makes decisions with incomplete information. Sometimes the only thing separating courage from recklessness is whether the decision works.

Late in the story, after days of exhaustion and injury, a Navy SEAL reaches him on a dark beach and asks if he is wounded.

Jake’s answer tells you almost everything you need to know about him:

“Later, sir. We need to go. NVA’s coming.”

That’s Jake Caffey.

That’s who I think Jake Caffey is. But one of the great things about books is that readers get to know a character in their own way, and sometimes see things even the author didn’t. So, I invite you to meet Jake in Call Sign Blackjack, in paperback or eBook, and decide for yourself who he really is.