Former Green Beret Alex Dekker turns thriller writer with “Desert Heist”

Former Green Beret Alex Dekker turns thriller writer with “Desert Heist”

WILMINGTON, N.C. (WECT) -After nearly 20 years in the U.S. Army Special Forces, Alex Dekker has spent plenty of time in places most people only see in headlines — deploying on several missions to Iraq, Afghanistan and other locations around the world during his military career.

Now, the former U.S. Army Green Beret is taking readers somewhere else entirely: into his debut novel Desert Heist, a fast-moving, globetrotting thriller that blends the modern special operations world he knows with the search for ancient history he’s always loved.

“I considered two things,” Dekker said of the decision to write a book. “One is, what do I know? And one is, what do I like and I’m interested in? And what I know is Special Operations after having spent 20 years in it. What I’ve always loved is history, though.”

Dekker served with the Army’s 5th Special Forces Group and later as a special operations team member assigned to the United States Army Special Operations Command. His experiences on deployments to the Middle East, and on personal trips, shaped how he sees the world and how he builds the environments his characters move through. But becoming an author wasn’t originally in his plans.

“I sort of had a lull in between deployments, where I had been kind of gone too long and I came back and was told I just needed to sit around for a little bit and not do much and have a good cool-off period,” he says. “And so, not doing well with nothing to do, I had this idea to write a book, so I sat down and I wrote it and then I put it away and I didn’t think about it again. It wasn’t until a while later that I met my now wife and during the course of our courtship, it came up that I had written a book. She asked to read it, I let her read it and she said, ‘You might have something here!’ I kind of let some buddies in the military read it, and it progressed to sending out query letters and going from there.”

Dekker said his fascination with archaeology started the same way it did for plenty of people: watching a movie featuring Harrison Ford’s iconic character Indiana Jones in Raiders of the Lost Ark. Today, that interest is more than casual. Dekker is an avid student of history who has volunteered on numerous archaeological digs. He is also an Arabic speaker and holds a Master’s degree in Applied Intelligence from Georgetown University. That mix of lived experience — special operations training and real-world deployments paired with an academic and hands-on interest in history — is at the core of Desert Heist.

But if you want to know if Dekker is his main character Nate Wilde, he says, ‘not exactly’.”

“I am not,” Dekker says. “We have a lot of similarities and he’s maybe, a reflection or a version of me had I gone a different path. I did a full 20-year career. He does about half that. He got out. He pursued other interests. And so he has a lot of the same skills and background, but he sort of diverged paths a while ago.”

Dekker also has ties to southeastern North Carolina through the training pipeline that shapes so many Special Forces soldiers. He had several stints at Fort Bragg, at first for some basic army training and then later for some of his professional military education and specialized training. When there was a chance to decompress, Wilmington was a familiar destination.

“My original memories of being stationed here are somewhat miserable,” Dekker said, describing them as synonymous with sleeping in the rain and the cold and the pressure of failure hanging over your head.

“Whenever you’d come out and go to try to cut loose, you’d go to the beach, come to Wilmington,” he remembered. “As I came back and grew my career, came back for maybe professional military education or those things, I got to actually experience more of the area and experience it under less threatening circumstances. So, North Carolina, this area, it’s always been very near and dear to my heart.”

For Dekker, the debut thriller is only the beginning of his new career as a author. He has already written the second Nate Wilde book, which is now in the hands of his editor Emily Bestler and her team, and is working on the third book in the series.

“As long as people are interested in reading them, I will keep writing them,” Dekker said.

Desert Heist publishes Tuesday, July 28.

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