Adam Karaoguz (car-owz) joined the Navy a few months after graduating high school. He started as an undesignated deck seaman and rescue swimmer aboard the USS Tarawa (LHA-1), about as close to the bottom of the food chain as it gets on a Navy ship. He loved the job—even wrote a poem about it.
A few years later, he left the Tarawa in San Diego Bay and crossed the Coronado Bridge to attend Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL training. His class was profiled in The Warrior Elite: The Forging of SEAL Class 228 by retired SEAL Captain Dick Couch. Over the next six years as an enlisted SEAL operator, he served as a communicator, joint terminal attack controller, sniper and team leader, deploying to South America, Iraq and Afghanistan. He was then selected for the Navy’s Seaman to Admiral-21 commissioning program and studied Middle Eastern Studies and Arabic at George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs.
As a Naval Special Warfare officer, Adam led maneuver elements at the squad, platoon and troop level in Iraq, Afghanistan and Somalia. He also helped stand up an enduring training element for Ukrainian Maritime Special Forces. Along the way, he earned a master’s degree in Irregular Warfare from the Naval Postgraduate School. His final operational tour was as a troop commander at Naval Special Warfare Development Group, where he completed the last of ten overseas deployments. He finished his career teaching midshipmen as an assistant professor of naval science at the University of Rochester and retired after twenty-eight years of naval service.
Today, Adam is an adjunct faculty member at Joint Special Operations University, assisting partner nations in understanding operational planning and changes in the character of war. He writes the Renaissance Humans newsletter, with essays on war, complexity, story and the sacred. His debut novel, The Infernal Tower, has been described by USA Today best-selling author Jack Stewart as “Die Hard directed by Christopher Nolan and written by Dante.” He is hard at work on his next thriller, The Arcadia Initiative, and lives in the Finger Lakes region of New York with his family.