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Ed Ruggero remembers very clearly two ambitions he had early on: he wanted to be a soldier and he wanted to be a writer.
Ruggero graduated from West Point in 1980, fulfilling one of his professional dreams. He served as an infantry officer in the Army and later returned to West Point to teach literature and writing. While he was on the faculty at West Point that Ruggero got the idea that it would be great to invite a newly famous author named Tom Clancy for a visit.
“I knew Clancy was fascinated by all things military, and West Point is a great draw. I had no travel budget to offer him, but I cheekily wrote that if he made his way to New York, I’d let him talk to my upperclass cadets.”
Clancy’s visit became a big event for the Academy, and the author was a houseguest of the Superintendent, the three-star general who is essentially the president of a university. In class that afternoon, Clancy told Ruggero's students, "I waited until I was almost forty to try something I always wanted to do. Don't wait."
"That's what got me going on my first book," Ruggero says. “I got up at 4:30—oh-dark-thirty in Army jargon—and wrote until it was time to leave for work at six. I had two young children at the time and didn’t want to sacrifice my time in the evenings with them.”
Clancy's encouragement paid off, as that early morning manuscript became 38 North Yankee, Ruggero's first book.
Ruggero has written a number of books about leadership and built a business running retreats for business executives to places like Normandy and Gettysburg.
“We use the history of these battles and the challenges facing the commanders, to figure out how we can better lead our modern organizations.”
On one visit to West Point Ruggero met a graduate of the Class of 1941, who became a guide for his next two books, both non-fiction accounts of American paratroopers in World War Two. Some of the hundred and fifty or so former paratroopers Ruggero interviewed for his next two books fought in six major campaigns.
“Getting to know those men and capturing their stories for later generations has been a highlight of my professional career.”
While visiting Sicily to research his non-fiction Combat Jump, about the 1943 Allied invasion, Ruggero became intrigued by the question, ”What happens after the fighting moves on?”
“The Allies had somehow to restore law and order and recreate a civil society and all its functioning parts immediately in the wake of the most violent and chaotic of human endeavors: modern war. That must have been incredibly difficult.”
That musing led Ruggero to a new fiction series that kicks off in 2020 with Blame the Dead.
“The protagonist is a former Philadelphia beat cop, Eddie Harkins, who winds up investigating the murder of a US Army surgeon. Among other problems, Harkins learns that many of the victim’s colleagues think that the dead man—who was something of a low-life—pretty much got what he deserved.”
“But, as Harkins says, you can hardly blame the dead guy for his own murder.”
Ruggero and his wife, Marcia Noa, divide their time between Media, Pennsylvania and Lewes, Delaware. Ruggero spent seven years as a trustee of the Philadelphia Outward Bound School.
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