Jack Carr knows his way around a battlefield, and a military thriller

On a stifling August night, an orderly line of more than 100 people, mostly men, snaked down the sidewalk outside Books and Greetings at a New Jersey strip mall.

Many wore camouflage. Still more sported tattoos — flags, anchors, skulls and wings — and facial hair, ranging from full Santa to neat goatee. Conversation was hushed but ardent.

“I cannot get enough,” said a visitor wearing a No Surrender T-shirt. “When I finish, I start over.”

A man in a trucker hat stitched with tomahawks agreed: “Same, bro.”

They were fanboying over Jack Carr, a former Navy SEAL turned No. 1 bestselling author whose eighth thriller, “Cry Havoc,” came out Oct. 7. He was the guest of honor.

There was no reading or Q&A session. The price of admission ($29.99) included a professional photograph with Carr, downloadable via QR code. In two months’ time, attendees would receive a signed copy of “Cry Havoc” bearing the ultimate benediction: a bullet hole shot through the title page.

As fellow veterans traded unit designations, chatted about guns and waited uncomplainingly, it was clear that they were unfazed by delayed gratification. The real prize was the chance to meet Carr himself.

“At first we weren’t sure if people would come,” said Chris Paniza, a bookseller who handled crowd control. “Then they started lining up an hour before the event.”

Jack Carr’s debut novel, “The Terminal List” came out in 2018. Since then, his books have sold more than 5 million copies.

“The Terminal List” spawned two Amazon Prime series starring Chris Pratt as James Reece, Carr’s Navy SEAL protagonist who is always, as the saying goes, kicking ass and taking names. The second of them, “The Terminal List: Dark Wolf,” launched this summer, starring Taylor Kitsch (aka Tim Riggins from “Friday Night Lights”) as Reece’s best friend.

Carr, 51, also has three podcasts, a book club, a newsletter, a blog and a line of merchandise — including beer steins, sunglasses, onesies, watches, sweatshirts, cutting boards and golf balls — emblazoned with his signature tomahawk logo. His prodigious output dwells on the knife’s edge of macho and manosphere, where tactical equipment is described down to the tiniest screw and adventure and annihilation go hand in hand.

Get him started on his fandom, though, and Carr turns misty-eyed.

“Someone comes through the line and says, ‘I joined the military because of you,’” he explained. “Or a parent comes through and says, ‘My son is off to boot camp tomorrow.’”

Carr, who writes under a pseudonym and takes his commitment to privacy very seriously, knew he wanted to become a SEAL from a young age. His mother was a librarian; his father was a lawyer. He grew up in Northern California, hearing stories about his grandfather, a Corsair pilot who was killed in World War II.

“I had his medals, I had his wings,” Carr said. “I had the silk maps they gave aviators back then, because if you had a paper one and you hit the water it would disintegrate.”

Like many a child of the ’80s, Carr was a voracious consumer of pop culture, devouring movies, TV shows and magazines that featured men in uniform and heroes battling villains. But books like Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan series and David Morrell’s “The Brotherhood of the Rose” were the real fuel for Carr’s SEAL dreams.

The more he learned about “the toughest training ever devised by the modern military,” Carr said, the more he realized, “that’s my goal.”

In 1997, not long after graduating from college, he went to BUD/S, or Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL training in Coronado, California.

“Those were prewar years,” Carr said. “We thought we’d do secret missions and come back in time for beers at the local bar. That wasn’t the case. There was really nothing going on.”

Then, he said, “Sept. 11 happened.”

Carr’s grand post-and-beam house is so high in the mountains, and so far from the upscale ski bummery of Park City, Utah, it requires two separate GPS addresses and two security gate codes to reach.

He and his wife, Faith, welcomed me like a returning hero, then introduced their older son, a warm, lanky adolescent who has a genetic mutation that manifests as a global developmental disability.

“He’ll require 24/7 full time care for the rest of his life,” Carr said, right off the bat. “That’s where a lot of this drive comes from, making sure his trust is funded in a way that, if I get hit by a bus tomorrow, he gets taken care of.”

The family exchanged hugs before mother and son headed down the hill to school.

Then Carr gave me a tour. The pinball machines in the basement. The home gym he rarely uses. The barrel sauna with a view of the valley below, including the gun range where Carr shot 8,500 title pages for “Cry Havoc,” and the warehouse from which two employees ship his merch.

The house has two offices: one for business, one for writing. Both are lined with thrillers, military ephemera, mementos from his TV shows and bottles of whiskey.

On Sept. 11, 2001, Carr was in Guam, two weeks into his second deployment. He watched the Twin Towers fall on television. He’d already read up on the responsible parties.

Carr was dispatched to Kuwait, then to Uzbekistan and Afghanistan. He completed seven deployments, including three tours in Iraq and another in the southern Philippines. He read voraciously the whole time, alternating between escapist fiction (Daniel Silva, Vince Flynn, Stephen Hunter) and nonfiction to prepare himself for what lay ahead.

“He was a knowledge carnivore,” said Clint Bruce, a fellow SEAL who was with Carr on 9/11. “Relentlessly curious, always writing or reading, learning about the culture where we went and trying to understand what was going on 50 years before we got there.”

Carr said, “I wanted to make sure I knew as much about warfare as I possibly could. That’s what you owe the team, that’s what you owe their families, the mission, the country.”

He wasn’t eager to get into the particulars of his time “downrange”— much of it is classified — but his pride was evident.

“It was a good run,” Carr said. “I feel fortunate that I escaped relatively unscathed, and made decisions that worked out under fire. Because you can make a good decision and the enemy still gets a vote and things can go sideways.”

But when he found himself in a bureaucratic role, Carr realized it was time to switch gears.

“I knew what I was good at, and that is leading men on the battlefield,” he said. “I didn’t watch those movies back when I was growing up and say, ‘Oh, I want to be the paperwork guy.’”

For some authors, finding a publisher can be as daunting as becoming a Navy SEAL. This was not the case for Carr.

Sitting at his dining room table beneath a chandelier made of antlers, he recalled the SEAL buddy — he’s big on buddies — who introduced him to Brad Thor, a thriller author whom he admired. Thor, in turn, agreed to introduce Carr to his editor, Emily Bestler, when “The Terminal List” was ready for prime time.

“Ninety-nine percent of people say, ‘I’m going to write a book’ and they never do,” Thor said in an interview. “They want to chitchat and have a burger with an author.” Carr had a certain intensity, a laser focus that distinguished him.

Another SEAL buddy introduced Carr to Lee Child, who advised him to pick a single-syllable pseudonym, preferably one that started with a “C” (the easier to locate in a bookstore). Carr obliged, liking the idea of landing on a shelf alongside Clive Cussler, Tom Clancy and Child himself.

In November 2016, Carr sent “The Terminal List” to Bestler. A month later, after introducing Carr to four literary agents — he chose Alexandra Machinist, now at CAA — she bought the book.

“It was masterful,” Bestler said. “It did not feel at all like a first novel. It was very quickly clear to me that Jack would become a star. There was no doubt in my mind.”

Eight weeks after the New Jersey bookstore event, “Cry Havoc,” which debuted at No. 3 on the bestseller list, arrived by mail, right on schedule.

The book, a prequel, is dedicated to David Morrell, the author who created Rambo, now Carr’s buddy; and to the men of MACV-SOG, a classified special operations unit which conducted covert missions during the Vietnam War. James Reece’s father, Tom, the hero of the novel, is a member.

There, on the title page, was the bullet hole, shot with a CAR-15 rifle, a gun favored by the special ops unit.

Carr included the unit’s unofficial motto as an epigraph. “You have never lived until you’ve almost died,” it reads. “For those who have fought for it, life has a flavor the protected shall never know.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.