Ackerman studied literature and history at Tufts University, where he also joined Naval ROTC (Marine Corps option).[5] He graduated summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa in 2003.[6] He holds a master's degree in international affairs from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy.[7] He also completed many of the United States military's most challenging special operations training courses.[8]
Beginning in 2003, Ackerman served eight years in the U.S. Marine Corps.[9] He worked as both an infantry and special operations officer, initially assigned as a platoon commander in 1st Battalion, 8th Marines.[9][10] He served multiple tours of duty in the Middle East and Southwest Asia.[11] As a Marine Corps special operations team leader, Ackerman was the primary combat advisor to a 700-man Afghan commando battalion responsible for capture operations against senior Taliban leadership. He also led a 75-man platoon that aided in relief operations in post-KatrinaNew Orleans.[12] He was briefly attached to the Ground Branch of the Central Intelligence Agency'sSpecial Activities Division.[13]
In 2004, Ackerman led a Marine rifle platoon of 45 men during the Second Battle of Fallujah.[14] During one night of the month-long battle, the platoon established a fighting position in a store. When the sun rose the next day, they were surrounded by insurgents. While wounded himself, Ackerman exposed himself to enemy fire to pull wounded Marines to safety and coordinated four separate medical evacuations. To save the platoon, he ordered his men to use explosives to destroy the store’s back wall. Twenty-five men were wounded, but everyone escaped alive. Ackerman was awarded the Silver Star for his “heroics in the battle” and a Purple Heart for his wounds.[10][14][15]
USA Today reported that Ackerman was the assault force commander of a group of US Marines that carried out a raid that led to the death of an estimated 33 to 92 civilians in Azizabad, Afghanistan, in August 2008.[16] According to USA Today's investigation, the marines had been set up by an informant who provided them with false intelligence. The Pentagon maintained that such reports were "Taliban propaganda."[17]USA Today later sued the Defense Department to obtain its internal records.[18]
Ackerman received the Bronze Star for Valor for leading his Marine special operations team through an ambush in Herat Province, Afghanistan, in which one Special Forces soldier was killed.[10] He left the Marine Corps in 2009 as a captain after being assigned to the CIA.[19]
In 2021, Ackerman was one of the people who worked with other veterans, journalists, and activists to help evacuate as many Afghan allies as possible in 2021, during the U.S. withdrawal.[20]
Ackerman served as chief operating officer of Americans Elect, a political organization known primarily for its efforts to stage a national online primary for the 2012 US presidential election.[21] As one of its officers, Ackerman was interviewed extensively, notably on NPR's Talk of the Nation.[22]
Like all novels written in skilled, unadorned prose about men and women of action, this novel will probably be compared to Hemingway's work. In this case, however, the comparison seems unusually apt ... Elliot Ackerman has done something brave as a writer and even braver as a soldier: He has touched, for real, the culture and soul of his enemy.[28]
The Los Angeles Review of Books describes the novel as a "radical departure from veterans writing thus far" due to his choice of a first-person narrator, the lowly Aziz, a poor soldier in a local militia.[29] The Stars and Stripes review described Green on Blue and Phil Klay'sRedeployment as carrying "the sting of authenticity and the sensory expression of experiences lived".[30]Green on Blue was a New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice.[31]
Ackerman's second novel Dark at the Crossing, published January 24, 2017, by Alfred A. Knopf, was a finalist for the National Book Award in 2017. In a starred review Library Journal wrote, "Here is a thriller, psychological fiction, political intrigue, and even a love story all wrapped into a stunningly realistic and sometimes horrifying package. Put Ackerman on the A-list."[32] In the New York Times Book Review the novelist Lawrence Osborne wrote, "One could argue that the most vital literary terrain in America's overseas wars is now occupied not by journalists but by novelists ... Elliot Ackerman is certainly one of those novelists ... He has created people who are not the equivalents of the locally exotic subjects in your average NPR story, and he has used them to populate a fascinating and topical novel."[33]Dark at the Crossing was noted as one of the best books of the year by the Washington Post, NPR, Christian Science Monitor, Military Times'', Vogue, and Bloomberg and was a New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice. Ackerman was a featured author at the Miami Book Fair in 2017.[34]
Ackerman's third novel Waiting for Eden was published September 25, 2018, by Alfred A. Knopf. The book was nominated for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, and it won the Marine Corps Heritage Foundation's James Webb Award. Author Anthony Swofford wrote in The New York Times Book Review, "Masterly ... Brilliant ... In his short novel, Ackerman accomplishes what a mountain of maximalist books have rarely delivered over tens of thousands of pages and a few decades: He makes pure character-based literary art, dedicated only to deeply human storytelling ... Cusk's Outline trilogy and Jenny Offill's Dept. of Speculation have created similarly shimmering portraits of humans at rest and fury ... Ackerman explore[s] conflicted, confused true love in such elegant and humane ways that you will come to question everything you think you know about the meanings of romance and fidelity ... The micro-level power of his unadorned and direct prose lies in no less than an attempt to contain and dramatize the darkness and light of our souls ... To identify this book as a novel seems inadequate: Waiting for Eden is a sculpture chiseled from the rarest slab of life experience."[35] The novel was one of the best books of the year on Amazon, NPR, and the Washington Post and was a New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice.[citation needed]
Places and Names: On War, Revolution, and Returning[edit]
Ackerman's fourth book Places and Names: On War, Revolution, and Returning was published June 11, 2019, by Penguin Press.[36] The memoir was nominated for the 2020 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Non-fiction.[37]Time magazine named it a must-read book of 2019 and said, "In Places and Names, perhaps the most striking war memoir of the year, Ackerman attempts to make sense of the reasons he served (personal and geopolitical), the people he met, the kinship he felt and the reckonings he has since confronted. Places and Names is as clean and spare in its prose as it is sharp and unsparing in timely observation."[38] It was also a New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice.[citation needed]
InThe Fifth Act: America’s End in Afghanistan, Ackerman recounts his life as an infantry officer on combat missions, his decision to leave the military, and the efforts to get Afghans out of the country in 2021 when the U.S. pulled out.[43] The Fifth Act was published by Penguin Press in August 2022.[44]
For a period of time, Ackerman lived in Istanbul and worked as a reporter covering the Syrian Civil War.[45] His article "Why Bringing Back the Draft Could Stop America's Forever Wars" was featured on the cover of the October 21, 2019, issue of Time magazine.[46]
United States
United States Marine Corps
