Summary
J.D. Simkins spent four years as a Marine Scout Observer, then one of roughly 200 in a service of 180,000. He was deployed to Iraq all of 2006 and parts of 2007. He left the service and came home in 2008. Junior Marines he’d supervised deployed without him the following year. Some didn’t come back. He later lost his parents, two years apart. In 2021, he watched thirteen Marines die at the Kabul airport in a war he had signed up for when those Marines were toddlers. He felt something crack open that professional distance couldn’t repair. He now refuses to let any of it become a statistic. He’s now the editor-in-chief at one of the country’s most prominent military news organizations, where he makes daily decisions about which stories run and which die on his desk. Prioritizing the outdoors provides him with quiet, the kind of stillness that allows him to talk to people who are no longer living.
It’s 2:30 in the morning on a frozen lake somewhere in the Yukon, and J.D. Simkins can hear his own heartbeat. Not as metaphor. Not as literary device. The cold and the silence are so absolute, so uninterrupted by anything resembling modern life that his body becomes its own sound. No signal. No deadline. No screen in his hand.
“A level of quiet there that I have never experienced,” he said. The darkness there doesn’t feel hostile the way some people might expect. He describes it as the closest thing to a sensory deprivation tank he’s ever found without paying for one.
He’s alone the way most people in his industry never allow themselves to be. And he’s talking to his mother.
She has been gone a few years by the time he finds himself on that ice. His father passed on a couple years before his mother. “Whether it was deployments, friends and eventually losing my parents, I felt a lot and I still do,” he said.
In the spaces where there’s no signal and no noise, he talks to them. “I just have a conversation, and I do feel a sense of closeness, which is incredible in spaces like that because you’re not close to any other people out there.”
He wouldn’t call himself a sentimental man. He spent four years in a job that required him to be the calmest, most precise voice on a radio during intense moments. But on that lake, in the dark, with nothing between him and the cold and whatever lies past it, he lets himself feel all of it.
That capacity isn’t incidental to who J.D. Simkins is. It’s his entire foundation.
The Scout
He came out of high school afraid of public speaking. “The Marine Corps benefited me a lot in that regard, having to confront all of these things that always unraveled my nerves a little bit,” he said.
He enlisted in the Marine Corps at 17 and was assigned to one of its quietest, most demanding specialties. “At the time, out of like 180,000 active-duty Marines, there were fewer than 200 of us.”
The community was small enough that even the members he didn’t like became something like family. “It was still like having your annoying sibling or something in a way,” he said. Still his people.
“You have to be able to tell higher ranking people what is going on, what your actions are affecting, what your options are really.”
The profession demanded that he learn assertive early, he said. “At that young age you have to be able to tell higher ranking people what is going on, what your actions are affecting, what your options are.”
An added wrinkle often came in the form of being assigned to infantry units, which he jokes can be pretty intolerant of non-infantry personnel.
“As a scout you at least start to recognize that you can be a pretty valuable commodity if you know you’re stuff,” he says. “Here’s this guy who can hop on a radio and just say, ‘Blow that place up,’ and it solves a problem.”
The dynamic is familiar to anyone who has been both the outsider and the specialist. Valued for the skill. Kept at a distance for the category.
“The Marine Corps really just impacted my overall work ethic and my perception of what I once thought was difficult,” he said. “Going back to school after getting out was like a vacation compared to what the previous four years had entailed.”
Iraq and the Geometry of Accuracy
Simkins deployed to Iraq at the beginning of 2006 at 19 years old. “Every decision is high-pressure, high-speed as a scout over there,” he said.
Enemy mortar teams had their operation down cold. “They would often pull up in a pickup truck, unload a mortar tube and base plate, fire off like six mortars at our guys and then throw it back in the truck and get moving,” he said. “Speed and accuracy were very important in making sure that you’re tracking that and getting artillery rounds onto them as fast as possible while also making sure you avoid civilian buildings and are taking collateral damage into account.”
Oftentimes, by the time any response was possible, they were already gone. Still, even something as routine as a nighttime illumination mission demanded precision that civilian life rarely asks for.
A round would climb, detach, release a parachute with blazing light beneath it. “We would have to calculate where the rest of that canister is going to fall because that’s a big piece of metal now flying through the sky that we would have to make sure is going to land in a field and not hit a house or an area with other Marines.” The math was quiet and the stakes were the size of the actual world.
He takes the standard with him into every editorial meeting he runs. “Journalism has dissolved at times to where it’s so based on who’s first without always ensuring accuracy,” he said. “We don’t ever want to get caught with our tails between our legs because we just rush to put something out.”
The institutional knowledge operates on a different frequency. When he heard that the United States had asked Ukraine for help finding cheaper alternatives to knock down drones a week into a new conflict — this, despite the Navy having spent previous years shooting down $30,000 Iranian-made drones in the Red Sea with multimillion dollar missiles — the feelings came on fast.
“I’ve called that strategic malpractice,” he said. “They knew these munitions are everywhere. You’ve already dealt with them before. And yet you’re still kind of being caught by surprise.”
What Came Home
Simkins wrapped up his third deployment in 2008 and separated from the Marine Corps that September. Some of the junior Marines under his charge were on their first deployment when he was on his last. After he got out, those young men went to Afghanistan. A couple of them were killed.
“It made me want to go back in, because you feel like, I should have been there, because they were under my charge at one point. But that cycle would never end if the conflict doesn’t end.”
“It made me want to go back in,” he said, “because you feel like you should have been there, because they were under my charge at one point. But that cycle would never end if the conflict doesn’t end.” There was no version of going back that resolved the guilt. There was only the recognition that the guilt was evidence of love, not debt.
Years elapsed. Then, in 2021, 13 troops died in the explosion at the Kabul airport in Afghanistan. Eleven of them were Marines. “I couldn’t wrap my head around that there were people in 2021 who were dying in that same war when they were probably just three years old when I signed up,” he said. The war had been waiting for them.
“That really still stings,” he said. “And now today there are veterans of our wars who are still in their 20s and 30s and are having to watch a new conflict in Iran that feels eerily familiar, despite whatever narratives are being pushed,” he said. This isn’t a World War II veteran speaking from across a safe distance of history. These are people young enough to feel the repetition in their bodies.
Regardless of the ebbs and flows of conflict, he misses the people who made him. “There’s that element of camaraderie that you no longer find among some civilian employees and workplaces,” he said. Years later, he took a journalism course on how to cover white nationalism, riots and extremism. The two instructors were both combat veterans. Strangers, but not. “Just being around them, it was like being back with friends immediately. I had never met them before, but the camaraderie was there.” He recognized something he thought he’d left behind.
The Fly Fisher
After the Marine Corps, after years accumulating the particular weight that comes from watching things go wrong from close range and having to describe them accurately to people who weren’t there, J.D. Simkins eventually found himself writing a newsletter about the American West for Sunset Magazine. He was a D.C.-area kid. The Shenandoah and the Blue Ridge Mountains were technically accessible, but even those ventures required 90 minutes of gridlock traffic and the corresponding mental strain. But something opened when he went further.
“I took up fly fishing. That was something that eventually took on a mental health, borderline spiritual role,” he said. “You come away from it feeling better, feeling refreshed.” Through an Indigenous friend from Wisconsin who mentors Native youth on the water, he learned the values of immersion in these remote spaces. Science backs it as well. “It’s really fascinating. The neurological processes going on in your brain as water, like a river, rushes around your waist and compresses your thighs — it triggers the same neurological response that is fired when you receive a hug.”
“My brain kind of shuts off. I don’t think about anything. It’s one of the only activities I’ve ever done where that happens.”
“My brain kind of shuts off,” he said. “I don’t think about anything. It’s one of the only activities I’ve ever done where that happens.” For someone whose mind is rarely quiet, this wasn’t a small discovery.
On that frozen Yukon lake at 2:30 in the morning he was at peace. “I was like, this is the best thing I’ve ever experienced, just because I feel a sense of closeness to them.”
Further exploration in remote spaces only tethered Simkins more to that pursuit. He was driving through the Isle of Skye alone in 2019 when a pair of ATVs crested a hill. They had set out to round up loose sheep. He hadn’t seen another human in over an hour.
“I just remember spending the day before scrolling online and being like, ‘Oh God, this politician said this horrific thing and this person said something incredibly stupid.’ Just the existential annoyances we too often slip into. And then I saw those guys corralling sheep and I thought, ‘That’s probably the biggest problem they’re going to deal with today.’ So, how can I apply that to my life as often as I can? I know what I need. Even though I might not get it some days, I know that even putting something on a calendar and just having it there to look forward to allows me to think, ‘OK, there’s relief coming up.’
“And therapy helps, too.”
The Writer Who Wound Up in Journalism
Simkins naturally gravitated toward writing as a child. His father was a phenomenal one, he says.
“Any time he submitted any pieces to the Washington Post, they published it verbatim. Didn’t change a word,” he says. But his father’s parents never once told his dad that he was good enough. Despite the creative talent, doubt was always there.
“One of the most awful things in my life is just realizing how good of a writer he was — better than me, for sure — and not having anyone tell him that as he was growing up.”
His father, however, made sure to encourage J.D. at every turn. Creative writing pursuits followed, then journalism.
“I started out more creative writing driven than I ever was in journalism,” he said. “I kind of just stumbled my way into this.”
The Marine Corps gave him early evidence that. One day, he was scolded for arriving thirteen minutes early to a formation instead of fifteen.
“The Marine Corps always says if you’re not fifteen minutes early, you’re late.”
His sergeant ordered him, as punishment, to write an essay on accountability. J.D. did not view it as such. He went back to his barracks room and began writing a first-person comedic narrative.
“The first line of my essay was something like, ‘I awoke with a gasp,’” he said, laughing. The story he invented involved a gang brawl on the way to formation, then a collision in which a car sent him spiraling through the air.
“In the story I’m flipping violently through the air, but as it’s happening, a solitary tear falls from my eye. I wrote that I was crying because I had been voted most likely to be accountable as a senior in high school and I had let everybody down.” His sergeant took one look at the essay and told him to get out of his office. That sergeant is still a friend.
Another punitive essay assignment concerned the importance of seatbelts, doled out to him after a master sergeant spotted him moving his car six spaces in a parking lot without buckling up. He returned to his barracks and went back to work, writing an encyclopedic history of the seatbelt, from its origins through the development of the three-point harness. A similar response from his superior. Also still a friend.
“Someone might see a story and think it’s not worth covering. But I might see it from a different angle that could be turned into something that winds up killing.”
“Someone might see something and think it’s dull or not worth covering,” he said. “But if you can see it from a creative angle, turn it into something humorous and completely innocuous, sometimes it winds up killing.” When the Pentagon confirmed that an overseas Popeyes wouldn’t receive the chicken sandwich that had swept the nation in collective hysteria, for example, J.D. wrote a piece about how the chicken shortage was destroying military readiness and morale. “That’s still one of our highest viewed stories ever,” he laughed.
He also wrote a satirical response to a claim by a press secretary that service members felt deep affinity for Confederate base names because those installations were often the last American soil they saw before deploying. He took the argument to its logical extreme, writing as a veteran who absolutely agreed, including passages about calling base barbershops from Iraq “just to hear the sound of someone enjoying skin-to-base contact.”
“No one cared about the base name when I was on Camp Pendleton,” he said. “No one.” The institutional knowledge that nobody ever cared about was precisely what made it work.
The Editor
Military Times and Defense News deal with specific audiences, and J.D. Simkins knows that readership with a precision that comes from having lived it. “If this story comes across, is it going to matter to the E5 or E6 and below?” That’s the first question.
“Is there a 21-year-old sitting in the barracks right now in California who is really dying to know about the Iraqi elections? They’re more concerned with how they’re going to afford beer on the weekend.”
“Is there a 21-year-old sitting in the barracks right now in California who is really dying to know about Iraqi elections or Indo-Pacific diplomacy?” he said. “Those guys are more concerned with how they’re going to afford beer that weekend.”
The flip side is finding the angle only his team can execute. When conversation around Iran potentially mining the Strait of Hormuz grew loud, after the U.S. had decommissioned its own minesweepers, numerous outlets began discussing the decommissioning, which had occurred the year before. His team published a piece on what a minesweeper actually does. It became one of the week’s highest-trafficked stories on the site.
“It’s a futile effort to try to chase the New York Times when they have newsrooms of 200 people and we have like a dozen,” he said. “We need to approach things more in a way of, ‘What can we instead do well that they’re not going even touch on?”
He kills stories too. When coverage of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s steak dinners overseas was heating up, he looked at it and passed. “There are a lot of things you can nitpick on when it comes to Hegseth or the Pentagon,” he said. “There’s a laundry list. But making sure that troops have a steak dinner isn’t one of them.” He has eaten that dinner. He knows the occasion for it.
The Line
The question of where journalism ends and exploitation begins isn’t abstract for Simkins. He’s emotionally invested. Today, he finds himself frequently using a phrase to desribe the thing he finds most corrosive about the profession: main character syndrome. “That is so rampant today, especially in national security journalism and especially in the D.C. bubble,” he said.
“It’d be one thing to make yourself the center of the story if you were covering some conservation issue. But this is literal life and death we’re covering on a daily basis. To do that with those stories is disgusting, in my opinion.”
“It’d be one thing to make yourself the center of the story if you were covering some conservation issue or pop culture,” he said. “But this is literal life and death we’re covering on a daily basis. To do that with those stories is disgusting. Normalizing or treating an event as an opportunity for clicks or to promote yourself is really gross. And it’s a disservice.”
And he’s not just seeing it among journalists.
Six service members just died in a plane crash and the Pentagon and White House are out here meming their way through it less than an hour after the fact,” he said. He has had friends whose mothers received casualty notifications.
“I recognize that because of my background I have a lot more of an emotional tie to the subject matter,” he says. “But that’s something I never want to lose. It’s a bad place to become numb to it.”
The Screenplay
Simkins has been working on a screenplay about his friend, a Marine who served in Fallujah during the April 2004 offensive. His friend lost his best friend in that fight. Then the U.S., unhappy with the way the battle was proceeding, pulled the Marines out and handed the city back to the Iraqi army. That quickly failed. Operation Phantom Fury had to be fought that November. The men who had already paid the price of the first battle watched their sacrifice get politically abandoned, then saw the entire sequence repeat.
He said he revised the screenplay’s ending recently. He had originally written a closing image of his friend driving past the site where he last saw his best friend’s body, covering his face with his hands, closing his eyes to shut the memory out. Fade to black. He changed it. Not because the grief wasn’t real, but because he didn’t want the story to end on brokenness.
In the new ending, his friend does the same thing: covers his face, closes his eyes. But the man next to him in the Humvee, without a single word, reaches over and jostles his knee. And there’s a look between them: I got you.
“That’s the message I want to see more of. The strength of these individuals who went through something and felt abandoned by the people who sent them, who are still standing together.”
“That’s the message I want to see more of,” he said. “The strength of these individuals who went through something and felt abandoned by the people who sent them, who are still standing together and able to support each other through it.”
What Stays
I had been building toward the last question of our conversation through every act of his story. I told him: you have spent your entire career telling other people’s stories. When is the last time someone asked you to tell yours?
He paused in the way people pause when they are deciding whether to take something seriously or deflect it. He took it seriously. He talked about the outdoors newsletter for Sunset Magazine, the way it had slowly stopped being a newsletter and started becoming something closer to a journal.
He had been more vulnerable in it than he normally allowed himself to be. He wrote about his military experience and his parents and the way all those things wound around each other and became the person doing the writing.
The feedback was overwhelmingly positive. It meant a lot, and added to the encouragement his parents, despite not receiving their own, heaped upon him from a young age.
Soon, he wants to write a travel book called Don’t Go Here, every chapter a different trip that went spectacularly haywire. He has plenty of those stories, he says, and they are funny in the way that calamity becomes funny with enough distance. He also wants to write a satirical book about working in a newsroom. The characters he has encountered require no exaggeration, he says laughing. For now, he’s wrapping up the screenplay.
At the very end of our conversation, after more than an hour, he said something about writing a screenplay about his friend’s story that has stayed with me.
“There was a little bit of healing in the process for me as well,” he said. “The more I went into it, the more I felt it, in real time.”
I think about that when I think about what J.D. Simkins represents in this field. He’s an editor who hasn’t stopped being a writer. He’s a veteran who hasn’t stopped feeling the weight of what that means. He’s a man who calculates the trajectory of falling things and makes sure they land somewhere that won’t cause harm. He has been doing that since Iraq. He’s still doing it now.
On a frozen lake in the Yukon, in the dark, with nothing but his own heartbeat for company, he felt close to the people he had lost. Not resigned. Close.
He isn’t finished carrying things. And he doesn’t ever want to be.
RESOURCES
Military Journalism
Military Times | militarytimes.com
National publication covering news, policy, and culture for U.S. service members and veterans.
Task and Purpose | taskandpurpose.com
Independent military news and culture outlet covering service members, veterans, and defense policy.
Veteran Mental Health
Veterans Crisis Line | veteranscrisisline.net
Free, confidential crisis support for veterans, service members, and their families. Call 988, press 1.
Project Healing Waters Fly Fishing | projecthealingwaters.org
A national program dedicated to the physical and emotional rehabilitation of veterans through fly fishing and fly tying.
Veteran Storytelling
The War Horse | thewarhorse.org
Nonprofit newsroom dedicated to accountability journalism about the U.S. military and veterans.
About Jonathan Simkins
Jonathan Simkins is a United States Marine Corps veteran who served four years as a Scout Observer, including a combat deployment to Iraq in 2004. He’s a senior editor at a leading military news organization, with editorial oversight of multiple brands serving the active duty, veteran, and defense communities. His background spans long-form narrative writing, national security journalism, satire, and outdoor journalism. He is currently completing a feature screenplay based on the experiences of a fellow Marine who served in Fallujah. He is based in the Washington, D.C. area.
Learn More | veteranexcellence.org
Veteran Excellence Magazine documents veteran leadership and service across national industries.