JULY 2025 – Pretty much all journalists would burn their laptop to get their work optioned into a Hollywood film, and Mark Bowden has enjoyed that good fortune several times in his career. Two of his best-known works – Black Hawk Down and Killing Pablo – have helped make Bowden, a one-time staff writer for The Philadelphia Inquirer, as close to a household name as any newsroom reporter in the last 50 years.
Bowden, now 74, remains a contributor to The Atlantic, and this week the Atlantic site published Bowden’s profile on Trump’s joint chiefs of staff, Dan “Razin'” Caine. Caine is a one-time fighter pilot who leap-frogged over the Pentagon’s league of four-star generals to land the job. A lot had to do, Bowden reports, with the fact that Trump was dazzled by Caine’s nickname, and that Caine, as an ace F-16 pilot, was something of a badass. The good news about this profile, though, is that Caine is very much a low-key military man, unwilling to submit – so far – to Trump’s political pressures. In many respects it’s as much a report on how a career military officer handles the Trump White House, as it is about Caine himself. It’s a first-rate profile.
https://www.theatlantic.com/national-security/archive/2025/07/razin-caine-donald-trump-joint-chiefs/683440/?utm_source=apple_news