Nathaniel Fick, USMC Captain and author of One Bullet Away: The Making of a Marine Corps Officer, was born in Baltimore, Maryland in 1977.  He graduated with high honors from Dartmouth College in 1999, earning degrees in Classics and Government.  While at Dartmouth, Fick captained the cycling team to a US National Championship, and wrote a senior thesis on Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War and its implications for American foreign policy. 

He was commissioned a second lieutenant in the United States Marine Corps upon graduation, and trained as an infantry officer. 

Fick led his platoon into Afghanistan and Pakistan only weeks after 9/11, helping to drive the Taliban from Kandahar.  After returning to the States in 2002, he joined Recon, the Corps’ special operations force.  Subsequently, Fick led a reconnaissance platoon in combat during the early months of Operation Iraqi Freedom, from the battle of Nasiriyah to the fall of Baghdad, and into the peacekeeping that followed. 

Fick left the Marines as a captain in 2003 and is currently pursuing a masters degree in International Security at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, and an MBA at the Harvard Business School. 60 Minutes, the BBC, and NPR have featured his work. Fick’s writing has appeared in newspapers across the country, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The International Herald Tribune.