A 1967 graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy, Dick Couch served as a Surface Warfare Officer and a Special Warfare Officer. While a platoon leader with SEAL Team One in 1970, he led one of the only successful POW rescue operations of the Vietnam War. On release from active duty in 1972, he entered the Central Intelligence Agency, where he served as a Maritime Operations Case Officer. Dick retired from the Naval Reserve in 1997 with the rank of captain and currently serves as an adviser on military and tactical ethics for the component commands of the US Special Operations Command.
He began his writing career in 1990 and has authored nine novels: SEAL Team One (1990), Pressure Point (1992), Silent Descent (1994), Rising Wind (1997), The Mercenary Option (2003), Covert Action (2005), Act of Valor (Novelization) (2012), Act of Revenge (January 2014), and Op Center–Out of the Ashes (May 2014). Dick Couch's latest book, Navy SEALs: Their Untold Story (November 2014), is the subject of a major PBS documentary.
In addition to his fiction writing, Couch has written nine works of nonfiction that focus on Military ethics and Special Operations. His books and articles have been featured nationwide in leading outlets such as the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, the Christian Science Monitor, Variety magazine, Booklist, Kirkus, and the Library Journal. His co-authored novelization of Act of Valor, reached Number Four on the New York Times Best Seller List.
Dick enjoys a unique relationship with the US Special Operations Command and its subordinate Army, Navy, and Marine Corps component commands. They have allowed him special access for extended periods of time with their training and operational elements, and to tell their story in print. Dick has spent five of the last fifteen years embedded with these special operation components, at their domestic locations and their forward operating bases overseas.
Dick has served as an analyst for FOX TV, MSNBC TV, and ABC radio during periods of key combat operations in Afghanistan and Iraq. He has also been featured on National Public Radio, “The O’Reilly Factor,” with Bill O’Reilly, “Hardball” with Chris Matthews, and was a guest on Brian Lamb’s Q&A on C-SPAN. He has often traveled to the wartime theaters as an embed with American and allied Special Operations Forces.
He has lectured at the Air Force Academy, West Point, the Naval Academy, the Naval Special Warfare Center, the JFK Special Forces Center and School, the FBI Academy, the Naval Postgraduate School, The Joint Special Operations University, and The US Marine War College on issues of character development, ethics, moral battlefield conduct, and counterinsurgency. He recently completed a year-long assignment as an adjunct professor of ethics at the Naval Academy. Currently, Dick is busy with his next book, a nonfiction work on two of his SEAL teammates who received the Medal of Honor.