Tom Young retired from the Air National Guard in 2013 at the rank of senior master sergeant. He served more than twenty years as a flight engineer on the C-130 Hercules and the C-5 Galaxy, logging nearly 5,000 hours of flight time. His career included service in Afghanistan, Iraq, Bosnia, Kosovo, the Horn of Africa, and elsewhere. Among his military honors are the Meritorious Service Medal, three Air Medals, three Aerial Achievement Medals, and the Air Force Combat Action Medal.

Young also holds degrees from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He studied writing there and at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, among other places. Besides his previous novels, The Mullah’s Storm, Silent Enemy, The Renegades, and The Warriors, he is the author of the Sand and Fire ebook special Phantom Fury and the oral history The Speed of Heat: An Airlift Wing at War in Iraq and Afghanistan, and he contributed to the anthology Operation: Homecoming, edited by Andrew Carroll. He lives in Alexandria, Virginia.