Background
Background, interests, and the kind of work I keep returning to.
I spent years in the Marine Corps, mostly doing things that don't translate neatly into a resume. Air Traffic Control in the Triangle of Death. Multiple deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan. Leadership under conditions designed to break you down and find out what's left. What's left, I've come to understand, becomes the writing.
After the military, I went back to school — graduate work in business, and more recently an MFA in creative writing. Before all of that, I graduated from Virginia Military Institute (VMI), Class of 2003. The combination sounds unusual, maybe even contradictory, until you spend time in those worlds and realize they're all just trying to answer the same questions: What matters? What's actually true here? What do you do when the gap between what you expected and what happened is too wide to cross in one step?
I live in Oxford, Florida. I have a wife named Rhonda who is a Nuclear Medicine Technologist and who is more patient with me than I deserve. I have two kids: Owen, who already knows everything, and Audrey, who keeps me honest about a world that operates by rules I'm still learning.
This site is where I keep work that feels worth making public — writing that tries to be honest about what it's actually like to carry the past into a present that doesn't quite know what to do with it. Some of it is polished. Some of it is still taking shape. That feels fine to me.
Not a trophy case, just a little context for the kind of experience behind the work.
Qualifications and Roles
- MMTI — Marine Air Traffic Control Mobile Team Instructor
- WTI — Weapons and Tactics Instructor
- MCMAP Black Belt — Marine Corps Martial Arts Program
- Detachment Commander
- MAWTS-1 (Marine Aviation Weapons and Tactics Squadron One) OPFOR (Opposing Forces) Officer and ATC (Air Traffic Control) Division Head
Deployments and Assignments
- OIF 4-6, Iskandariya, Iraq
- 26th Marine Expeditionary Unit (MEU), 2007
- Combined Air Operations Center (CAOC), Al Udeid, as MARLO and Army BCD SOF coordinator
- Afghanistan tour
Writing and Craft
Creative nonfiction, the essay form, revision, and the slow work of figuring out what a piece actually wants to be once you stop forcing it into the shape you planned.
Systems and Workflow
Tools, structures, and practical frameworks for making life cleaner, simpler, and more intentional. The kind of systems that actually get used, not just theorized about.
Leadership and Pressure
What happens to people — and to decisions — when the stakes are real and the margin for error is small. The gap between theory and practice, and what lives in that gap.
For writing, projects, or thoughtful conversations, you can reach me at rob@hedglen.org
Still building, which is probably the point.