Army Veteran Devin Fish’s Answering the Hard Questions
“I’m going to walk so that someday someone might be able to run with it.”
Devin Fish
Devin Fish spent nearly ten years in the Army, from cavalry scout to career counselor, and survived poverty, both parents’ addiction, and a 2019 hospitalization for suicidal ideation. He turned all of it into a book he wrote in a war zone, and the writing ended up changing him as much as he hopes it changes his readers.
The story he almost didn’t tell
Devin grew up in Rockford, Illinois, a city he describes as safer than only five percent of the country. He moved sixteen times before he turned eighteen, went to seven different schools, and watched both parents struggle with drug and alcohol addiction. At eighteen he saw his father in the hospital, then shipped to basic training. Two years later his mother passed away. By twenty-one he was, in his words, in “a desperate chain of self-hatred,” and in 2019 he checked himself into a hospital for suicidal ideations.
Coming out of that hospital, he set a single goal: become an Army career counselor. It took him three years instead of one, but he did it, and somewhere in there he realized he had a story worth telling. He started writing on his last deployment before leaving the Army.
“I was never alone. It was just, it’s a story people want to hear, but no one wants to be the first one to actually sit down and write that kind of information down and expose themselves.”
— Devin Fish
Writing in a war zone
Stationed in Kuwait with little to do off-duty, Devin made writing the book his mission. He wrote most of it in the first six months, dissecting his own life ten pages at a time. Before the book was even finished, he presented its opening chapter to a room of two to three hundred deployed troops. He expected to be shamed. Instead, the story landed.
He knew his weaknesses going in, and he refused to let them stop him.
“I just focused on writing my story. I knew that I was good at that.”
— Devin Fish
Why Scribe, and not the traditional route
When the manuscript was ready, Devin did the math on self-publishing and traditional publishing. He sent the book to a traditional publisher first and waited. He also looked up the publisher David Goggins used for Can’t Hurt Me, one of the books that inspired him, and that search led him to Scribe Media. The decision came fast.
“I almost locked it in immediately because I’m like, yeah, this is the team I want to work with.”
— Devin Fish
The traditional publisher eventually replied. It took five months, and the answer was no. By then, Devin was already a published author.
“It took them like five months for them to respond to the book and they said no. So I was like, well, too late.”
— Devin Fish
The note that made the book
Devin’s first draft was a self-help book with none of his own story in it. The chief editor at Scribe read it and told him he’d written the book without telling his own version of events. Devin went back and wrote a hundred pages of memoir in a single week before the manuscript locked. He later emailed to thank the team for the note, because writing that section changed him: he began contemplating Christianity, reopened the Bible, and seeded the story of his next book right at the end of this one.
“The book didn’t just change […] people who read it, the book ended up changing me.”
— Devin Fish
He loved the cover the moment he saw it. When the Scribe designer sent him seven options, one stopped him cold: a demon and an angel on the front, and on the back, the first hard question, “do you want to die?” He knew readers would understand exactly what they were about to read.
“When they showed me the seven designs, I’m like, that’s the one.”
— Devin Fish
As for the grammar, the part he calls his worst subject, he happily left it to the professionals.
“Thankfully I found Scribe Media and like anytime they had to go and edit the book, I’m like, well, good luck. Cause every time they marked it up, it was like a hundred, a hundred different comments and a hundred punctuation marks.”
— Devin Fish
What the book started
When fifty copies arrived in his mailbox from Scribe, Devin had to sit down and reread his own book to prepare for a run of podcast interviews with a PR team. He separated from the Army in May 2026 after ten years of service, and he’s now all in on writing. He’s already a hundred pages into the next book, Answering the Call, and he started a YouTube channel under the same name as this one. Every reader who picks it up tells him the same thing.
“Every time someone reads it, they’re like, it’s a brutally honest book that will make you uncomfortable. I’m like, that was the goal of the book.”
— Devin Fish
For Devin, the point was never sales or status. It was leaving a trail for the next person walking out of the same dark place he came from, so their climb is a little shorter than his was.
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