Interview with Max Ibach
Courtesy of Erica House Publishers

What was your greatest inspiration for writing The Castaway?

I could give you some sort of grand answer, but the truth is simpler. I saw a couple of survival epics in video form and knowing what I know, immediately determined that they were composed mostly of bovine scat. Following that observation, I established a personal goal of writing a survival book. The Castaway was simply my best effort in that direction. I chose Young Adult Fiction as my level of achievement, because one of my rejection slips indicated there is a better market there.

By the way,
The Castaway is not my first novel. My first novel is The Song of Mannheim. Unfortunately, it is too long for the publishing houses, (588 pages). The problem lies in the fact that I am an unknown author. Once I understood the rules, I wrote a shorter book. The Castaway succeeded in finding a publisher.


In this work, a young boy named Sheldon finds himself lost in the wilderness, and must rely on his wits and survival skills to make it out alive. It is clear from these vivid sequences that you have an extensive knowledge of these skills. Could you tell us how this knowledge developed?

Through military survival schools and by being a childhood member of the Boy Scouts of America.

I grew up as an only child, in rural Oklahoma in a twenty-three house oil field camp. The only kids my age in the camp, were girls. They didn't much interest me until I was about fourteen. Following their later discovery, I thought of little else. Before that time, there wasn't anyone for me to play with, so I spent the winter months trapping fur bearing animals and either hunted or fished the rest of the year. Although it wasn't in the Yukon, my trap line was about five miles long and I had to run it every morning before going to school. I used to literally run the entire distance, cross country, as fast as I could manage, so I would be home in time to catch the school bus. I had a pack frame, and a lot of sparsely settled country around me, so I did a lot of hiking and camping mostly by myself. When I was twelve, I joined the Boy Scouts of America. I learned a lot there, while ascending to the rank of Eagle Scout.

When the Korean war broke out, I was of draft age. I instinctively knew I didn't want to go hup-towing across the Korean peninsular with the Army, so I joined the Air Force. That proved to be a marvelous decision. I enjoyed military service, so much I made a career of it and served in the United States Air Force for twenty-one years. The first three of those years were spent as an enlisted man. I took some competitive exams, and the remaining eighteen were spent as a jet fighter pilot. Continuation training as a pilot involves attending survival schools. Military survival schools are incredibly good. I also thought the food was great, too. Of course I'm probably not a good judge of food, since the worst meal I ever ate was wonderful.

I imagine the military survival schools are even better now than when I was in service. Over my career, I attended a basic two week course in Nevada, winter survival in Alaska, Water survival in Japan and jungle survival in both Panama and the Philippines. The survival schools also taught the knowledge of former POW experiences and escape and evasion tactics as a part of the general survival mission.

The basic act of flying high performance aircraft is incredibly dangerous, all by itself. Especially when the airplanes are newly minted and always made by the lowest bidder.

After fifteen years of service I made the scene in Vietnam. There, I flew 175 combat missions while piloting an F4 Phantom, during a ten months period in 1966.

You'll notice that the boy in the story not only has to survive, but has to escape and evade a grizzly bear during his twenty-eight day hike out of the wilderness.


Your writing style is unique in that the images you construct with language are poetic, yet not in the traditional sense. Are there any authors that have influenced your style?

I read a lot, but I've never come across another author who writes in first person, present tense. When I began writing, I didn't realize my tenses were odd, until a friend with four university degrees pointed it out to me. Until that point, all I was trying to convey was first hand knowledge of what was happening in the story. I wanted to tell it as though it was happening immediately in front of the reader, at the moment of occurrence.


There are many instances in The Castaway that depict detailed sequences of aircraft and flight, written in an informative manner that is also easy for the layman to understand. Would you share some details of your flight experiences with our readers?

I have only about 5,400 hours of jet fighter time, which is not a lot of flying hours in comparison to a commercial air line pilot. However, the experience I have is unique, mostly because it involves a lot of danger and first hand hazardous experiences.

When I first began flying, we were at the dawning of the jet age. Commercial airlines were still flying prop-driven airplanes. If we saw a contrail in the sky, it was being made by a military jet fighter. Not long after that, the airlines transitioned into jets, but that took an extended period of time for the change to occur.

My first jet fighter after advanced flight school was the F-86 Saber Jet.

We were being groomed for Korean service. The F-86 is the fighter that flew against the MIG's in skies above Korea. My initial sequence of hair raising experiences began with that machine. They included having the engine quit during flight in two different airplanes. The silence that followed resulted in two dead-stick landings, without power. That was about the time when I attempted to acquire life insurance for myself to benefit my family. The insurance actuarial tables claimed that a jet fighter pilot was the second most dangerous occupation on the planet. Number one was a steeple jack. I limped along without major life insurance for a number of years until something I could afford came along.

My next airplane was the F-100 Super Saber Jet, which we all considered to be an incredibly dangerous airplane. It killed a lot of pilots before all the bugs were ironed out f it. After that, it killed off the unwary because it had some very dangerous flight characteristics. I ejected out of one of those when the engine fuel manifold ruptured in flight. The engine quit and it got real quiet again. While my trigger-like mind was busy digesting the problem, the airframe caught fire from the wings back and I nearly swallowed my tongue. When all this started happening, I was flying at a hundred feet and five hundred knots as I prepared to perform a practice nuclear weapons delivery maneuver. Smoke came into the cockpit, both fire warning lights suddenly came on and things started going to hell in a hand cart. The flight controls stopped steering the airplane and I pulled the handles.

Unfortunately, I fractured two vertebra in my lower back at some point during the ejection sequence. Those fractures have caused me major difficulty late in life.

Do you have plans for future books in the works?

The first book I wrote,
The Song of Mannheim, has not been published yet.

It is Mainstream Adult Fiction about several serial killers who are plaguing an area along the Texas Golf coast during the late 1940s. High school age girls have been disappearing for the past ten years and the local sheriff claims they are runaways seeking a better life in the big city. The book follows the lives of two incredible seventeen year old boys and their families who are hired by an organization called the Ironstone Group. The families move to Southern Texas and begin to gather information. Along the way, the boys manage to free one of the captive women and take a terrifying night time canoe trip down a local river to rescue another.

I have two other books in writing. One is
Shadow Warrior. This is Young Adult Fiction about a pair of undersized, fourteen year old boys who are onboard a research vessel off the coast of Irian Jaya when modern day pirates capture the vessel. The boys hide in the ships ventilation system and eventually succeed in taking the vessel away from a band of fourteen armed pirates. That book is about two-thirds finished.

A third book is
The Cardinal Number. It also is about two-thirds finished. This one is a continuation of The Song of Mannheim, using the same main characters. This novel involves locating and identifying a group of assassins for hire who live on a large remote ranch in the Big Bend country of Southern Texas.


When you aren't writing, what other interests do you pursue?

I retired five years ago from a second, lifetime career. My days are generally devoted mostly to golf and writing. I frequently begin writing at 0300 in the morning using one of my three computers that utilizes an older word program that is not Y2K compliant. I changed the date in that sucker so it wouldn't malfunction when the new year began.

I find instrumental music to be inspirational when I write, so I listen to a stereo system while working.


What is the most important piece of advice that you would like to share with our readers, especially the younger ones?

Get a college education and don't ever stop learning. Your future life is going to revolve around continued education. Someone smarter than me said, "When you drop out of school, you drop out of life." Who ever said that, knew what he/she/or it was talking about.

The most important portion of my life came when I was in military service.

Nobody can do now, what I did then, with only a high school education. I went from being a Private First Class enlisted man, to Lt/Col in twenty-one years.

How important is education today? Just to be a pilot in today's armed forces, requires not only that you be a superb physical specimen, but you have to have a degree.

Seven years after I flew in Vietnam, I retired from service and became a stone carver. My wife and I bought a small company in Denver, where I spent the next twenty-three years designing and carving cemetery memorials. I had an artistic talent (also previously untapped) that allowed me to succeed as a creator of art objects. Those cemetery art objects will survive long after I am dead and gone.

My education remains high school level, but with a lot of personal, first hand living experience thrown in.

When you fly jet fighter planes for as long as I did, and live through the experience, you become a survivor. In looking back at my life, I can see that there were life altering portals that opened for me, rather mysteriously. I happened to be in the right places at the right times and was able to achieve some limited degree of success through extreme good fortune.

In today's world, education is everything. People who don't educate themselves, will not succeed at any level of the modern world.

I got most of my initial writing experience investigating airplane crashes in the USAF and fabricating the voluminous reports required of that effort. Because of that particular and previously unknown skill, I also became the editor of the Fifth Air Force Flight Safety Newspaper. To that point, I had absolutely no experience in writing articles for anything. I was the original square peg in a round hole.

My only salvation was that I did, however, seem to have a natural talent for determining the cause of an airplane crash. I also had a unique ability to express myself so clearly, that accident investigations almost became my primary career.

In case you weren't listening the first time; Once again, get the best education you are able to afford, and above all else, never stop learning.


If lost in the wilderness, what is the one thing that a person should know?

Knowing one thing, probably won't cut it unless you can walk a hundred yards to a farm house. Being lost requires a lot of knowledge in order to survive any extended stay in a wilderness area. Everything out there eats and drinks, and has fangs and claws and its parents taught it how to catch something to eat. You don't have any personal equipment for finding anything but a grocery store. While you are in the wilds, you become part of the local food chain. A carnivore doesn't care if you are human or a pork roast. I suspect we may even taste about the same to a cougar or a bear or a great white shark. Even with knowledge, in order to remain alive, you have to be physically fit, equipped for the climate and able to keep your wits about you. Nothing in ordinary life prepares a person for being lost and miles from help.

My dad made me recite his essentials for survival while being lost, until my mind hurt: Stay calm, don't panic, let the first wave of fear pass so you can think clearly, get warm, find food, make shelter, signal for help. He also taught me other stuff. Things like, how to build a fire with only one match; and "If you're in a dry place and you need to find water just look for an animal trail.

Walk it until another trail intersects the first and the point the trails make where they come together will point toward water."

When I went to my fist military survival school at Stead AFB, Reno, NV, I discovered that I already knew what the instructors were teaching. That knowledge had been acquired by living in the country, being naturally woodsy and having a great father. What I learned from him and the country around me, was further amplified Boy Scout involvement.

As a youngster, I also had something else going for me. I had the greatest set of parents God could ever have created. When I left home for military service, I took part of my father with me that has served me an entire lifetime. The words are simply, "What would dad say?"

For most of 67 years, I've been comparing situations to, "What would dad say?" Those simple words probably kept me out of a lot of trouble, no matter how old I was, or wherever I happened to be. My dad died a long time ago, but I still use his four words for guidance, even today.

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