by Jesse Klein

You’ve often heard people say, “I could write a book about that.” But how many people have the discipline and skill to actually pull it off?

One person with the right stuff is Lieutenant Glenn Rambo of the Woolwich Police Department. That’s right, one of our areas finest has had his first novel published, a huge accomplishment to accompany the joyous arrival of his first child.

You may ask how did a police officer with nearly 20 years on the force morph into a published novelist. Lieutenant Rambo recalls that crossing over well.

Early in his career, Rambo estimates he was probably just 19, he put off writing up a police report. His punishment was a brief but memorable suspension from the force.

“I avoided writing because I didn’t like it” Rambo recalls, but instead of quitting he embraced it. From that time forward he threw himself into the writing up of reports and learned not only the art of writing on the job, but how to make it enjoyable and interesting.

“I had no formal schooling as a writer” and Rambo admits his talent is purely homegrown.

As a result of hard work and dedication, this 19-year police veteran, who is still by the way only 37 years old, has been promoted numerous times. In his 12 years as a Woolwich Officer, Rambo has risen from Patrolman to Corporal to Sergeant and in 2005 became a Lieutenant.

All the while Rambo was infused by incredible experiences, including being a first responder to 9/11. He and a team from Gloucester County Emergency Rescue were at Ground Zero by 4 p.m. the afternoon of the terrorist attacks.

But the pivotal career experience that launched Rambo’s desire to write a book was when he was selected to provide security for NBC news people covering the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

Rambo arrived at the devastated New Orleans just four days after the hurricane swept through the Big Easy leaving in it’s wake a path of destruction never before witnessed in this country. A day after the Louisiana River crested, Rambo arrived in to provide security to NBC reporters and camera people stationed in New Orleans.

He spent the next eight days with them as the national news station gave up-to-the-minute coverage of the  disaster.
 

LT. GLENN RAMBO (far right) with other officers on security duty in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina ravaged the city.
 

 “It was the best worst week of my life,” Rambo recalled. “I came home with the burning desire to write it all down, but I just could not formulate the words.”

Instead he turned his passion for writing to another topic both familiar and important to him; the national crises over illegal immigration. The result: Crossing the Line his first published novel. “I used the writing as therapy and it allowed me to enter into an alternate reality.”

The issues surrounding illegal immigrants have always been on his mind. “The majority of these people are caught up in a broken system. They come here often simply as a last resort to provide much needed income to their families back home.”

Rambo also said that the Mexican government makes more profit off the taxes charged to common laborers from the money they send home than it does off oil exports. “They are taken advantage of both here and at home.”

While illegals have long been the target of prejudice and suspicion, they are now facing an even more perilous prospect. As they illegally enter the US, these vulnerable workers are increasingly becoming recruiting targets for street gangs.

The issue of gang intrusion to this area has been one of fierce interest over recent years, as gangs such as the Crypts and the Bloods are suspected of taking the convenient path down 295 to infect our local communities. The common methodology of these gangs is to prey upon the young and vulnerable, and pressure them to join, or become the target of violence themselves.

But Lieutenant Rambo’s story is one that takes him out of his home turf and allows him to use his imagination. The setting is the US/Mexican border of Yuma, Arizona. The action thriller follows a team of border volunteers “as they fight for their lives and their country as illegal immigrants come looking for little more than just freedom.”

Crossing the Line goes on sale this month at major stores nationwide including Barnes and Noble, Walden Books and B Dalton.

And you may ask how did Rambo’s book not end up on the proverbial “cutting room floor?” After finishing the first 200 pages in about six months, Rambo submitted the manuscript to Tate Publishing located in Mustang, Oklahoma. A week later he called Tate and was put through to Richard Tate, founder of Tate Publishing, who had recently finished reading Rambo’s submission, a copy still on his desk.

The subject matter of Crossing the Line had already piqued Tate’s interest and when Rambo spoke with Tate they quickly developed a sense of personal connection born out of similar life experience.

Tate, a Vietnam veteran who served as a Marine Corps Gunner, learned that Rambo was a former Marine reservist. They spoke of their life experiences and both could identify with the sense of service and duty in times of tragedy.

Based on their personal connection, and his strong initial interest in Glenn Rambo’s book Tate decided his company would publish Crossing the Line. Rambo remembers being ignited by the acceptance and that it helped him finish the concluding 100 pages of the novel.

Rambo said that his favorite part of the writing process is character development. He said that no one was more surprised than he when his characters took drastic changes in direction, and ended up in far different roles at the end of the story than where he had initially foreseen them.

This experience is similar to that described by many authors, and Rambo was pleased saying that the end result left the characters in better places than he had originally imagined.

Rambo is now hard at work on the sequel to Crossing the Line, which focuses on the US effort to recover after the full-spectrum of broken immigration policies. He related, “We (the US) helped create the problem” in a search for cheap labor, and “we must be part of the solution.”

Rambo admits that his early success as an author is not the normal experience, particularly early acceptance by a publisher. Tate only accepts four percent or 400 of the 10,000 manuscripts they receive each year.

Rambo took something he originally disliked and avoided, and learned to love it. Through discipline and skill development he has pulled off a writer’s dream. He encourages other struggling writers to do the same. “If you have the dream to write, do it, and don’t quit.”