Jon Flatt

Jon Flatt is an app developer, writer, and veteran living in Ireland. He deployed to Afghanistan as a nineteen-year-old National Guard soldier in 2006, spending a year training Afghan National Army forces in what would become one of the war's most volatile regions. He returned home carrying invisible wounds that would take nearly two decades to fully understand and confront.

After struggling through reintegration, PTSD, addiction, and a legal system that often failed veterans, Jon found his path forward through family, travel, and the patient work of healing. He earned his degree while serving, worked various jobs, got clean in the mountains of Colorado, and eventually built a successful app development business that allows him the freedom to live anywhere.

The search for that freedom and search for himself led him to Ireland, where he now lives with his wife Christina and their two children, working remotely while spending his days with his kids and exploring Europe. For nineteen years, Jon carried the stories of his deployment in silence—until a simple conversation about fear in a Portuguese restaurant finally cracked the dam open.

Smoke 'Em If You Got 'Em poured out in the weeks that followed—raw, unfiltered, and unflinchingly honest. It's his first book, but the story he's been carrying his entire adult life.

When he's not coding or writing, Jon can be found fly fishing the rivers of Ireland, planning family adventures, or teaching his kids that healing happens one day at a time.