Texas Flood: 4 July 2025
Power, Money, Politics, History, Bureaucracy, and Tragedy
David Richardson was the senior political appointee at FEMA when the Guadalupe River rose 26 feet in 45 minutes on the morning of 4 July 2025. He had been sent to the agency only weeks earlier — to nurse it through hurricane season, then shrink it or shut it down.
This is his firsthand account of that night and what followed: the stalled Gulf storm over parched Hill Country limestone, the camps and towns in the floodplain, the search-and-rescue teams he cleared when headquarters would not, and the deeper argument that the real cause was not only weather, but building where the water always comes.
There is no invented plot. “History has no plot,” he writes. The theme is leadership under friction — go to the point of failure, or get out of the way.
~200 pages
Publication date: September 15, 2026.
War Story
A novel · Foreword by Douglas Dechert
“They were brothers—brothers from the old army.”
Major Clay Steerforth, USMC, and Lieutenant Colonel Abdul Mujeed of the Iraqi Defense Forces gamble their lives on an ideal. Separated by culture, they meet in Ramadi and Fallujah and become, against the odds, friends. Combat, chance, and the promise of love bind them. Death is already in the work.
Drawn from Richardson’s years as a Marine adviser in Anbar — and from the other war, the one at home in Washington, teaching and painting — War Story is a first novel about why men keep going back to the fight.
Permuted Press · 400 pages
Publication date: April 16, 2019
ISBN 978-1-68261-871-4