WELCOME TO MY HOMEPAGE

Welcome. My name is Xavier Stone. I served in the United States Army. That part I am allowed to type. After that there are four years that are not in any file you can request. I know this because people have requested them. What comes back is one sheet of paper with my last name spelled wrong and nothing else on it. That sheet of paper is not a clerical error. That sheet of paper is the entire point, and it is the closest thing to a straight answer you are going to get out of me. I am not going to explain that paragraph. I have already said more than the two men who came to my house in 2011 would have liked, and they were not rude about it, but they were clear. I built this website myself. It took me about eleven months. It is not fancy. Neither am I.

The date burned into the corner of this photo is wrong. I have chosen not to correct it.

WHY PEOPLE COME TO THIS SITE

In my experience people find their way here for one of three reasons. They want the book. They want me to come speak at their event. Or they want the number.

Two of those three I can help you with.

BESTSELLER FINE. A MEMOIR OF THE YEARS THAT ARE NOT IN THE FILE LIEUTENANT XAVIER STONE

MY BOOK IS OUT. NEW! "FINE." is 412 pages. It took me nine years to write, six of which I spent deciding whether I was allowed to. My wife Sherri read it first. She read it in one sitting and then she went out to the driveway and sat in the car for a while. Nothing in it is classified. I want that on the record. Everything that would have been classified is in there as a blank space, and I trust the reader to be an adult about it. ► ORDER A SIGNED COPY ◄

9/11 WAS THE WORST DAY OF MY LIFE

I know what people think when they see that heading. I have had four e-mails about that heading and one of them was from a man in New York who was, I will say, not entirely fair about it.

I am not going to change the heading. Here is why.

On the morning of September 11th, 2001, at about twenty to seven, I laid a 1998 Honda CBR down on the interstate outside Council Bluffs at somewhere around seventy miles an hour. I came to rest about forty feet from it, on my back, in the rain. I watched it burn from there. I could not get up and I could not roll over and I could not make my voice work loud enough for anybody to hear it over the road.

When I caught my breath I stood up and walked over and looked at the rubble. I was twenty-three years old and I had been saving money for 2 years working minimum wage so I could drive it across the country I loved and now I was watching the whole thing COLLAPSE in front of me.

It was the first time in my life I had been somewhere I could not get myself out of. Everything I know about lying still and staying calm and waiting on other men, I learned in the second lane of a wet highway in Iowa, three years before anybody in a golf shirt ever came looking for me.

Somebody at the scene took this. It ran in a fire department newsletter and a fellow mailed me a print of it in 2003. Note the date in the corner. That one is correct.

By the time the third truck got there the men working on me had stopped talking. Not out of anything unkind — they had all gone quiet at once and they were all looking at the same place over my shoulder, and one of them finally said "they're saying a plane hit," and I said "a plane hit what," and one of the firefighters wiped a tear from his eye and told.

So I want to be clear about it: I know exactly what else happened that day. But a man only gets the one worst day. I do not get to trade it in for a different one on the basis of what else was in the newspaper.

AS SEEN IN

• The Kearney Hub — regional interest section, 2019 (they cut the good part)
• A podcast that has since been deleted, which I would like to note was not deleted because of me
• Page 6 of the Bass Pro Shops Spring Circular, 2019, in the background of a boat
• 60 MINUTES — segment did not air