After interviewing U.S. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis on Memorial Day, two student reporters from Mercer Island High School’s Islander newspaper have experienced life on the other side of the journalism industry. They’ve been featured by more than a dozen news organizations, including NPR, CNN and BuzzFeed News, since publishing their interview in June.

By now, many Islanders know the story of the improbable interview. Rising junior Teddy Fischer obtained Mattis’ phone number after its accidental exposure by the Washington Post. He decided to contact Mattis and ask for a one-on-one to discuss foreign policy. Surprisingly, Mattis called back.

“You’re from Washington state,” Mattis, who grew up in Pullman and earned a bachelor’s degree from Central Washington University, told Fischer. “I grew up in Washington state on the other side of the mountains there on the Columbia River. I just thought I’d give you a call.”

It was a rare on-the-record interview with Mattis, a retired four-star Marine Corps general, NATO officer and Stanford professor, which covered topics ranging from the importance of history and U.S. involvement in the Middle East, to advice for graduating high school seniors.

Fischer, with the newspaper’s editor, Jane Gormley, drafted a list of questions, expecting a 10-minute interview. It ended up being 45 minutes, with a transcript of over 5,000 words that now has more than 300,000 views on the Islander’s website.

Mattis, who is somewhat of a private public individual, said that the Washington state connection was one of the reasons he responded to Fischer’s call. The other was a desire to impart knowledge on young people.

“I’ve always tried to help students because I think we owe it to you young folks to pass on what we learned going down the road so that you can make your own mistakes, not the same ones we made,” he said.

Gormley told the Mercer Island Reporter that when drafting the questions, she and Fischer decided to keep them apolitical. They said that though they used their status as high school students to secure the interview — “I don’t think he would have responded at all if we were a major news organization,” Fischer said — but the defense secretary treated them as serious journalists.

“I definitely knew when we confirmed the interview that this was going to get picked up,” Gormley said. “I tried to instill that we really need to do this right if we’re going to go for it.”

In a companion piece to the interview also published in the Islander, Gormley wrote that she “fell in love with journalism because it humanizes and highlights people that would otherwise go overlooked.”

“But, working on this story made me realize the power it has to humanize the stoic and seemingly one-dimensional political figures we see on the news everyday,” she wrote. “Journalism gives not only the power to humanize those making history, but the chance for people of any age to be the ones recording it.”

The experience is “something I’ll remember forever,” Gormley said, and she hopes it encourages more high school students to study journalism and write for their student papers. Her mission as editor was to “make journalism cool again,” she said.

Young journalists all over the country are publishing news stories — high school journalists in Kansas investigated their new principal and forced her resignation — and features — many have investigated prayer in football after the firing of a coach in Bremerton — and capturing national attention.

Gormley said that high school journalism is unique because “money isn’t an incentive to do anything.”

“We were genuinely interested in the answers to the questions we asked,” Gormley said.

Some parts of their interview gained traction in the international and domestic media, including Mattis’ comment about a “regime change” in Iran and his respect for former Secretary of State and presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, but Fischer and Gormley said they weren’t looking for clickbait and avoided asking about the current, controversial, administration.

“We have our own opinions but they don’t matter — his opinions matter,” Fischer said. “His job is to give the best advice to anyone, no matter who’s in office… This is someone who’s respected across the aisle.”

Mattis told Fischer that he speaks “the same to high schoolers, college grads, or congressmen” and has “found high schoolers to be plenty bright.”

“We’re using [being high school students] to our advantage … but at the same time, we wanted people to read the interview not considering that we’re high schoolers,” Gormley said. “It’s interesting to see how that helped us, but it also cut people off from actually reading the story initially.”

Fischer and Gormley said they enjoyed the opportunity to pose questions that usually wouldn’t be asked. Their age and the way they obtained the story helped it go viral, but they said there’s a lot of substance in the defense secretary’s comments. After transcribing the interview, Gormley said it “reads like a history lecture.”

Mattis did make a few comments on the political climate, and said people should remind themselves that those with opposing views are human beings too. He recommends “sitting down and talking with them, and after having a good strong argument, going out and having a root beer.”

“We really appreciated the advice he gave [about ideology]. It meant a lot to hear that coming from someone in his position, that has so much power like that,” Gormley said. “No matter your political leanings, I think it’s really important that he said that.”

Gormley is off to study at Washington University in St. Louis. Fischer is interested in foreign policy, and possibly military school. A career in journalism may be in his future, but he said he has to take the SAT first.

Here are some excerpts from the Islander’s interview with Mattis:

TEDDY: What subject areas do you think students should be studying in high school and beyond to better prepare themselves to be politically active and aware adults?

MATTIS: Actually, I’ve thought a lot about that question. I would tell you that no matter what you’re going to go into, whether it be business or politics or international relations or domestic politics, I don’t think you can go wrong if you maintain an avid interest in history.

TEDDY: What advice would you give to a current high schooler that is scared about what they see on the news and concerned for the future of our country?

MATTIS: Probably the most important thing is to get involved. You’ll gain courage when you get involved. You’ll gain confidence, you’ll link with people, some of whom will agree with you and some won’t, and as a result, you’ll broaden your perspective.

TEDDY: How do you believe younger generations of Americans should be working towards improving America’s political climate?

MATTIS: I think the first thing is to be very slow to characterize your fellow Americans… I don’t care for ideological people. It’s like those people just want to stop thinking.

TEDDY: You said as a nominee for secretary of defense that the military had to be more lethal, but how does diplomacy play a role in your position when dealing with foreign powers?

MATTIS: The way that you get your diplomats listened to in an imperfect world is you make certain you back them up with hard power. The reason I say that is, as much as I’d like to live in a world where people who are out to do others harm would be willing to listen to rational thought, not everyone is.

TEDDY: How can the U.S. defeat an ideology?

MATTIS: I think the most important thing on that is probably education. An economic opportunity has to be there as well. On the education, I sometimes wonder how much better the world would be if we funded for nations where they have ideology problems, where the ideologies are hateful, full of hatred. I wonder what would happen if we turned around and we helped pay for high school students, a boy and girl at each high school in that country to come to America for one year and don’t do it just once, but do it ten years in a row. Every high school whether it be in Afghanistan or Syria or wherever, would send one boy and one girl for one year to Mercer Island or to Topeka, Kansas or wherever.

TEDDY: Any advice for graduating seniors?

MATTIS: I would just tell you that there’s all sorts of people that are going to give you advice and you should listen to the people you respect, but I think if you guide yourself by putting others first, by trying to serve others, whether it be in your family, in your school, in your church or synagogue or mosque or wherever you get your spiritual strength from, you can help your state, you can help your country, if you can help the larger community in the world, you won’t be lying on a psychiatrist’s couch when you’re 45 years old wondering what you did with your life.

For more, see www.mihsislander.org/2017/06/full-transcript-james-mattis-interview.