I am a native Boston Suburbanite. I graduated from the then largely commuter school, Northeastern University. It was the last year the U.S. Army put most ROTC graduates immediately on active duty. I was commissioned second lieutenant at the end of that tumultuous summer of 1969. My training was to last nearly a year, first in infantry and then rotary wing flight. That experience became the backdrop for my first published novel, The Sweet War Man. It is a love story with the major conflict of a young man seeking to fly in Vietnam and his girl who opposes that main desire. I flew one tour in Southeast Asia in the early 1970s. That was a different war from the one in the mid to late 1960s. The Army was in the early process of withdrawing from Vietnam. We who served during that period faced situations different than previous American soldiers. A lot of what happened during that withdrawal period and what our Army had become is what I want to write about in the sequels to The Sweet War Man. When I returned after my tour, the Army began discarding people since the ground war in Vietnam was essentially over. I was released early from my flight committment. For the next few decades during which I married, nurtured four children and scheduled widgets in electronics manufacturing plants, my main interest remained writing fiction. With the experiences I gained from my early Army period mixed with the exciting period of the 1960s and 1970s, I have tried to take the human condition of war and its tension and married it to the unpredictable plight of love. This mixture hopefully makes for intriguing storytelling.

The Sweet War Man
I underwent the training depicted in the book, Infantry and rotary wing flight.

Sent my novel to the New York Book Expo and the London Book Fair and they made like echos in the wind. Anyone else share that experience?