Meet the Author

My interest in military history began at a young age. My father, an Air Force Brigadier General, who later earned the Legion of Merit, occasionally brought home unclassified supply catalogues for World War 2-era planes. I spent hours poring over the details, imagining what it would be like to fly in them. I also had two uncles who served in the Marine Corps and told me stories of fighting in Corregidor, Philippines, or visiting Iwo Jima, not being able to take a step without walking over dead bodies. While the stories were fascinating, they instilled in me a deep sense of the brutality and terrible tragedy war can bring.  Like a scene from the Academy Award winning movie, The Best Years of Our Lives, the men in my family returned home from war and tried to pick up the pieces of their lives.

Their sacrifices were not lost on me. I enrolled in the ROTC program at Princeton. Upon graduation, I was assigned to the USS Furse, a destroyer, and became the chief intelligence officer for the ship during the Cuban Missile Crisis. We also served in the South China Sea off the coast of Vietnam. After the military, I got a law degree from Penn and took a job for a large New York law firm.

I think, my mind had already begun to weave the stories I knew from my family and those I learned through reading into a deeper understanding of the complexities of World War II. This, coupled with an interest in World War II era intelligence, a very new field at the beginning of the war, and its use of codes and code breaking to discern bombing potentials for long range bombers (B17-B24) and the RAF. Different sides had different bombing capabilities, which greatly affected the outcome of the war.

The complexities of the war combined with the human toll of these bombings planted a seed that led me to start writing a story to flesh out the contradictions. Creating characters who examined these issues allowed me to explore how war is shaped by circumstances. Ultimately, writing the story to the only conclusion I could imagine: war is futile and winning always comes at great cost.