About the Author

My first tour out of the Naval Academy in the mid-fifties was an unbelievably great tour on the destroyer Buck steaming throughout the Pacific on two deployments.  Then it was off to Navy flight training and a succession of eight fighter squadrons ashore and onboard carriers flying mostly the venerable Phantom jet.  Interspersed were two years in the Stanford MBA program, CNO aide duty, command of a large supply ship and the carrier Forrestal and finally, as the head guy for Navy flight training.  Early on, I was lucky to have joined up with my long-time wife Carolyn who stuck by me in good times and tough and raised two wonderful girls. 

After retiring from the Navy in the mid-eighties, I lucked out again and served as president of two publicly owned maritime cruise ship companies, American Cruise Lines and Europa Cruise Lines, and returned to the sea as second mate on the SS Constitution and then onto a series of mini-adventures sailing as a part-time master of civilian ocean-going research ships listening for Soviet subs far north in the Barents Sea and drug interdiction in the Pacific off Colombia.  For the past thirty-six years, we have lived in the Navy town of Pensacola where most of my time is spent writing, traveling, seeing four grandsons and two daughters in Atlanta, playing racquetball, critiquing the Blues and offering gratuitous missives to anyone willing to listen.