All This and a Buck Gets Me a Cup of Coffee

Before I was 30, I’d been in everything from an Arctic hurricane to a rum factory in Haiti.

I’d gone to sea for a living – truly the second biggest crap game in the world. It was a place where the only chip in the game was your life and it was on the table every time you got underway.

This hard learned lesson came after graduating from Montclair State College with a BA in Biology in 1970. Which in turn led to spending 5 years, 10 months, and 19 days as a commissioned officer and a senior petty officer in the U.S. Coast Guard, mostly aboard cutters in the North Atlantic including two Arctic cruises.

Before being discharged, I was blessed by the Northern Lights, sailed through Prince Christian Sound at the tip of Greenland, a land so old that you expect to see Leif Ericcson pull out from the next fiord, seen the Green Flash as the sun set behind the Leeward Islands and watched dolphins play in a bow wave in the Gulf of Mexico.

The words “Boarding Party” and “Prize Crew” evoke images of pirates and bloody cutlasses.  Reality for me was a .45 caliber pistol and backed up by M16’s and .50 caliber machine guns.  

One time on ship if I had zigged instead of zagged, they would have buried me in two pieces. (Hell of way to lose your immorality complex.)

Between the time I was discharged in January 1977 and writing books, on the docks of Boston, my tires were flattened by an ice pick wielding competitor when I got an order for ship supplies before he did.

Following this, while helping bring a sailboat back from the Bahamas, when we made port, I had grey in my hair and the copper taste of fear in my mouth

Briefly, my job history reads like a Doctor Strange comic book from the 1960’s. I’ve sold insurance, encyclopedias, computers and commodity options. Jobs have included scuba diving, retail sales, computerized embroidery, marketing marine navigation software to mega-yachts in Florida, telemarketing, building models of everything from sailing ships to weapons systems, directing a one act play, and producing a music CD.

My first book, Bloodstained Sea: The U.S. Coast Guard in the Battle of the Atlantic 1941-1944 (International Marine, a division of McGraw-Hill, 2004) resulted from a promise I made to the Alexander Hamilton survivors’ first reunion 45 years after it was sunk on January 29, 1942 off Reykjavik, Iceland. It took me 17 years to fulfill this promise. The work received critical acclaim by reviewers and veterans. The Naval Order of the United States honored him with its 2005 Samuel Eliot Morison Award for Naval Literature.

Moving from naval to aviation history, In the Event of a Water Landing (Cutter Publishing,2010), tells for the first time the full stories of the Bermuda Sky Queen and Sovereign of the Skies rescues, the only two completely successful open ocean ditchings in Commercial Aviation history. Mike Hall, who in the Spring1943 was the first man to board an enemy warship on the high seas since the War of 1812 (U-175), battling 30-foot waves, 30 knot winds, and 45-degree temperature on October 14, 1947, rescued all 69 crew and passengers without injury. I later got Mike and the Sky Queen’s pilot Chuck Martin together for the first time. Both men where 26 years old when Chuck ditched the Sky Queen.

Forgotten Sacrifice, The Arctic Convoys in World War II (Osprey Publishing, 2012) resulted from my speaking at an Arctic Convoy in Reykjavik and befriending the Russian contingent.

I spent three weeks in St. Petersburg, Arkanglis, and Murmansk interviewing vets, including four men, who when they were 12 years old, served as Cabin Boys. It also provided me with a wealth of stories and material never available in the West (Note: I don’t speak Russian).

Other voices are those of U.S., Canadian, British, New Zealand, Icelandic, and Polish vets.

 For Enduring Freedom Enduring Voices (Osprey Publishing, 2015), I spent six weeks in Afghanistan (Note: it wasn’t the fighting season at the time). Then it was seven weeks on the road conducting interviews. This gave me the chance to use the voices of the men and women who have fought in America’s longest; sustained war entailing combat operations to tell for the first time the history of U.S. military operations in Afghanistan from 2001 through mid-2014.

Finally, Bloodstained Sands: U.S. Amphibious Operations in World War II (Osprey Publishing, 2017), tells the story of these forgotten men for the first time, tracing their operational history from Guadalcanal to Casablanca, Sicily, Normandy, Iwo Jima, Okinawa, and many others many others. I knew the Coast Guard surfmen who ran the first version of the Higgins boat at the New River exercises in Septem 1941 then put Marines ashore on Guadal Canal eleven months later. This was the first of 182 US-led amphibious operations in WWII, all of them successful.

I have published two novels:

Choke Points (Cutter Publishing, 2009): It’s a simple plan – force the withdrawal of US troops from Iraq by shutting down key US ports. No need for weapons of mass destruction, ordinary explosives easily obtained would do the job.

Turning Rifles into Silver – The Rif Wars (Cutter Publishing, 2020): On his 15th birthday Luke Cooper’s family was massacred by Mexican bandits. Turning Rifles into Silver is the tale of Luke’s adventures as he left his Texas ranch to become the 1st mate on a freighter, to being forced into fighting with the Spanish Foreign Legion, his capture by the Rifs.

Added to these are:

 Haiku of a Wayward Sailor is my first sojourn into the world of writing poetry. As strange as it may sound, I didn’t choose the haiku style, it chose me. Some so quickly I almost didn’t have time capture them.  All in all, it took less than two weeks to for the 42 pieces to be completed. To these I added 4 poems to round out the collection

Musings of a Wayward Sailor, an eclectic collection of stories, history, biographies, and thought-provoking vignettes.

I do all my own research using primary sources when available and secondary when not. In addition, I conduct my own interviews. The depth of these can only be achieved by a veteran. Simply put, none of us trust an outsider to understand what we experienced.

To the best of my knowledge, I am the only author writing historical narrative nonfiction with contextual experience (excluding riding a camel, driving a landing craft, and being shot at). This gives a level of authenticity to my work. Not bragging, simply, telling the truth based on what I have read elsewhere.

I’ve known the love of a great woman and how heart wrenching it can be to raise children.

All this and buck gets me a cup of coffee.