Last week, my wife and I watched the movie, Philomena, for the first time. Based on a true story, the film tells about an Irish woman’s  years-long search for the illegitimate son who was taken from her as a baby and sold for adoption by a Catholic nunnery. Near the en...

IWhen a younger performer suggested that country music legend George Jones and other older singers should step aside and leave the scene to the next generation, Jones responded with a new popular song called, I Don’t Need No Rocking Chair!” The song is a vigorous defen...

I have experienced three momentous “where were you when…” events in my life. The first occurred on December 7, 1941. I was only five-and-a-half at the time, but the moment when we learned that Japan had attacked Pearl Harbor is one of the most vivid memories of my chil...

When I was working with an agent on my first book, Fall Eagle One, the agent called my action/adventure novel, “a boy book.” After publication, one of my biggest surprises was the large number of women readers who really like the book. I never envisioned that a World W...

Today, we live in a world of technological marvels.  We take most of them for granted. Yet so many of the innovations we enjoy did not exist within the lifetimes of many people alive right now. A few years ago, a woman who had reached the age of 100 was asked what was...

I am a lifelong fan of newspaper comic strips. When I was a young man, the comic strip characters with whom I identified were Steve Canyon and Buzz Sawyer. For those too young to remember, Steve was an Air Force aviator, while Buzz was a Navy test pilot. Today, however...

I write historical novels about war. My first book, Fall Eagle One, is about World War II in Europe. My second novel, Hold Back the Sun, is set in the opening months of the Pacific War in the Western Pacific. Asphalt and Blood, which is at the copy edit phase, tells th...

The world in which I grew up was relatively simple. Most people lived and died in the areain which they were born. Transportation was still mainly by train, with automobiles slowly gaining ascendance. Communication between cities consisted mostly of what is now called,...

Few computers existed when my generation came of age. My first Navy duty station, the Naval Research Laboratory, had one of them for use in scientific calculations. That computer occupied an entire floor of a large laboratory building. It consisted of hundreds of inter...

Last Tuesday, July 1st, Admiral Michelle Howard became the first woman four-star admiral in the U.S. Navy, joining the first women who hold four-star rank in the Army and the Air Force. Admiral Howard is becoming the Vice Chief of Naval Operations (VCNO), the second mo...