After graduating from PHS in 1958, I went to Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine.  My academic career was mediocre, but I enjoyed the school and the friends I made there.  I enrolled in ROTC on a whim and upon graduating in 1962 was commissioned as a 2d LT in the U.S. Army Infantry.  I entered active duty in November of 1962 after spending the summer knocking slag off welds at Plainville Electrical Products, where my father was also employed; not knocking slag off of welds I might add. 

I had no intention of staying in the service for a career when I went in, but my first assignment was to the Infantry School at Ft. Benning, Georgia where I began my training in the  Infantry Officer's Basic Course.  After graduating, I volunteered for paratrooper school at Ft. Benning, completed that training and then volunteered for Ranger School.  I received my Ranger Tab in April of 1963 and headed for the DMZ in Korea.  I served there as a platoon leader for a year.  Having volunteered for Special Forces when I was in Korea, I was assigned to the Special Warfare Center at Ft. Bragg, North Carolina in April of 1964. There I trained to become qualified as a Special Forces officer and went almost immediately to Vietnam.  In country, I commanded a four-man team that was assigned a special mission in the Central Highlands, the details of which remain murky, but basically we worked with the mountain tribes fighting the Viet Cong.  The mission lasted about three months.  I was then
assigned as the Executive officer of a Special Forces "A" Team in the foothills of the Central Highlands.  We opened up an area that had been under Viet Cong control for six years.  Our biggest worry  was the family of brown kraits living in the team house we built as they are deadly poisonous snakes.  When in camp, we tucked our mosquito nets beneath our mattresses very tightly so they wouldn't share our bunks on the colder nights.

I returned to the States in January of 1965 and was assigned as a general's aide de camp at Ft. Jackson, South Carolina.  After doing that for a little over a year, I commanded a training company which was training infantry soldiers how to fight in Vietnam.  I was married during this time to Janet..., a southerner.  Left there in 1967 for another Army School at Ft. Benning, Georgia where my first child, a son, Devlin, was born.  And then back to Vietnam.  This time I was in the Mekong Delta as a District Senior Advisor.  I advised a Vietnamese Major on military and civilian operations.  I was promoted to Major during this tour.  Being an advisor to the Vietnamese on both of my tours, I learned to love the people and the culture, a love that remains as strong today as it was 33 years ago.

Upon returning from Vietnam, I was selected by the Army to attend graduate school to obtain an MA in English in preparation for a tour as an instructor at the United States Military Academy, West Point.  I went to UMass, Amherst, received my MA in 1971 and taught at West Point for three years.  My second child, a daughter, Shannon, was born there in November 1971.  My wife and I split in 1973, but I retained custody of the children.  Left West Point in 1974 and was assigned to be a student at Command and General Staff College in Ft. Leavenworth, Kansas.  Traveling across country in an old VW hatchback as the only adult with two young children was an experience I will not ever forget.  After a year there I was assigned as a plans and operations officer at Ft. Devens Mass.  There I was married again in 1976 to Surah..., originally from ...Mass.  I think she liked my kids, but we remain married to this day.  My tour at Devens was cut short as I was asked to return to West Point to teach again and run the Fine Arts program.  We stayed there for three years and I was promoted to Lieutenant Colonel.  The last assignment in my 20-year Army career was as an Inspector General in Germany.  My last child, Rose was born there in the small German town of Kircheimbolanden in the Pfalz region.  I retired from the Army after 20 years, and we all returned to the states in 1982 and moved to ...Maine.

One last item, I returned to Vietnam in 1995 to visit all the places I was assigned and got to talk to some of the Viet Cong soldiers I fought against.  It was a wonderful experience and the old soldiers told me that they did not hate Americans as I thought they must after all the damage we did.  They told me that we had all lived a page of history together and that horrible things happened to and were done by both sides, but now it was time to turn the page and let bygones be bygones, which was, of course, exactly what I needed to hear.