NOTICE

MANUAL OF THE INDEPENDENT COUNTERTERRORIST
xvii
be allowed and it turned out to be a fiasco. We
learned. I learned.
My interest in things military has existed
for the whole of my life. I remember, for example,
at five-years-old reading books on B-52 bombers
in the adult section of the Detroit Public Library.
No, I couldn’t understand all of the words, but the
photographs inspired me to learn what they
meant. Later, in elementary school, I remember
watching documentaries on the Vietnam War
which was ongoing at the time and television news
coverage of our troops returning home from the
theatre. My father had served as a medic in the
Army Air Corps in the States during the Second
World War so I knew what it was that I was
watching.
I enlisted within the Navy at seventeen but
about time I showed up for my oath and physical, I
was a week-old adult. Regardless of whether I was
seventeen or eighteen, I had to wait four months
before I endured that breathtakingly challenging
task known as Boot Camp. My service was largely
uneventful and my role within it decidedly bland.
It was still the Cold War and Russians were all
over the place whenever we sailed out into the
Pacific. I was stationed at Pearl Harbor and the
reminders of major war were all around us. So,
too, when we deployed to Japan where I was near
the dry docks that built the ships that struck at
Pearl and the devastation we unleashed in
response at Nagasaki. Still, I wanted to have an
impact on defending the land of my birth.