This can't help but be a bit biographical, but I'm going to avoid some of the obvious.

I'm a little bit more than a Vietnam Combat vet (E Recon 1/7th, 1stAirCavDiv). I was a grunt in a very small but among us a well storied tiny combat unit. I am also as a result and directly related to it a 30 year veteran of what usually called the VA but is now formally named the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs.

I worked my way up from being a guy who answered veterans questions to being a middle manager in Computer Networks and User support.

That's related to being a writer believe it or not because midway through my first try at writing a novel a friend made available a personal computer that was so primitive that it was initially sold without an operating system. By the time I got a used one the CPM operating system had been bolted on with a floppy disk drive. I finished that first attempt at writing a novel on that machine, but had so many problems with it that I learned quite a bit about computer hardware and software.

As a result when PC's first came to the Veterans Benefits Administration's Regional Office I had accumulated enough skill that I became a Supervisor who helped to distribute the first PC's and then VBA's first network.

This history gave me a good deal of expertise in

Soldiering.

Protesting

VA history

VA disability claims and processes

Computer networks and resources\

Protests against the Vietnam war (I was an active participant before I was drafted and I was stationed at Ft. Ord during a problematic March by students nationwide. This is the background for the novel I am writing now, Prelude) The scars of war, both mine personal, and those the many veterans I have served over the years.

I am also enough older than so many of you that I may simply have cultural experiences that you have not. Just as an example I was a subscriber to Ms. Magazine in the year that it was first issued, and honored as such in a list the magazine published at it's end. I was in college from the Fall of 1964, and though interrupted by my war time service for a year and half remained pretty much on the same campus until 1973 pursuing a Master's degree in Literature (that I never finished).

My wife and I met and dated in college but married other people before joining our lives together again after the death of her first husband and my divorce. I wouldn't usually mention that but she was Germany where her first husband was assigned, while I was a student in California during 1968 and much of 1969. We marvel that we both know the history, but the assassinations and attempts of those years, Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King prominent among them were of but little moment to her experience while I experienced them as a deep cultural despair.

Not to worry. There are no tests. If you want to know anything about these areas expertise ask away... And if you ask, in the question section, and I think I can tell you something worth while, I will respond.