Dick Conoboy is a recovering civilian federal worker and military officer who was offered and accepted an all-expense paid, one year trip to Vietnam in 1968. He is a former Army Foreign Area Specialist for Western Europe and Southeast Asia, counter-terrorism intelligence analyst and information/security manager at the Defense Department. Dick also worked as a resource manager at various government offices to include then VP Al Gore’s National Partnership for Re-inventing Government, now recognized as having been a shamefully neo-liberal “think tank”. He speaks fluent French and a passable English learned through many years of elementary school experience diagramming sentences. Dick owes his writing ability to consuming large amounts of chemical laden and fried fresh water pike and perch fished from Lake Erie in the 40s and 50s near his native Cleveland whose Cuyahoga River regularly catches on fire.