So you have to write a full bio, huh? And you’re wondering how to detail your life without being boring? Hmm… your life really IS kind of bor… OK, how about if you just put in the minimum details, for curiosity’s sake, and then put in the inflection points where your life changed completely, or maybe had only a slight change of direction that later led to… something not quite so boring? Well, that’s better than nothing. So go ahead pal, switch “person” and get on with it.

 I was born and raised in southern lower Michigan, mostly in the town of Buchanan. I went to an elementary school near our farm, and then to high school in town. My Dad had been a football star there and later at Michigan State, so I went out for J.V. football. I too had a glorious career. That is, I made some terrific plays. OK, I had one good play. It was a night game against St. Joe. I was on the defensive line, and through the whole game I was slamming into the guy across the line, and he was slamming into me. But in one play he forgot to block me, and I suddenly found myself alone in the other team’s backfield, just me and their quarterback. We were both confused by this whole turn of events, but eventually I thought I might as well tackle him, so I did - not very well, but it worked. A sack! Take that, Von Miller! The inflection point: I finally realized that sports were not my forte.

I later went to college at Michigan State, where I got a parttime job in the cafeteria busing tables. I think I was good at it, especially the way I could analyze situations and come up with creative solutions. For example: if the cafeteria is busy and you need to clear a table, but the people there are just sitting around talking, you don’t need to ask them to leave. Just take away the dirty dishes and they’ll go. And apparently, people in the cafeteria business don’t need analytical busboys; they need fast and efficient ones. So, they put me in the back, washing pots and pans. It was a formal occupation. You had to wear a heavy rubber apron and heavy rubber gloves, and there was a pipe that jetted steam into the water to heat it up. One day a guy came by and called us “pearl divers”. I didn’t know if he was joking, but, eager to learn, asked if “pearl diving” was a common term for it. He (and this will be an inflection point later) said that it was.

One Friday night I went to a mixer, I asked a girl to dance, we kept dancing, we fell in love, we got married, and today we still are. Sometimes I tell her that “our song” is Anne Murray’s “Could I Have This Dance for the Rest of My Life”, but I don’t know if she believes me.

The School of Engineering had something new in those days: a computer of its own. It was called, I think, MIchigan STate Integrator and Calculator, or MISTIC for short. I got a tour inside it one day. It was a room entirely filled with racks of vacuum tubes, and today the phone in your pocket is probably a thousand times more powerful than MISTIC. I didn’t have any classes with it, since I was an English major. But one day a guy in my dorm, who must have been learning Fortran, said that he’d just written a Do Loop, in which you told the computer to do the same thing over and over until it got the right answer, and I thought: wouldn’t it be great to write a Do Loop of my own?

Then there was that pesky war in Vietnam. I kept thinking they would realize how pointless it was and end it. They didn’t. I even wangled a year of grad school at the University of Michigan, to give them more time to finish up over there. They didn’t. Finally, I got my draft notice. So, I went down to the Ann Arbor recruiting office to get out of the draft by enlisting for Officer Candidate School. Was this such an important inflection point that I remember small details about it? I’m not sure, but thanks for all your help, Staff Sergeant Ronald L. Canada – wherever you are.

Well, maybe it WAS important to enlist for a commission. Because I was a second lieutenant, because I was a platoon leader in Vietnam, and because I could analyze situations and come up with creative solutions, I saved hundreds of lives. OK, maybe it was only a couple of lives, including mine. And maybe I only avoided the possibility of losing lives…

One day we were setting up a company perimeter west of Chu Lai. We had an artillery forward observer team with us, consisting of a lieutenant and a sergeant. I think the lieutenant was busy talking to somebody while the sergeant was on the radio, zeroing in the defensive artillery fires for the night. I was watching the sergeant, noting what he said and where the cannon shells were falling, and suddenly realized what was going on. I rushed over to the lieutenant and said, “Your sergeant is zeroing in on the gun-target line!” And he said, “No!” And we both went over to the sergeant, who thought that zeroing on the gun-target line was the way you’re supposed to do it.

And while that was an quite an interesting moment in my overseas tour, maybe I need to explain a little…

You see, the artillery branch of the army are cool guys, and they realized early on that in the heat of battle their observers might not have time to think about angles and trajectories and geometry and stuff. They might just see enemies coming closer on the right, so they’d get on the radio and yell, “Right one hundred! Drop one hundred!” And that would be ‘right’ and ‘drop’ from the observer’s point of view, or the “observer-target line” – OTL - in technical terms. So, the artillery would put that OTL information into their computer and turn the dial and come up with those angles and elevations on the gun-target line – GTL - and it would all work out right. BUT, if your observer tried to make adjustments on the GTL and the guns corrected for the OTL, there are certain situations where the shells could drop right onto your own head. Ouch!

I got out of the army and went about applying for jobs with my military experience and my English degree. So, I wrote a resume and included a list of jobs I’d had, casually adding “pearl diver” - because everybody knows what that is, right? As a result, I got an interview with Michael Moore at TRW, who wanted to know about my experience diving for pearls. I must have done well with the rest of the interview, though, because he hired me as a technical writer. That was good, and later they had me using a spreadsheet to make monthly reports, except that the “spreadsheet” was a large book whose paper pages had rows and columns, and the report was something I had to type on the IBM Selectric typewriter. I’m terrible at typing, so one day I thought that if I put the information into a computer instead, then I could write a program telling the computer how to do the report. I did. It worked. And that was so much fun that I went back to school, studied Computer Information, and changed careers.

A few years ago, my youngest son was getting married, and while the ladies were out shopping for a dress, he took me to the Boeing Museum of Flight. They had some neat technology there, like the SR 71 Black Bird and the Concorde. But over in one corner was a lowly Huey helicopter like the ones we had in Vietnam. I took him over next to it and told him a funny story about the first time I rode a Huey out to the field. As a sort of initiation, the helicopter crew didn’t put me in a seat. Instead, they had me sit on the floor on top of some loose duffel bags. And then they took off, backing up slightly and then shooting forward in a steep bank, so that when I looked out the door I was looking straight down at the ground. It was quite funny, even though I didn’t fully appreciate it at the time…

Anyway, I took my son over there and was telling him that story, when suddenly a bunch of other Vietnam vets materialized around us and wanted to tell THEIR war stories. So, I guess that’s the way we are. War is hell and it’s terrible, but if you live through it without too much trauma, afterward, in later years, you might like to tell stories about it. I know I do. I put war stories in all my novels. (Ok, my one novel.) You might not recognize them as war stories, but they’re in there. Trust me…