My Experience Living and Editing The Little Orangemen

There was a time in Gaston County when young teenage boys from poor mill villages gathered on street corners after school. There we waited for a truck or a van or Coach Bennie Cunningham’s big station wagon to pick us up for football practice. We jostled and joked about our athletic skills, sometimes in the…Read More

The Origins of An Act of War

As an aging Vietnam veteran and writer I sometimes reflect on the war and my involvement in it. I was young, just twenty years old. I turned twenty-one on October 14, 1968 as my unit slogged through the jungle near the Cambodian border. It was on a trail leading into Vietnam from Cambodia that we…Read More

Why I Wrote Confessions of a Preacher’s Kid

My father’s first church was Riverside Baptist in Cramerton, North Carolina. The parsonage, a small mill house, was less than fifty yards from the South Fork River. Growing up in Cramerton was a delightful experience. As a child, on summer days, I usually left home after breakfast, returned for a quick lunch, and then left…Read More

The Inspiration for A Breach of Faith

The Vietnam Memorial in Washington, DC was dedicated in 1980. The memorial was controversial at the time. Rather than statues of soldiers or proclamations of victory, it is a long granite wall with the names of those killed in the ten years of battle. My time in Vietnam was 1968 to 1969, the bloodiest years…Read More