I don’t know what came first for me, my love of American history or my love of firearms. What is certain is the two feed upon one another. For reasons not understood by me certain aspects of American history have attracted my attention more than others. For example, the American West with special emphasis on the Indian Wars era fascinated me at an early age and I’ve been an avid student of World War II for as long as I can remember.

Conversely, I’ve never paid much attention to the American Revolution and have only done cursory study of World War I. Even though I grew up in the east, thoughts of visiting Revolutionary War battlefields never entered my mind, but at age 19 I drove 2,000 miles to Montana to visit the (then named) Custer Battlefield. While in Europe in 1982, I took a train right past the World War I battle sites in order to get to Omaha and Utah Beaches in Normandy. From about age 12 my ultimate dream was to see the island of Iwo Jima and that happened in 2008.

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