Something about your instructor:  I am an Emeritus Professor of Liberal Studies and a Lecturer in History at Skidmore College with degrees in history and library/ information science from Ohio University and from The University of Michigan, where I received my Ph.D. in 1975. Most of my career in higher education was spent directing academic libraries at Skidmore and elsewhere while teaching on a part-time basis.  In the mid-1990s I stepped aside from library administration and returned to the classroom full time. From then until my retirement in 2002, I taught Liberal Studies and special topics courses in military history for Skidmore, both on campus and in the London program.

My interest in things military probably began during WWII, when my older brother served as a Bombardier on a B-17 Flying Fortress, flying out of a base in Suffolk, England. In the late 1950s I enlisted in the USAF. The young man in the picture below is your instructor, shown during Air Force technical school training at Lowry Field, Colorado, in 1960.

Subsequently, I served as a Photographic Equipment Repairman in the Strategic Air Command, working on B-52 bombers, and in this and a variety of other specialties for the Ohio Air National Guard in the mid-1960s, working primarily on F-100 fighters.  I was commissioned as a Lieutenant in 1967 and, recalled to active duty in 1968 at the height of the Vietnam War, I interrupted graduate school long enough to serve a second tour of active duty as an intelligence officer for a Tactical Air Command fighter unit in the Republic of South Korea. Although this service in the 1960s in the USAF qualifies me as a "Vietnam era veteran," please note that I never set foot in Southeast Asia.  It did much, however, to stimulate my interest in military history generally and in the Vietnam War specifically.