School was very strange. The teachers finally discovered what was wrong when I was in the third grade, and tried to move me ahead three levels into the sixth grade. My parents said no.
By and large I found school boring. Most of the time I could do a solid B, B+, perhaps an A, without studying. And since I was an athlete, that was considered sterling! Shot and discus, track and field, American football, basketball, baseball—I was good at everything.
As for writing, I thought again about doing that, at 10 and 16 and 20. I said, ‘It would be a useless exercise. What am I supposed to write about? I haven’t seen enough of life, so anything I write is going to be empty.’
I went to university and discovered that trying to carry a very heavy load in academic subjects and play football, I needed to know how to study. And that was something I had never learned how to do, so I floundered quite badly. At the end of a year at university I went into the army and went to Vietnam.
I’ve always been a military history buff. But when I was in Vietnam I wasn’t thinking history or strategy: I was thinking staying alive, and occasionally taking an R&R to Australia where I’d go to the beach and drink a lot of beer and try to meet a schoolteacher on vacation.
I sort of knew in a way what to expect because military service has always been a family tradition. All my brothers, my father and my uncles, my grandfather and my great uncles went into the military—’some enlisted, most as officers, some made careers, some did not. But you did your basic service and if there was any shooting going on, you went where the guns were.
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