This book was written in response to two questions:

What was it like, during the post-World War II period of the expansion of American power, to spend most of one's early childhood in Paris, France, Morocco, and Germany, and one's preteens and teens in the Philippines and Japan?

And then, after seven formative years in East and Southeast Asia, what was it like to experience the Vietnam War in the same region?

A former philosophy professor, George Lowell Tollefson is the author of Unbridled Democracy and What Is War?