In battle, topography is fate.

I was born in Munich, and my father was stationed in Salzburg. For the first three years of my life, I lived in Austria back when the American Army was still in Austria. I grew up subsequently in posts around the country around veterans.

The people who write official histories for the Army believe that a generation needs to pass before you can tackle the official history. It's useful to have some distance. Sources become available. Passions cool. It allows an opportunity to make some real assessments and judgments about personalities and characters.

There are a number of World War II historians I admire: Cornelius Ryan, Mark Stoler, Antony Beevor, to name a few. As for generals, there are those I admire as combat leaders and others I admire because they're great fun to write about.

There were almost 11,000 American soldiers killed in Germany in April of 1945, the last full month of the war. Thats almost as many as died in June, 1944. Right to the very end, it was absolutely brutal.

I was with the 101st Airborne Division in Iraq, really in the middle of nowhere, about 80 miles south of Baghdad. And it was almost midnight, and I got a computer message from the home office of the Washington Post asking me to call them. I did call them and was told that I'd won the Pulitzer Prize.

The American army between world wars after World War I had virtually disintegrated. It was a very small force, given largely to practicing cavalry charges on western outposts.