http://arlingtoncemetery.net/bpbertrand.htm
The author served. That’s about all I know. He has a flare for dramatic writing, to be sure.
Ray Starmann was born in Chicago, Illinois on June 28, 1965, and grew up in Lake Forest, Illinois. Ray traces his original interest in writing to the CBS Radio Mystery Theater, which played nightly during the 1970's. The one hour drama series focused on crime, suspense, thriller and horror episodes. Ray served as an army intelligence officer for eight years. He was serving in Germany when the Berlin Wall fell and was an eyewitness to that event and the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe. In 1990-1991, Ray served in the Gulf War with the famed 7th Cavalry. Ray worked for Greystone Television as a treatment writer, actor, researcher and associate producer. In 2008, Ray and Sean King teamed up to write "Generation Gap", a Hallmark original movie starring Ed Asner and Rue McClanahan.
I’m not going to denigrate anyone’s time in uniform. Suffice it to say that not everyone faces traumatic circumstances in the military.
Thank you for your service.
Having know several intel guys during the end of the 60s, it was not a fun job. Extremely stressful at times, like my own. One intel guy took me on a tour one evening of East Germany along the border. We were having a good time, drinking beer etc.
Then his radio called him to a Russian site where something had happened. I went along because he said it was a intercept site, so being in the business myself I was curious as to how the Russians did their work. (There was a mutual exchange agreement in place that allowed US intel people to inspect Russian sites as they could do ours).
When we got there, there was all sorts of Russian vehicles including a few tanks and APCs. As we walked up to the site where whatever had happened, we passed some really nasty looking, heavily armed, blood-stained troops stinking of cordite (Spetsnaz, it turned out). It got really bad fast. I still cannot shake what I saw. All the intercept guys were shot multiple times (to the point of separating body parts) for the ‘crime’ of listening to Western music ...
There was a constant drum beats of other events, working 4 km from several Russian Mechanized Armies on full alert, as we were. We had no guns, no ammo. Facing several 100k of troops and 35,000 tanks, whose first rest stop after passing the Fulda Gap was 60 km behind us. Nukes or not. 72 hours to the English Channel.
So of course, one Christmas Eve we called up one Russian net on a ‘secure’ channel and wished them Merry Christmas in Russian. They were not pleased.