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I'd read up on the history of our country and I'd become fascinated with the story of the Alamo. To me it represented the fight for freedom, not just in America, but in all countries.

I never stopped thinking about the Alamo from that day to this. I'm a huge collector of memorabilia. I've got Davy Crockett's bullet pouch. I've got Colonel Travis's belt.

I have 60 years of reading to draw upon: naval memoirs, dispatches, the Naval Chronicles, family letters.

I'm a 10th-generation Texan. My ancestor - Andrew Kent - fought at the Alamo.

I have been writing for 50 years and readers still read my first book from when I was in the Marine Corps.

When I was 8 years old, I made my own encyclopedia of American biography - Johnny Appleseed, Jim Bowie, Davy Crockett, Daniel Boone, Charles Lindbergh, my pantheon of favorite heroes. Then I would write my own things and sew them together and try to make my own book.

As an author of narrative history, I read a lot of history books.

I had the notion that I wanted to write the great dirty American novel, so I went to Roanoke College on the GI Bill.

I always seem to get inspiration and renewed vitality by contact with this great novel land of yours which sticks up out of the Atlantic.

I grew up in Los Alamos, New Mexico, which is my hometown. In Los Alamos is, for people who don't know, a nuclear lab that built the atomic bomb. The only reason the town exists is to make nuclear weapons and weapons of mass destruction, and that's still happening there.