Ronald V Rockwell

I was born in 1938 and raised on a Montana farm. We were not rich nor did we consider ourselves poor, but rather of modest means. This was also the case with my peers, nearly all anglo-saxon farm kids, an exception being my friend Roger Carrier who described himself as 5/8 Cree-Chippewa Indian and French Canadian. We were all quite familiar with the term, “A Hard Day’s Work.” There was plenty of work to go around on the farms and ranches in the Sun River Valley. By the time we graduated from high school adult behavior was expected of us, if not a lot sooner. The next step for most of us, the young men that is, was military service. Some of us, perhaps 30%, went on to college, but whether attending college or not, nobody shirked, and everybody worked.

At the time of this writing, I am eighty-five years old. My life has been one of adventure. This is particularly true of my experiences in the 1960s spending four years as a foreign student in Germany, and four seasons of summer employment as a Smokejumper for the US Forest Service in Montana and, later, the Bureau of Land Management in Alaska. I then spent one year from 1967 to 1968 as a Civilian Advisor working with ten US Army officers and enlisted men in a remote district of South Vietnam where there was all the danger anyone could wish for. Returning to my family in the USA, I spent the next five years teaching in a public school and as a college instructor of German. Seeking a career with an international bent, I was accepted by the DEA for Special Agent training. This led to a twenty-year career in another adventurous job as a Special Agent and Supervisory Special Agent serving at home and abroad.

My retirement has been a life of summers in Montana and winters in Mexico up to the death of my first wife of forty years, Gabriele, a lovely German lady, She passed away in 2007. I eventually traveled to the Philippines where I met another lovely lady, my wife, Meriam. Commencing in 2009, I began writing books as a hobby. I prefer to write documented military histories but I have written some fiction. My histories are, “The US Army in Frontier Montana,” “Operation Barbarossa: Letters Home,” and, “Jim Bridger: Opening the West, Vols I & II.” I just recently published a two volume military history entitled, "Hitler at War."

My academic life has been limited to earning a Masters in German Literature with plenty of extra credits in History and Political Science, many of them earned at the universities of Heidelberg and Mainz in Germany. Obviously, my entire life has not been spent as an academic. I prefer to refer to myself as a non-academic historian or better said, independent historian. My life's experiences have left me very much connected to the "real world" and many of its 20th century events.

Ronald V Rockwell

2024