Our Path to Military History

We've always liked military history.

We suppose we started leaning it at an early age by watching war movies on NY area channels 5, 9 and 11 which showed them every weekend.

We learned more military history by getting into tabletop war games.

By the time we were starting to flunk out of college about 1995 we expressed an interest in studying the subject for real.

In response our grandfather got us these three books:

Those are JFC Fuller's classic Military History of the Western World Vols I, II &III. They served as a decent enough introduction during the summer of 1995.

Now, precipitously we interned at the US Senate that summer and discovered Borders Books and Music. Hard as it is to believe, 40 minutes north of  New York City the only book stores we had were B Daulton and Walden Books at the Jefferson Valley Mall.

But at Borders, well, we'd never seen so many military history books in our life. The MH section must have had a thousand titles.

From then on we were hooked and spent the next several years reading up on World War Two, the wars of the British Empire, the Napoleonic Wars, etc. Napoleon was particularly fun as being a Yank, we know nothing of the 25 year struggle with France.

Our biggest problem back then was time. When to find time to read the dozens of books we wanted to read? Eventually we learned to turn off the TV and put down the video game controller. But at first we simply read at bed time, as we always had.

As we dropped out of college and had trouble finding work we had more time on our hands, unfortunately. So we read a lot of military history.

A few years later military history would change out life.