The country was back on its feet by 1950, but all eyes were now on the Soviet Union and the expanding Cold War. The UK joined the US in the Korean War that year, fighting the Chinese and the Soviet Union in what we all believed was a dress rehearsal for the next global war. It ended in a stalemate, and the country was split in two.

The US and Russia began mass-producing nuclear weapons, amassing thousands—enough to alter the Earth permanently, making it uninhabitable. Other nations developed their own nuclear weapons: the UK, France, Israel, India, China, and Pakistan.

Despite the whole world going crazy, life settled down for me at home. My teenage years were a sharp contrast to the turbulent first twelve years of my life. Mother and Father, as I had come to refer to Sarah and Robert, were loving to me, fair but firm, and never were there two parents who cared for a child more. They didn’t dote on me, but they gave me every scrap of spare time and energy they had. Mother was adamant about my keeping up with chores and my schoolwork. Father always had a project he wanted us to do—usually science-related. I knew early on that he imagined me following in his footsteps. To him, science was the noblest endeavor, and physics towered above all other sciences.

But like every child becoming an adult, I learned the limits of my abilities. Where science and math were concerned, those boundaries didn’t extend nearly far enough. I would never be a great scientist, or even a bad one. My mind just wasn’t wired that way. I did excel at languages, however. Perhaps it was a gift from my biological mother. Picking up a foreign tongue was a piece of cake for me. And I loved history—military history in particular. I read everything I could about the Third Infantry, the division in which my biological father had served and died. I devoured histories of Germany and the British Empire.

University came and went, and my only notable accomplishments occurred in the boxing ring. I had no clue what I wanted to do with my life. Like so many others with the same problem, I joined the army. It seemed a noble pursuit and a good place to get my bearings and maybe see a little of the world.