Episode Details

Ray Deptula, a retired Navy helicopter pilot and political-military officer, joins us to talk about his two-book historical saga Those Damn Yankees: A Dog Before a Soldier and Can't Find My Way Home.

Ray tells the American Revolution from the other side. His hero Jack is a desperate young Englishman who joins the British Army and lands in Boston in 1774, just as things are about to blow. We get into why Ray sees the Revolution as Britain's Vietnam, a war they fumbled away through bad strategy and worse politics, what his time at the US Naval War College taught him about how wars really get decided, and the friendship at the heart of the second book between Jack, who can't read, and Custis, an enslaved man who can. Plus the young men who go to war out of desperation in every era, the colonists' fight to be treated as Englishmen, and what that history can teach us today.

Find Ray's books at raydeptulaauthor.com and on Amazon.