About the Author:

Edward Duffy was born November 29,1947 in a Sharecropper's house outside of Augusta,Arkansas,a small delta farming town in the eastern part of the state.The population is roughly half white and half black,,but his world was almost entirely black. Whites would not be a big part in his life until the day he was drafted into the Army And sent to Vietnam. There were 15 in his family,including his mother and father,and 12 brothers and sisters,him and a cousin, Gloria Dean whose mother died in childbirth and were taken in and raised by his parents. From the age of 5 Edward worked on the farm chopping cotton as well as rounding up cattle each morning that had wandered off the night before.He soon learned the basics of tracking, and how to tell the scent of a cow from the scent of other woodland creatures or livestock. All these skills would serve him well in later years,not in the thick woods of Arkansas,but in the thick jungles of Vietnam.