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But after reporting to his first duty station, a laid-up warship filled with a disgruntled crew who welcomes him aboard with a brutal hazing and violent displays of intolerance and harassment, he learns the hard way that to be a real sailor, you sometimes have to put yourself into harm’s way to defend what you believe in.

However, after his only true shipmate—an eccentric nonconformist who, himself, had to overcome intolerance and harassment—is discharged from the navy, Boot Camp is left on his own to face the discrimination and dangers that await him.

Growing up on the shores of Ohio’s Lake Erie in a town called Ashtabula, which is an Algonquian word meaning river of many fish, Kurt was a Dolphin in elementary school, a Raider in junior high school, and a Mariner in high school (he even managed to work at a marina part time during his senior year). He enlisted in the navy immediately after graduating from high school and has considered himself a sailor ever since.

While in the navy, Kurt earned a bachelor degree in English from the University of Maryland, a Master of Human Relations degree from the University of Oklahoma, and a multitude of mostly obscure and forgotten technical and management training certifications. However, in 1998, Kurt took a hiatus from his regular duties as a navy cryptologic telecommunications specialist to attend the U. S. military’s Defense Equal Opportunity Management Institute. The institute may be little known to most, but it is internationally renowned to those in the human relations field. In addition to service members and civilians from all branches of the U. S. military, Kurt’s eclectic class included soldiers and civilians from the South African army. It was a unique educational experience for him, to say the least.

Upon graduating from DEOMI, Kurt was certified as a Navy Equal Opportunity Adviser and was assigned the responsibilities of providing diversity management training and equal opportunity consultation and assistance to sailors throughout the navy’s Western Pacific area of operations. His assignment as an EOA was one of the most challenging and rewarding assignments of his navy career and served as an impetus for the writing of THE SEA TRIALS OF AN UNFORTUNATE SAILOR, as well as several of the poems found in POEMS FROM THE RIVER.

A husband and father of three, Kurt lives comfortably within the two cultures of the United States and Japan. He has been assigned to duty stations in Washington DC, Yokohama, Pearl Harbor, Norfolk, Okinawa, Yokosuka, and Fort Meade, and he has served on the USS Ingersoll, USS Comte de Grasse, USS Conolly, USS Theodore Roosevelt, and USS Shreveport. He now lives in southern Pennsylvania in a house on top of hill. When not reading, writing, or moving from chair to chair, he often wanders down to the bottom of the hill to walk along the countryside’s many rushing creeks and silent still ponds.