Time passes slowly in a sniper hide as you lie totally silent, sometimes for days, except for a periodic whispered radio check, and are bedeviled by bugs, hunger, thirst, and weather. While your partner is on watch, your thoughts can drift, and I spent many idle hours thinking about the odd track that brought me to whatever hole in the ground I was occupying at the moment. A rock and baseball had a lot to do with it.

I was born on January 12, 1966, into a 100 percent Irish family. Home was a three-story, six-bedroom colonial house located in a neighborhood of similar homes in a nice area of Waltham, Massachusetts, about twenty miles from downtown Boston. I lived there from the time I came home from the hospital until I left to join the Marines nineteen years later.

I had four sisters, all of whom were older than I, and every time one of them would marry and move out, I would be bumped up to a larger bedroom. Mom had her hands full taking care of us.

One thing that set our house apart was that it would change colors periodically, for my father was a painting contractor. I remember waiting on the glassed-in porch for him to come home (at the time, the house was yellow, with brown trim) and running outside when his green work truck came into the driveway, covered with ladders, filled with buckets and brushes, and smelling of paint and turpentine. His work clothes were a splatter of small rainbows.

My parents were a perfect fit among the other couples who had moved into the changing neighborhood, all of them young blue-collar types who had worked hard in their early years of marriage, had families, and were now taking newer, bolder steps into the world, everyone intent on taking life to the next level. One neighbor bought a heating oil business, and a plumber set up his own shop, but my dad took a different path.