Sam Adams was a graduate of Harvard College and spent ten years as an analyst for the CIA. He was completing this memoir when he died of a heart attack in 1988.
 
Col. David Hackworth was the author of About Face and the youngest full Colonel in the US Army when he resigned in protest over the Vietnam War.
 
Dr. John Prados is a senior research fellow at the National Security Archive, where he also directs the Archive's Iraq Documentation Project and its Vietnam Project. His books Vietnam: The History of an Unwinnable War, 1945-1975, Keepers of the Keys and Combined Fleet Decoded were each nominated for the Pulitzer Prize.