Thank you for buying one of my books. I appreciate that very much.

Regarding your questions about reading first-person accounts of Missouri guerrilla warfare, Kirby Ross' and Don Johnson's suggestions are first rate. If you will look in the back of the book you just bought on pages 236 and 237-8 in my bibliography of 1862 guerrilla accounts, you will find a list of unit histories and memoirs of participants for 1862, several of which Kirby also listed. As Kirby suggested, periodicals also contain valuable first-person accounts, and in this same location of the bibliography you will find a list of periodical articles on this topic for 1862. You will notice that many of these may be found in old issues of the "Missouri Historical Review" and the website where you may find these online is http://www.archive.org/stream/missourihist03to04missuroft/missourihist03to04missuoft_dijbvu.txt if I got that all correct. If I goofed up this url, look it up in Google.com or a similar top-notch search engine. I have provided such sections in the bibliography section of the several volumes of "Guerrilla Warfare in Civil War Missouri" keyed to the year covered by that volume.

1864? Yes, I have been flailing away at the manuscript for 1864 and 1865 (both in the same big volume) over the last three years and I am currently working on Chapter 24. It looks like I have about nine more chapters to go. so I really have to get on the ball. I plan to release the manuscript to the publisher next year and hopefully it will reach the market about a year from now, if all goes well.

You asked if I subscribed to another discussion board. I watch or lurk about the Rootsweb version about the Missouri Civil War, but it has pretty much been defunct over the last two or three years. There used to be a third forum keyed to Missouri Civil War more in the genealogy slant like the Rootsweb one, but it has been gone since the late 1990s. Strong emotionalism, partisan opinions, and name calling pretty much wrecked the poor Rootsweb forum and, as Yogi Berra once said, "people have been staying away in droves." (or was that Casey Stengel?) I monitor several other of the Civil War message boards that are sister to this one, but I ask more questions than I usually answer on those, as I use them mostly as a resource (not that I don't occasionally with this one, too).

Regarding other countries and causes using the guerrilla warfare of the American Civil War for inspiration and modeling, well, no, not until recent years. According to the U. S. Dept. of Defense, many countries around the world use the Amer. CW as a model for regular military history, especially in Europe, but until recent years anyway, hardly anybody but us crazy Americanos study the irregular or guerrilla aspects of the war. Of course, this is rapidly changing as more documentation is published about the American verison of terror war 150 years ago. Frankly speaking, until America's involvement in guerrilla war bigtime starting in the 1960s, even us Americans avoided the topic as distasteful and contrary to the spirit of "all one country again." The exception to this general trend took place during the "Lost Cause" phase of our history about the 1880s when southerners were encouraged and empowered to write and publish their memoirs and unit histories and some of them were about the guerrilla contribution to the southern cause. You can even see this a bit in the old issues of the "Confederate Veteran." I studied at the US Army Special Warfare School at Fort Bragg in the 1980s, and little about the ACW was taught until later that decade. The US military dropped the teaching of its own military history during the 1960s as being old fashioned and of little use in modern times until the DoD soul-searching that followed our sad end to the Vietnam War. The sum of all this is that many readers worldwide are now interested in US military history, and, since guerrilla warfare has blossomed in various forms around the world, for good or bad, lots of people are now interested in reading about ACW guerrilla stuff. Our own military has gone from ignoring it big time in the 1960s to lately not being able to read enough about it.

Historical research fun, but tedious. Oh, yes, but, sadly, correct and less flawed military history has to follow tedious research. When history writers take shortcuts, they tend to accept what somebody else wrote about something, follow established trends rather than strike out in new unfamiliar areas, and, generally stay comfortable. Of course, I have the advantage of keeping my day job and doing this stuff as a hobby. I actually do CW guerrilla reseach and writing to relax. In my lowly opinion, there is not enough money in writing this stuff to wholly support a writer without a pension or part-time work to pay the bills and put food on the table. Fiction pays better, people tell me. Look, I like fiction as much as the next guy, but I don't want it creeping into my study of ACW. I have enough trouble telling the folklore and mistruths from the truth in this topic anyway.

Now, I must get to bed because I am working day shift in the morning and have to get up at "oh-dark-thirty."

Bruce