SNAPSHOTS USA, (An American Family Album) is a book I had to write. A work of fiction based on fact. My reply to 38 years of silence that have succeeded in turning lies into history. Writing this book, I am fulfilling my obligation and responsibility to everyone who so desperately wanted their stories truthfully told. My feelings for them remain intense. Deep emotional bonds that have not faded with time.

Like Pearl Harbor, and 9/11 2001, May 4^th 1970 was another historic “turning point” that transformed our image of who and what we are as a nation. Now is the time to retrieve from the black hole of denial a dark page of our History. For there are lessons written there we must learn if we are not to repeat the past.

To fully tell the story of the four dead students, four wasted lives, I had to enter the theater of the imagination to create the lives they would have lived. Had they lived.

And to achieve the complexity that is Truth, I also had to show the enduring and destructive impact of this event on the future lives of participants and witnesses. No one involved escaped unharmed in body or soul.

I hope my book will initiate a time devoted to “Truth and Reconciliation”. A time for healing festering wounds. For these four dead students were our children. Your children. Demonized by public opinion and the media as obnoxious, outrageous, diseased, drug addicted and violent.

Today we still denigrate the value of a single life. Our children play video games and watch television where killing is considered victory. Ten years of “Body Counts” and “Kill Ratios” in Vietnam atrophied our nation’s awareness of the full meaning and tragedy of death. Writing and reading this book, we become “Rememberers”... and this is a vital and health-restoring act that hopefully will enable us and future generations to end tragic cycles of violence at home and abroad.

For without a solid foundation of Truth – there can be no Rule of Law.