During the war, Michael G. Harpold served two years with USAID in South Vietnam as an advisor to the National Police. His forty-year career of service to country began at age seventeen in the US Army and includes the US Border Patrol and its parent, the former US Immigration and Naturalization Service. The author and his wife, Elaine, live in Ketchikan, Alaska, where he continued to serve his community as a member of the city council and the school board. His first book, a novel, Jumping the Line, describes the lives of Mexican-American farmworkers and Mexican immigrants.