As one of the authors of Military Education Benefits for College, I’d like to welcome you to the first entry in our blog! 

For those of you who are curious, the title of this blog is part of the tagline for our book: “Improving the Most Powerful Weapon of All…Your Mind!” We thought it was an ideal title for the blog–a segue from the book, but a bit more ambiguous.

So what can you expect from us?  For starters, exactly what those of you who read the book would expect.  We’re going to be using this as a forum to discuss this issue at length, which has become acause celebre for the authors.  This not only stems from the fact that we are both veterans who have used our benefits to attend collge, but Ed and I also work at a university dealing with military, dependent and veteran students alike.  When we come across anything that we think our readers will find interesting, or that we think will spark some debate or inspiration, be certain we will post it here.  This will be a natural progression from our quick messages we post on our Twitter and Facebook sites dedicated to the book, which may have led some of you here.   If you can think of anything you’d like us to discuss here or investigate for you, please feel free to mention it to us here or anywhere else. 

As first-time authors, we’re novices in the writing experience and the process of having a book published. It’s all still very new to us, so we have a natural curiosity and excitement with our experiences and will share them with you. Every so often, we’ll discuss the unique experiences we’ll have meeting fellow veterans, authors and others along the trail of promoting the book.  We’ll share any press we get for the book with you here as well, as with our other social media outlets (Facebook and Twitter). 

Ed and I are also veterans of the military ourselves. We may tell the obligatory war story from time to time.

Lastly, I’ll speak strictly for myself here–I do like to go on tangents and discuss other things. I’m pretty passionate about my interests, so this may prove to be a forum for that from time to time. This time of year you may hear me talk briefly about how my Mets are doing (mighty fine at this particular time, might I add) or my many rounds of awful golf leaving triple-digit scorecards in my wake. I also may briefly talk about current events. Here’s an example: If you want to stop the oil spill, build a golf course near the site. Put a par four third hole with a tight lie to the left asjacent to the leak. Ask me to bring out my driver and hit away. I guarantee that hole will be filled right up. See that? Killed two birds with one stone right there!

So in closing, I hope you all enjoy our blog, which we hope to be slightly informative, provocative and at times–entertaining and enjoyable. I’ll leave you with a last parting thought from another former resident of our great state of Connecticut:

“The secret of getting ahead is getting started. The secret of getting started is breaking your complex overwhelming tasks into small manageable tasks, and then starting on the first one.”
–Mark Twain

One small manageable task down.