Patriots

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and Tom Doherty all provided help I needed to make this a better book. They're a perfect answer to the folks who claim that "Nobody cares anymore."

If you care, you'll find that other people care too.

Truth, Heroism, and Other

Confusing Subjects

Some years ago I thought that by studying history I'd learn the truth about what happened in the past. I've become perhaps wiser and certainly more cautious in my assumptions as I've grown older. I still believe in truth in an absolute sense. I just don't believe that human beings will ever run into it.

I'm not really sure about why I did some of the things I've done. The reasons I thought I did them were almost certainly, it now seems, not the real reasons. Do I know the real reasons? Well, maybe, but chances are that another ten or twenty-five years of distance and experience will give me a still different take on what was going on.

The above disclaimer is a prelude to me saying that as best I can tell, the action of Patriots is based pretty much on the way things happened in Vermont-then the New Hampshire Grants-just before the start of the American Revolution. (I modeled the climax on the capture of Fort Ticonderoga by Ethan Allen and the Green Mountain Boys.) I don't know about history classes nowadays but believe me, this isn't the way I learned about it in high school.

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