A Book Group Question about Immigrant Soldier

When I am speaking with book clubs who have read Immigrant Soldier, one of the questions I am most often asked is: “What parts are true and what bits are totally from the author’s imagination?”  Naturally in the limited time we usually have, and in the limited space of a blog post, I cannot go through the pages of the novel from beginning to end.  However, to give a sense of when and why I infused fiction into what is essentially a true story, I offer an explanation similar to the one that follows.