Ron Braithwaite--I was born in California and educated in the California school system. I graduated from the University of California, Riverside, with a degree in Zoology in 1965. Faced with the choice of a graduate program in Marine Biology or going on to Medical School, I opted—with much soul-searching—for a career in Medicine. I graduated from the Medical School at the University of California, Irvine in 1969.

I went on to study pathology, completing my residency at the University of California, San Diego in 1974. From there, I went into the Navy where I spent two years as a staff Pathologist at the Navy Hospital in Oakland, California. By this time I was feeling thoroughly californicated so I decided to follow my Southern instincts and relocated to Lafayette, Louisiana. There, I practiced in a four hundred-bed hospital for twenty years, eventually rising to the rank of Chief of Pathology. I then moved to my ranch in South Texas, directly on the Rio Grande, where I have stayed ever since.

Of course, the above is a bare outline of a life and, like every life, there are a million details squeezed between the lines. Some of these are more important—marriage, children—than the lines themselves. Others are at least as important, especially bouts of significant disease, including cancer. Still others, such as my obsession with movement, hunting, fishing and travel are the history of an entirely separate existence. My interest in history falls into this category. As a teenager, I read Prescott's fascinating The Conquest of Mexico and The Conquest of Peru. His works, published in the 1840's, captured—and still captures—my imagination. Five hundred conquistadores, under the brilliant but malign leadership of Hernan Cortés, attack the Aztec Empire—a gold-plated, savage and exotic civilization with hundreds of thousands of warriors under arms. Half of Cortez' conquistidors end as grizzly trophies on Aztec skull racks. The surviving Spainards, however, ultimately decimate the Aztecs. This, I thought, is a tale worth retelling.

Following my retirement from Medicine, living on the border of Coahuila and with a lifelong fascination with Mexico, my thoughts turned to the Conquest of Mexico.
I decided to write.