W. Thomas Burns is an avid sports enthusiast, who at the tender age of ten began caddying at the local golf course and thus began his life-long passion for the game of golf. After graduating from high school in 1967, he enlisted in the United States Marine Corps where after four months of training, he spent the nineteenth year of his life in the mountains and jungles of Vietnam. In 1970, he was medically retired from the Marine Corps, a twenty-year-old sergeant E-5. The author is now retired and living with his wife, Stella, in the beautiful state of North Carolina.