A journey through the Central American wars of the 1980s as seen through the eyes of a young American officer who worked on... More > both sides of insurgency in the region: In El Salvador Bill Meara supported efforts to defeat insurgents; with Nicaraguans he worked to keep an insurgency alive. One of very few Americans to see both sides up close, he takes readers into his world as an advisor struggling with cultural differences and human rights violations while trying to stay alive in murderous El Salvador. We join him on dangerous helicopter rides into contra base camps on the Honduran-Nicaraguan border and into a U.S. Embassy under attack. From Special Forces school at Ft. Bragg to Joan Baez’s back-stage party in Managua to a contra POW camp deep in the jungle, we get a taste of Meara’s world up close. < Less

SolderSmoke is the story of a secret, round-the-world, after-hours life in electronics. Bill Meara started out as a normal... More > kid, but around the age of 12 he got interested in radio... To make matters worse, when he got older he became a diplomat. In all of the places he has lived, his hobby caused him to seek out like-minded radio fiends, to stay up late into the night working on strange projects, and to build embarrassingly large antennas above innocent foreign neighborhoods. SolderSmoke takes you into the world of an expatriate geek. It is a technical memoir filled with funny stories and with serious descriptions of Bill's struggles to truly understand the theory behind the equipment that he built.(THIS VERSION SHIPS FROM A U.S. PRINTER) < Less

SolderSmoke is the story of a secret, round-the-world, after-hours life in electronics. Bill Meara started out as a normal... More > kid, but around the age of 12 he got interested in radio... To make matters worse, when he got older he became a diplomat. In all of the places he has lived, his hobby caused him to seek out like-minded radio fiends, to stay up late into the night working on strange projects, and to build embarrassingly large antennas above innocent foreign neighborhoods. SolderSmoke takes you into the world of an expatriate geek. It is a technical memoir filled with funny stories and with serious descriptions of Bill's struggles to truly understand the theory behind the equipment that he built. (THIS VERSION SHIPS FROM UK, SPAIN, USA) < Less

A journey through the Central American wars of the 1980s as seen through the eyes of a young American officer who worked on... More > both sides of insurgency in the region: In El Salvador Bill Meara supported efforts to defeat insurgents; with Nicaraguans he worked to keep an insurgency alive. One of very few Americans to see both sides up close, he takes readers into his world as an advisor struggling with cultural differences and human rights violations while trying to stay alive in murderous El Salvador. We join him on dangerous helicopter rides into contra base camps on the Honduran-Nicaraguan border and into a U.S. Embassy under attack. From Special Forces school at Ft. Bragg to Joan Baez’s back-stage party in Managua to a contra POW camp deep in the jungle, we get a taste of Meara’s world up close. < Less