Joe Tedeschi is a 1957 graduate of West Point who retired a regular Army colonel after a twenty-eight-year career. He then worked fourteen years in the defense industry developing a counterbattery radar for three European nations. His 1966 combat tour in Vietnam was cut short by a violent airplane crash, and this near-death experience and its aftermath provides the narrative for his first book, A Rock in the Clouds, which earned a 2022 bronze medal award from the Military Writers Society of America. He was ordained a deacon in 2002 in the Catholic diocese of Trenton, New Jersey, and retired in 2020 after eighteen years of active parish ministry.