Douglas Cavanaugh is an American expat who grew up in the Midwest. After several trips abroad in the 1990s, he arrived in Croatia in 1996, not long after the country's Homeland War had ended, and just after the final shots in neighboring Bosnia and Herzegovina had been fired. It was his earliest memories of Croatia's war-ravaged countryside that inspired the background for his first novel, Into Hell's Fire. During his initial tour, he quickly realized that it was one thing to imagine such destruction while reading about it in print or viewing it on television, but it was quite another to witness it firsthand. He was immediately struck how everyone seemed to be affected in one way or another, whether physically, mentally, or economically. Subsequent visits to Bosnia confirmed his decision to set the novel in this emotionally-charged atmosphere. Cavanaugh's daily contact with many veterans and civilians demonstrated other ramifications of war that might have otherwise remained unrealized. "By the end of that decade," he remarked in an interview, "post-traumatic stress syndrome was epidemic. Many people I met had immediate family members who had been killed. Countless others had been separated from their families and friends who had been relocated to other parts of the world. That sort of a forced separation can be brutal on an individual. And more than a few people told me how they had lost everything they owned, and how it all seemed to have happened overnight." Thankfully, a state of normalcy has returned to the region in recent years, though the local economies are still on the mend. Many other wounds will need more time to heal. "I was quite naive as to how the world really works when I first arrived. Living abroad has been a fantastic, eye-opening experience for me that I would recommend to anyone who is contemplating it - though it's not for everyone," Cavanaugh noted. Douglas has lived in Croatia for more than twenty years.