Consequently he wrote a paper on the V-2 during the captains’ career course after his return from Vietnam, which he later turned into an article for the ‘’Field Artillery Journal’’ and later expanded into a book.

[1][2] After leaving the Army in 1977, King aspired to write short stories, but upon reading a book about Stonewall Jackson during the Battle of Chancellorsville in preparation for a battlefield staff ride, he asked the question, “What if he was murdered?” Three months later he finished his first novel, A Bullet for Stonewall, published by Pelican Publishing Company in 1990.

In this murder mystery, King explored the possibility of John Wilkes Booth being the scapegoat of an elaborate conspiracy “with enough probability to hold the attention of the most accuracy-minded Civil War buffs.”[5][6] His third alternative history thriller, The Loki Project, was published in 2000, where he considered what would have happened if the Germans had built the atomic bomb.

[8][9][10] This interest led to a job with the US Army as the Chief of Simulations in the Army Transportation School in 1984 where he designed the simulations, TRANSWAR III, Theater Deployment in the AirLand Battle and TRANSWAR IV, Truck Company Operations in the AirLand Battle.

[12] Inspired by the inaccurate claim that the V-2 was ineffective, he teamed up with Timothy J. Kutta to write Impact, the History of Germany’s V-Weapons in World War II, published by Sarpedon Press in 1998.