Born at St. Mary's Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland on August 2, 1939, and baptized into the Christian Faith at Christ Lutheran Church in York, Pennsylvania, a month later.
His great-grandmother Mina Belle Wise went West to Montana to do her Christian duty to teach for a year, and returned with stories of the "cowboys and the Indians".
In September 1960, he met a Miss Josephine Alexander of Vicksburg, Mississippi, who had just arrived on post as a Department of the Army Civilian (DAC) Service Club Hostess.
[1] While at Georgia he studied under Professor Alf Andrew Heggoy and developed a speciality in Arab, Islamic North Africa, which was coupled with a field in Modern European History.
During the last few months of his PhD studies he had several job offers and accepted the post of assistant professor of history at the University of Mississippi in Oxford, where his wife had received her BA 1959.
Being a staunch advocate for the concept that a university professor had the obligation to research and publish as well as teach, he began by having articles accepted in the journals The Muslim World,[2] African Studies Review,[3] African Quarterly (New Delhi, India), The Indian Political Science Review, Military Affairs, and others.
At that time Cooke, Alf Heggoy, Claude Sturgill (University of Florida) and others founded The French Colonial Historical Society.
He was posted as the corps liaison officer for intelligence to The Saudi Eastern Province Area Command, with authority extending to the Saudi–Kuwaiti border.
During Desert Storm Cooke and the division saw heavy combat, and at the end of the war they occupied the town of As Salman, Iraq.
After his service with the XVIIIth Airborne Corps and the Division Daguet, Cooke returned to Fort Bragg, North Carolina, to be demobilized.
This happened in spite of General John Pershing's resistance to the merging of American troops with French or British during the war.
This association with the British scholars, Peter Liddle, Hugh Cecil, and Ian Whitehead, resulted in the publication of a number of co-authored books.
Cooke wrote eleven entries for Zabecki’s World War II in Europe: An Encyclopedia (Garland, 1999) and contributed a chapter entitled “James Guthrie Harbord: Pershing's Chief of Staff” in Zabecki's two-volume Chief of Staff (Naval Institute Press, 2008).
In 2009, his book, Chewing Gum, Candy Bars, and Beer: The Army PX in World War II (University of Missouri Press) was published.