Commander Kroll is a history instructor at the College of the Desert in Palm Desert, California. A former Coast Guard officer who became a Navy chaplain, he retired from the Naval Reserve in 1996. He is a 1971 graduate of the U.S. Coast Guard Academy and received his master's degree from the University of San Diego and his Ph.D. from Claremont Graduate University. His biography of Commodore Ellsworth Bertholf, the Coast Guard's first commandant, will be published by the Naval Institute Press in 2002.
