F. P. Dorchak's earliest writing efforts make for an interesting story in and of itself. Curiously, he began writing at that young age because, according to his mother, he thought he had been a soldier in the Civil War. Since he was obviously no longer in that life, the next best thing was to write about it. According to his mother, Frank began to draw and write stories about the Civil War. Many of the surviving artwork from his childhood shows (among the normal dinosaur and spaceship drawings) Civil War battles. Several of those battle scenes are labeled "1862," and deal with soldiers and bayonets.

During his adolescent years, Frank had one dream in particular that he always remembered: that of being bayoneted in the side during a Civil War battle. Frank awoke from that dream in intense agony and clutching his side, so much so that he fell out of bed. The feeling of intense pain persisted for many minutes after waking from that the dream. He never told anyone about it, until years later, in adulthood, and told one of his brothers. To both their amazement, his brother told him he'd had the exact same dream, as a kid.

In 1990, Frank had moved briefly to Alexandria, Virginia. While there, he visited the Civil War battlefield Bull Run (Manassas). Though he had visited several Civil War battlefields before and since, at this one Frank began to experience what he describes as his "Twilight Zone experience": though he couldn't name fields and units, he had had the most unnerving experience of literally feeling torn between two worlds: that of being in the present, but also in the Civil War--there, at Manassas. Throughout his entire tour of the Manassas, he felt as if he'd been there before--and died on the battlefield. His feeling leaned toward the second of the two battles. The battle fought in August of 1862.