Craig Trebilcock was born in Western Michigan in 1960.  He attended the University of Michigan, graduating with degrees in history and political science.  He continued at the University of Michigan Law School, where he focused his studies on international and constitutional law, graduating in 1985.

Bored with life as an attorney at the Department of Labor in Washington, DC, Craig volunteered for duty with the US Army, Judge Advocate General's Corps in 1988, with duty in Fulda, West Germany.  There he served as a military defense attorney in courts-martial. While in West Germany, he witnessed the downfall of Soviet control in Eastern Europe, and the dismantling of the Berlin Wall/Iron Curtain - an experience that was to shape his later career path.

Craig took up the practice of law as a trial attorney with a civilian law firm in York, PA in 1991, where he became one of the lead counsel in the Golden Venture political asylum cases (1993-1997), representing Chinese boat people fleeing from political and religious persecution in communist China.  This case led him to focus his future civilian law practice in the area of immigration law.

Unable to completely abandon the wanderlust he had uncorked while living in Europe, Craig continued military service in the U.S. Army Reserve, being twice mobilized for overseas deployments.  The first was the NATO peacekeeping mission in the former Yugoslav Republics in 1997, where as a Major he viewed the devastating ethnic cleansing in Croatia and Bosnia.
 
Craig's first combat deployment was the 2003 US invasion of Iraq, which is satirically described in "thinly" fictionalized form in his novel One Weekend A Month.  As a Lieutenant Colonel with a US Army Reserve Civil Affairs Brigade, Craig "rode the circuit" in Southern Iraq during and after the invasion, working to restore the Iraqi Justice system.

Between inadvertent trips through mine fields and a brush with a very impertinent suicide bomber, Craig developed a jaundiced view of Iraq War "mission creep."  He watched, frustrated, as an invasion intended to eliminate the threat of a rogue regime's chemical weapons became a social experiment by the State Department to see if Western democracy would fit a desert tribal society - one where total submission to higher religious and political authority was the only constant holding the society together. Somewhere along the way someone decided to give him a Bronze Star and a Commendation for Valor for surviving all of the nonsense, and the first impressions of what would later become One Weekend A Month and No Time for Ribbons were instilled.