The Foreign Service Journal, January-February 2023

42 JANUARY-FEBRUARY 2023 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL ences as deputy chief of mission in the Philippines during coup attempts against the government of President Corazon Aquino: the need to address the security of all Americans in the country. Terror as an Occupational Hazard Physically covering our children while lying on the floor, I reached up to grab my radio that linked me to my senior embassy staff. With it, I issued the order to activate our consular warden network to alert all American citizens to urgently take shelter and avoid moving about the city. Keeping the radio in place near one ear with one hand, I used my other hand to dial the phone number of the State Department’s 24-hour Operation Center (which I had memorized) to report our precarious secu- rity situation. Our perilous situation was further exacerbated by the absence of any Marine Security Guards; we were literally a Benghazi-like embassy. As the shooting began to subside, we moved the children to a more secure location inside the house, where any bullet would have to go through several walls to reach them. I then turned to the urgent need to get the two Cambodian factions to stop shooting. No one in the Cambodian government was answering their phones, so I had to cross Norodom Boulevard and get to the home of the interior minister. Waiting for a pause in the gunfire, I raced across the street and banged on the front door. I exhorted the minister, whose reception area looked like a war command center, to try to connect with his counterpart and get their troops to stop shooting. While I was there, he got through; and soon they agreed to halt the hostilities and exchange a liaison person to facilitate communications. Over the next days and weeks, however, mutual suspicion and antagonism grew, and the threat of renewed warfare per- sisted. When the situation completely broke down and open warfare was again waged in the center of the capital city, our small embassy earned special recognition for our actions. One of our first steps was providing interim protective arrangements for all Americans in the city by renting the ballroom of the Cambodiana Hotel. Remembering the lesson I learned in Manila, that we had to have such a place during the fighting, I beat the French ambassador in leasing the space in the most secure area in town. It served as a safe haven for more than a thousand of our citizens along with embassy families and nonessential staff while we worked to successfully evacuate almost all of them from the country. In the absence of virtu- ally all the local hotel staff, Now, even 25 years later, my clear recollection is of lying there and praying, begging God to allow any bullets that came into our home to kill me and not our children. In 1998, at the Royal Palace in Phnom Penh, Ambassador Kenneth Quinn (at right) meets with King Norodom Sihanouk about steps to take to encourage some candidates from the Royalist political party to return to Cambodia and contest the national election, an approach that was successful. COURTESYOFKENQUINN