The Foreign Service Journal, January-February 2023

44 JANUARY-FEBRUARY 2023 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL I expressed appreciation for his message but explained that it was just part of the job being an American diplomat. We are employed to advance and protect America’s interests and its citizens around the world, often in difficult and dangerous circumstances. Our career grants us a front-row seat to the making of history, and it also exposes us to potentially life-threatening challenges. Indeed, I was shot at, wounded, or under death threat in every foreign assignment I had during my three-decade Foreign Service career. We learned another valuable lesson from our experience in Phnom Penh: When a violent political crisis is over, it really isn’t over. Two years later, in 1999, our now high-school-age daughter and I arrived in Des Moines, Iowa. Having retired frommy 32-year diplomatic career, I was about to take up leadership of the World Food Prize Foundation. Kelly was preparing to start training with her high school swim team. One evening right around July 4, as she and I were sitting at home, we were suddenly transported back two years by a rat-a- tat-tat-tat sound that almost perfectly replicated those automatic weapons firing on that night in Phnom Penh. As we both instinc- tively dove to the floor, we locked eyes, and I said: “I think it’s firecrackers going off for the Fourth of July …” On every future Fourth, when they hear the sound of firecrack- ers going off, I imagine everyone caught in that Highland Park mass shooting will be painfully transported back to those terror- filled moments they experienced in 2022. n 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.