The Foreign Service Journal, October 2010

O C T O B E R 2 0 1 0 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 39 in a band. Tom Tiernan would head to Mexico City, where he and his wife Nancy adopted twins. Jim Roberts and his wife lived just downstairs from the Tiernans, and began to have children of their own. Chris Beede, Deborah Graze, Jack Zetkulic and John Heffern headed to different posts in China and Taiwan after further bonding through months of language training. Some of us stayed in touch— through actual handwritten letters, imagine! But as time went by, our trajectories took us in very different directions. Almost three decades later, it is remarkable to find so many common threads in our experi- ences, and so many common conclusions about the costs and benefits of a Foreign Service career as we begin to say good- bye to it. Within 10 years a handful of our class had already left the Service. Back-to-back visa tours elim- inated Christina Dewey, already 50- plus years old when she signed on in 1982. Now residing in California, Tina says that the Service was a short detour that didn’t work for her. Stephen del Rosso cites “the chal- lenges of a two-career marriage” as one of the factors in his decision to transfer from State to nongovernmen- tal organizations involved in global af- fairs. Lillian Harris, already a distinguished Civil Service expert, left after her first tour because she had married a British diplomat, and the two careers could not be managed. She is now a respected author on for- eign policy issues, as well as director of the “Together for Sudan” charity. David Ostroff resigned en route to an as- signment when his life partner could not be accommodated, and now works as a locally engaged staff member in our Paris mission to UNESCO. Moments of Danger Like now, the Foreign Service could be a dangerous pro- fession. In Nicaragua, I narrowly escaped a mob and my house was ransacked. In apartheid-era South Africa, my home was surveilled and many friends arrested. I was shot at and took part in an evacuation of embassy personnel from El Salvador, and served in Israel during the second intifada. And I witnessed yet more violence in Colombia and Mexico. Still, my experiences were tame compared to what befell some of my colleagues. Jim Roberts recalls that his home in Panama was torched in the late 1980s after he had become the very public embassy point-person on money laundering and the drug trade. During his early tours, Stephen del Rosso was held captive briefly by a group in Costa Rica and also had a hand grenade thrown at his office. Robert Jackson con- fronted “unimaginable” hatred and violence as coups tore through Cote d’Ivoire in the 1990s. And just a few years ago, Lucy Tamlyn evacuated most of her team from Chad as a coup ripped that country asunder. Still, she found that “I re- ally thrived ‘living on the edge’ and was able to provide the right kind of leadership in these situations.” Jack Zetkulic had the tires shot out from under his car in Georgia, and was the target of sniper fire in Bosnia. What I remember most about Jack was a 1995 Operations Center call I was on with Ambassador Robert Frasure, who joked how Jack was taking care of all of them in very rustic condi- tions — leaving mints on their sleeping bags — as the team camped in a sandbagged container through the long Bosnia negotiations. Shortly thereafter, Fra- sure would be killed in a vehicle acci- dent, and Jack would be taking care of him in a different, much sadder, way. Taking care of the Foreign Service family was a shared priority for 9th A- 100 class members. Chris Beede takes “considerable pride in seeing former subordinates leaping to new positions of significant policy input and manage- rial responsibility,” and is “heartened by their encouragement and affirmation that they appreciated yesteryear’s guid- ance fromme.” Robert Jackson regards serving as an A-100 coordinator as “my most satisfying assignment.” He com- pletely revamped the curriculum to make it more relevant to the challenges and duties one shoul- ders, mentoring more than 225 Foreign Service generalists and more than 25 specialists. Three members of our A-100 class have won the State De- partment’s annual award recognizing outstanding deputy chiefs of mission; all three make mentoring other officers one of their highest priorities. John Heffern, currently DCM at USNATO in Brussels, cites “difficult, sensitive EEO cases, cases of spouse abuse, cases of family issues with teenage chil- dren.” For me, the hardest is to cope with the death of a col- league or mission family member — supporting the surviving family, appropriately commemorating the life of service now ended, managing the community’s reactions, and keeping control of my own emotions. Moments of Dissent We were privileged to serve through some of the great diplomatic moments of the last century and this one. We were there through the rise and resolution of conflicts in Latin We were privileged to serve through some of the great diplomatic moments of the last century and this one.