The Foreign Service Journal, December 2011

50 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / D E C E M B E R 2 0 1 1 F OCUS riod of a couple of days, we were ac- tually able to get it to Baku, Minsk, or elsewhere in the former Soviet Union. We also sent a lot of “Official-Infor- mal” cables back then. I’m not sure those even exist today. The State Department made a lot of half-steps and missteps in those early days, but one excellent decision was not to send Wang computers to the new posts. Instead, Steve Lauderdale and his team sent personal computers and, over the next 18 months or so, patiently invented the department’s first overseas Mi- crosoft-based wide area network (called the WAN). While the rest of Embassy Bonn was sending text-only e- mails by the green cursor flicker of the old Wang system, we were starting to send entire Word and Excel docu- ments (gasp!) via this revolutionary new technology. (Again, I’m not making this up.) I wish I had space here to tell you about the time I spent 24 hours on the tarmac in Sochi, Georgia, with Jim Paravonian and about 100 inebriated Georgian friends, with $40,000 in cash needed for embassy operations stashed under our seats. And Louis Hebert could tell you about a “hard landing” in Moscow while coming in on a flight from Dushanbe, which pinned him in his seat dur- ing the evacuation of the plane. The plane was totaled, but he walked away unscathed. (By the way, Louie, most of us would call that a “crash.”) The bottom line was this: The assignment was a hugely satisfying experience. We traveled, trained and got our hands dirty in the day-to-day work of setting up an em- bassy, and then got up the next day and started all over again. In the early days we spent 70 to 80 percent of our time on the road. NPSU created and mentored the first generation of administrative locally engaged staff, and provided support, advice and sometimes a shoulder to cry on to that first group of Foreign Service management officers and gen- eral services officers who went out to these posts to do what was essentially a ridiculously impossible job. A lot of people have cycled through these “new” posts since the early 1990s, but there is a bond among those of us who were there in the pioneer days — before Hilton hotels, oil wealth, NATO and even the Eurozone. Mike Tulley was the first chief of human resources for the New Post Support Unit in Bonn from 1992 to 1995. He is currently direc- tor of the Regional Support Center in Frankfurt, which evolved out of the original NPSU and supports small U.S. missions in Europe. He has served in Yaoundé, Belgrade, London, Tallinn, Rome, Warsaw andWashington, D.C. Prior to joining the Foreign Service, Mr. Tulley worked for the Campbell Soup Company for five years and served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Honduras. Handing Over the Keys Embassy Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan By Julie Ruterbories T here were no direct flights to Bishkek in October 1992. Having completed A-100 orientation, gen- eral services officer training, consular training, and consultations with the New Post Support Unit in Bonn, I flew from Frankfurt to Alma Ata (now Almaty). A driver hired by the embassy met me on arrival and we set off on the four-plus hour drive to Bishkek, my first Foreign Serv- ice posting. Within a few minutes, we were driving across the open steppes of Central Asia. There wasn’t much to see for miles and miles, reminding me of the line: “It’s not the middle of nowhere, but I can see it from here” (from the movie “Thelma and Louise”). I was the first permanently assigned general services officer/vice consul in Bishkek. A temporary GSO who had The support flights were our lifeline. They brought everything from Post-it notes to Mosler safes. Julie Ruterbories at Bishkek Airport, 1993. Shawn Dorman