34
Regulation required new general officers to have a joint tour of duty as a first assignment if they did not have a previous joint tour.
35
Later expanded to include new “flag-level” State Department and intelligence professionals.
36
NATO has recently taken on a major role in Afghanistan.
37
The Russian gave Zinni an excellent biography in English of Marshal Zhukov, which Zinni later read with pleasure.
38
These problems remain.
39
Western fears of a military coup in Russia weren’t totally misplaced. There were crazy generals running loose on the peripheries of the military. Some of them had gotten elected to the Duma, the parliament. And some took part in the attempt to unseat President Yeltsin in 1991 (giving him his unforgettable photo op on the tank). But there weren’t many of these crazies, and they were too ineffective to have become much of a real threat.
40
The first Vlad the Impaler, a Hungarian nobleman who lived centuries ago, is thought to be an inspiration for Count Dracula.
41
Poland, Hungary, and Romania.
42
For more on this story, see Tom Clancy’s
43
EUCOM’s Air Force component, U.S. Air Forces Europe.
44
Southeastern Turkey is largely Kurdish, and a significant part of this Kurdish majority wants to join their brothers in the Kurdish portions of Iran, Iraq, and Syria in a unified Kurdish state — Kurdistan. In Turkey Kurds have frequently signaled their separatist intentions by means of guerrilla insurrections and terrorist acts.
45
Tangney, as a lieutenant general, was later the commander of the U.S. Army Special Operations Command.
46
This story is told more fully in Tom Clancy’s
47
Both leaders maintained ongoing negotiations with Saddam during our relief operation. At one point, Barzani asked for advice about what to settle for that the U.S. might support. He never got an answer from us — in my view, a serious missed opportunity.
48
