About the Author

Dave spent his childhood in the Iowa farm-to-market town of Sioux City and was fortunate toreceive an appointment after high school to the US Military Academy at West Point. Hegraduated in the top third of the class of 1968. While there he rubbed shoulders and stirred up the disciplinary juices of three famous graduates, inter alia, all of whom became four-star generals:Bernie Rogers, later the Chief of Staff of the Army; Norman Schwartzkopf of the Iraq war fame; and Alex Haig, who parleyed his friendship with Henry Kissinger into assignments in the White House, then Supreme Commander of US Forces in Europe and later, Secretary of State.

 

But perhaps Dave’s most well-known contact and much closer friend was a young cadet a year behind him, who lived in the room right next door – now the retired college basketball coach.Mike Krzyzewski – Coach K of Duke University.Dave was assigned to Vietnam within two years and commanded an artillery unit of self-propelled, automatic weapons designed as an anti-aircraft weapon but used in Vietnam for defending artillery fire support bases plus traveling and escorting supply convoys and engineer work parties.

 

He was granted a branch transfer upon leaving Vietnam and enrolled in the advanced course for junior officers in Military Intelligence based in Fort Huachuca, Arizona. He took up motorcycle riding in the southern Arizona deserts that would lead to great times in the Alps years later riding through hairpin turns too numerous to count in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, southern Italy,Hungary, and Croatia.

 

While in Arizona, he often spent weekends in Tucson; Nogales, Mexico; and Tombstone with the world famous OK Corral and famous drinking establishments like WyattEarp/s Saloon and The Crystal Palace (mind you, that was more than 50 years ago!).

 

He returned to Asia after the advanced course for a two-year joint assignment in Thailand as an analyst and intelligence briefer on the communist insurgency there supported from Laos andCambodia just before the surrenders of US-backed forces in South Vietnam and Cambodia.

 

He resigned his commission and returned to the US and graduate school at the University of Wisconsin – Madison, and within two years, went back to Thailand just as its neighbors inIndochina were adjusting to communist rule, besides the non-aligned neighbor to the west, Burma, now Myanmar.

 

For the next eight years he reported for CBS News, Newsweek magazine, and the BBC on a variety of geopolitical trends and changing foreign policy relationships, to include the Khmer Rouge auto-genocide in Cambodia; the boat people crisis from South Vietnam; and the short-lived cross border war between the communist neighbors of China and Soviet-backed North Vietnam. He also covered momentous political changes in the Philippines, India, Pakistan and Afghanistan, besides the countries mentioned previously.

 

With a wife and a new family, he moved back to Virginia and joined a close acquaintance in government service coordinating international defense relationships in the Defense and State Departments. The latter assignment included working for three years in the very complicated international assistance effort in the former Soviet Union.  For the last 30 years he has maintained his international relationships as a matchmaker for American and other advanced companies in private sector development in Asia, chiefly in energy and civil infrastructure, data solutions, and border security.And as some of the audience may know, he has just published his unusual “smorgasbord” of those adventures in his memoir entitled Son of the Heartland, On the Way to The Promised Land.He is a member in good standing in the American Legion and the VFW in Falls Church. He and his wife of 43 years, with their grown son and daughter and two delightful young granddaughters, one grandson, have lived in Falls Church for almost forty years.