Daniel P. Finney
Sep 13, 2012
The attack on the U.S. Consulate in Libya on Wednesday brought back haunting memories for Ken Quinn, the World Food Prize president and Dubuque native.
The year was 1997. Quinn, a U.S. Foreign Service member for 32 years, was ambassador to Cambodia. A rocket hit his home. Machine-gun fire ringed the house. Quinn and his wife piled their children on the floor and covered them with their bodies. The shooting went on for two hours.
The couple were “praying that the bullets that came in would hit us, not (the children),” Quinn said. He and his family survived that attack unscathed. Many friends and colleagues were not so lucky.
Wednesday, four people — including U.S. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens — were killed in an attack in Benghazi, Libya. The killings served as a painful reminder of the dangers faced by Foreign Service members in posts around the globe.
Quinn said he was either “wounded, shot at or under death threat under every foreign assignment I had. I woke up in Cambodia every day and my first thought was, ‘Who is going to try to kill us today? Who is going to blow up my embassy today?’ And that was my last thought at night.”
He added, “I’m not sure people know how widespread the threat to our people is. It’s everywhere. It’s immediate, and it’s very, very significant.”
Earlier in his career, Quinn served in Vietnam and the Philippines. He is the only civilian to earn the U.S. Army Air Medal for his combat helicopter missions in Vietnam. He received the U.S. Secretary of State Award for Heroism and Valor for his efforts to protect American citizens exposed to danger in Cambodia and for the four lifesaving rescues in which he participated in Vietnam.
What Quinn remembers most about his service, however, is those who didn’t make it home.
“What has the most impact is remembering the people that you knew who were killed that way — the people who served with you and were there one day and gone the next,” Quinn said in the aftermath of Wednesday’s tragedy in Libya. “There’s this sense of, ‘Oh, my gosh, if I had gone down the street at that time, that could have been me.’ You sort of wonder why I’m still here and that person is gone.”
The popular culture depiction of diplomats in fancy clothes at cocktail parties is dead wrong, even for ambassadors at low-threat posts such as Barbados, said Mary Kramer of West Des Moines, who served there as ambassador from 2004 to 2006.
Kramer, a former Republican state legislator and self-described unlikely diplomat, was appointed to the Barbados post by President George W. Bush. She spent most of her public service career in the Iowa General Assembly and a variety of Chamber of Commerce and economic development posts.
“I didn’t grow up through the Foreign Service,” she said. “It was a steep learning curve, and I felt more obligation to achieve than anything I’ve ever done.”
She cited the sign that President Harry Truman kept on his desk: “The buck stops here”
“When you are the ambassador,” she said, “if you’re not going to get it done with your team, it’s not going to get done.”
One of the most surprising aspects of ambassadorship, she said: learning security. Kramer, a native of Burlington who grew up in Iowa City, was used to going wherever she pleased whenever the spirit moved her.
As an ambassador, Kramer had a driver and rode in armored cars. She checked in at every destination and gave a full accounting of who was in her company. U.S. Marines and guards patrolled the grounds of her residence. Her bedroom was a fortified safe room. The U.S. built a new embassy during Kramer’s service, and security was a top priority.
“It is still a pleasure for me to this day … to be able to go into my garage and get into my car and drive myself wherever I want to go,” Kramer said. “I realize how much I missed that when that was not the way I was living my life.”
A low-threat post should not be mistaken for a “no-threat” post, said Chuck Larson, a political consultant from Cedar Rapids and former U.S. ambassador to Latvia. Larson served there in 2008, after a yearlong Army deployment to Iraq in 2004 and 2005 in a legal services role.
“The tentacles of terrorism reach throughout the world and into countries that one would assume would not be impacted by terrorism,” he said. “They can be more vulnerable targets.”
At the U.S. State Department in Washington, D.C., are a series of big, black marble pillars. Fastened to the edifices are plaques with the names of those who died abroad while in the service of their country. The dates predate the Declaration of Independence in 1776. Causes of death include being lost at sea, suffering from malaria and being killed by Barbary pirates.
On one visit to the nation’s capital, Quinn studied the plaques and noted a disturbing trend.
“From 1775 to 1965, the list of the dead filled up maybe half a plaque,” he said. “From 1965 to today, that plaque is filled, and another plaque is filled and they’re working through a third plaque. So many people have now been killed in these insurgencies, in terrorism and all of the fighting. (Foreign service) has become incredibly dangerous.”
After Wednesday, the plaques will have four more names.
