Millard Peck, 1962

After graduating from Kenyon in 1962, I spent a year at the University of Madrid studying Spanish language and literature, then joined the Army at the Military Assistance Advisory Mission (MAAG) in Spain, to save the expense of flying home to get drafted. From Spain I went to Officers Candidate School, and on to Airborne (Parachute) School, Ranger School, and Special Forces Training.

I spent not quite 30-years in the Army, which included three tours in Vietnam, where I spent a total of 45-months (including 3-months in Japan getting put back together again). The first tour was with the 5th Special Forces Group in the Central Highlands (Center), the second was with the 9th Infantry Division in the Delta (South), and the third was with the 101st Airborne Division in I Corps (North). During that experience, I was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross, 3-Silver Stars, 6 or 7 Bronze Stars, and a bunch of Purple Hearts.

After a four-year tour in the Foreign Language Department at West Point, where I was able to earn masters degrees in French and Spanish, I later went on to get advanced degrees in Portuguese and German, which led to a number of truly interesting overseas assignments, and enabled me to attend a variety of foreign military schools and training programs, among which were the French Parachute and Commando Schools, the French Command and General Staff College in Paris, the Uruguayan Staff College in Montevideo, the German Staff College in Hamburg, and the NATO Defense College in Rome.

Because of the languages, I had a very eclectic military career, the other highlights of which included two years at the Florida Ranger Camp, a tour in the 82nd Airborne Division, working at the Pentagon for Legislative Liaison (acting as a lobbyist for the Army), 3-years in Germany as a battalion commander, three-years in Special Operations during Grenada and the terrorist scourge of the 1980’s, two years in Paraguay as the ODC (Office of Defense Cooperation) Chief, and running the National Military Intelligence Center (NMIC) in the Pentagon.

It was the foreign languages that pointed me to overseas employment after retiring from the military. Also, the Army had become sort of a way of life, and I soon found myself doing military/security work in a number of bizarre, unpronounceable places.

Some of the highlights include working as the senior advisor to a Croatian infantry brigade in Bosnia, where, rather than planning and conducting brigade-level operations, I mostly did training, as well as a certain amount of combat surgery with a Swiss Army knife. I got very tired of that, and then went to South Africa to become the security chief for a guy who ran safaris at a place called Timbavaati, just outside of Kruger National Park. At that time everyone thought that SA was on the brink of a civil war, so private protective security was considered essential to buoy client confidence – since a number of safari-goers had cancelled their trips. After the situation in South Africa stabilized, I was supposed to go to work in Sierra Leone, but when my wing-man got killed there while I was in the States doing some training for DEA, I decided to take a less exciting job in Saudi Arabia as a brigade advisor to the 14th Royal Saudi Land Brigade in Tabuk, tutoring them through the transition from M-113 armored personnel carriers to Bradley Fighting Vehicles. After about a year there I signed on with the Justice Department and went to Haiti, where I ran the Centre de Formation de la Police Nationale (the Police Academy) in Port-au-Prince for almost three years, before going to Liberia for a year as the project manager for a DOJ police development program in Monrovia.

I finally got tired of cops and went to Albania when Kosovo was hot, planning to go to work on the side of the good guys. After a while, I figured out that there were no good guys, so I headed down to Angola and spent the next several years working on and off as an advisor to Defence Services Limited (DSL), a security outfit whose clients were mostly the French, British, and US oil companies. I also ran a project for the US Embassy and the Angolan Army confiscating heavy weapons from former-UNITA strongholds in isolated areas of the outback, then running over them with tanks, to make sure they did not turn up on the black market. Portuguese is now my best language.

After that, I spent about 5 years or so doing intelligence work with Blackwater in Iraq and Afghanistan, where we provided Personnel Security Details (PSD) for the State Department. I found both places interesting, but was not convinced that “nation building” was a proper mission for the U.S. Military. I have not quite hung-up my gun just yet, but have slowed down a bit. If I ever completely retire, I am hoping to settle in Cincinnati and spend some time with my collections of military memorabilia, firearms, and British sports cars. I still lift weights and work out a lot, since I have to keep-up with an under-30 group of guys, carrying about 30 pounds of body armor, plus weapons, ammo, and miscellaneous gear. All in all, since 1962, it’s been a helluva ride…