Growing up in a generation raised by WWII veterans, I always had a keen desire to read all I could about conflicts, especially those of the eastern Native American tribes against the push of the Eu...ver maisGrowing up in a generation raised by WWII veterans, I always had a keen desire to read all I could about conflicts, especially those of the eastern Native American tribes against the push of the European populations into the Americas and WWII. In 1968, while most of my peers were protesting the Vietnam War, I enlisted into the USMC. During my four years of active service, I was stationed in Vietnam and Japan for the most part. Having attended a Vietnamese language course while stationed at MCAS, El Toro, California, when I arrived in Da Nang, Vietnam, part of my duties required working with the local population. When transferred to Okinawa, Japan I immersed myself in the local culture there. Thus started my lifelong interest in other cultures. After Vietnam, I went on to receive my BS in criminal justice, cum laude, and juris doctor from the University of Toledo in Toledo, Ohio. After practicing both criminal and civil law in the Toledo area from 1982 until 2003, I moved to Denmark where I taught legal argumentation to moot court students at the University of Copenhagen, as well as working for Aperian Global, a company that deals in cross-cultural conflict resolutions within business settings. Returning to the United States in 2007, I set out on a different career course, taking my military, cross-cultural, and legal experience to both Iraq and Afghanistan as a senior rule of law advisor with the US Department of State. I served in that capacity in the rural tribal areas north of Baghdad from 2008 to 2010 and in the rural mountains of Southern Afghanistan from 2010 until 2013. Both regions were strongholds of what we considered to be insurgents of the governments. In Iraq, Al-Qaida, and in Afghanistan, the Taliban. In both regions, I used a cultural approach to establish the legal systems within the regions’ cultural norms.ver menos