John R. Cronin

John R. Cronin was raised in an Army family, mostly in the Washington, DC area, and after one year at VMI, joined the Marines at 19. He went through Parris Island and radio telegraph school before going to Vietnam twice with Battalion and Force Recon units from 1967-69, where he was wounded once during each tour. He returned to the States and finished his BA in political science at The Citadel before being commissioned back into the Marines as an infantry officer for three years. Following his discharge in 1976, he went to Rhodesia for four years where he served as an officer on Fire Force with the Rhodesian Light Infantry and then as a deployed operational Group second-in-command with the Selous Scouts.

He left Rhodesia in 1980 and in 1982 went to Cairo and then Beirut, where, after having survived a kidnapping by Hezbollah, he received an MA in Middle East Studies, and then went on to The School of Oriental and African Studies at The University of London for his PhD in Middle East Politics. He has since held a series of administrative positions in, and taught international politics at, the university level in the Washington area and worked as a consultant on educational administrative policies in the Middle East.

He currently lives in Alexandria, Virginia with his wife and their two children: a daughter (8), who now has her double salchows, loops, flips, spins and lutzes down and is working through all of her combinations; and a son (6), who wants to know if he will get hugs and playtime if he joins the Marines. He has also archived what is believed to be the Eastern seaboard's largest collection of sticks, dead leaves, rocks, branches, plants, grasses, pods, stems, dandelions, pine cones, birds' nests, roots, berries, acorns, wire, asphalt, dirt clods, sand, string, concrete and brick chips, rubber bands, plastic tubing, construction tape, discarded snake skins, old cicada shells, crushed insects, sidewalk-baked worms, ossified dog doots, cork, bones, feathers, birdseed and bark. Much of this he has eaten at one time or another.