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My A-ha Moment or What I Learned From the Marines by M arta Zielyk Marta N. Zielyk holds the post o f Senior Diplomatic Interpreter in the U.S. State Department. All thoughts expressed in this article are her own and do not reflect the views o f the U.S. government. One of my favorite features in Oprah Winf rey’s O Magazine is a column simply entitled “A- ha.” Every month a celebrity or movie star or writer talks about a moment in her life when she was struck by a thought, which was so jolting and insightful that it forever changed how she perceives her life. My own “A-ha moment” came during a hike in ankle-deep mud, through the Amazon rain forest with a group of large, burly, mean looking Marines. It wasn’t an earth shattering insight, along the lines of how to cure cancer or settle the Mid- East crisis. Instead, it was the actualization of an idea, which I had heard many times throughout my life. It took that rainforest hike to make me understand the idea in a very personal way. Let me start from the beginning. Recently, the State Department gave me a unique opportunity to take a year off from my regular duties as Diplo matic Interpreter and head back to school, specifi cally to the National Defense University (NDU). NDU is the premier center for joint professional military education, and is under the direction of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. It houses the War College, the Industrial College of the Armed Forces as well as several other smaller institutes and educational centers and is located on Fort McNair in Washington. D.C. Its mission is to prepare mili tary and civilian leaders from the United States and other countries to address national and international security challenges. After fulfilling the requirements of the one-year program, I would attain a master’s degree in national resource strategy, which—as was explained to me on the first day of school—means that I would learn how to harness our nation’s dip lomatic, military, economic, and industrial power to ensure the fulfillment of our national security strategy. My classmates at NDU were 250 military officers: men and women, holding the rank of Lieutenant Colonel or Colonel from all the military services, about 50 civilians from the State De partment, the CIA, the U.S. Secret Service, and another 50 military officers from all over the world, including a Lt. Colonel from the Ukrainian Air Force. The main focus of the year was to teach the military officers, who were all very quickly moving up the promotion ladder in their respective services, to work at the highest levels of the U.S. govern ment. We, the civilians and international students, were there to provide the military students with a point of view different from that which they had experienced during their careers in the armed forces. After all, if in a future conflict, they would have to work in the National Security Council or be members of multilateral, multinational crisis re sponse teams, their year at the National Defense University would have prepared them to cooperate with diplomats, intelligence officers, defense contr actors, our friends and allies around the world, etc. To say that I enjoyed my year at NDU would be a huge understatement. I loved it. After 20 years of being in the workforce I was ready for a sabbatical. It was wonderful to step away from the small and insular world of Ukrainian politics and focus on the big, broad picture of the United States and to place it in a historical and strategic context. I loved discussing America’s responsibility as the world’s only superpower; I loved writing essays on whether the environment is a critical national se curity resource; I loved reading what the greatest military strategist in history, the Chinese general Sun Tzu, wrote in 500 BC about how to outwit one’s enemy. And yet, the lessons I learned from my year at NDU went so much deeper than the complexities of the military procurement process or the art of war. What I came away with were lessons on how to live and interact with the world around me. People, Видання C оюзу Українок A мерики - перевидано в електронному форматі в 2012 році . A рхів C У A - Ню Йорк , Н . Й . C Ш A.
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