Eric Shinseki (b.1942,) fully Eric Ken Shinseki, is a retired U.S. Army general who served as the seventh Secretary of Veterans Affairs (2009–14.) He was the first Asian-American to attain a four-star general and the first Asian-American Secretary of Veterans Affairs.
Born in Lihue, Hawaii, Shinseki earned a B.A. in engineering from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, New York. He became a second lieutenant’s commission in 1965 and began the first of two combat tours in Vietnam. He was awarded three Bronze Stars for valor and a Purple Heart with an Oak Leaf Cluster.
Shinseki then earned an M.A. in English from Duke University (1976) and became an instructor at West Point. He also served for the Pentagon and with the 3rd Infantry Division in West Germany.
Shinseki rose through the ranks and became a brigadier general and later the commander-in-chief of the U.S. Army forces in Europe. He commanded the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) peacekeeping forces in Bosnia-Herzegovina (1997–98) and served as army chief of staff (1999–2003.)
In 2008, President Barack Obama chose Shinseki to serve as the secretary of the Department of Veterans Affairs (V.A.) He resigned in 2014 following a scandal over delayed care and falsified records at the agency’s hospitals.
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Eric Shinseki
If you don’t like change, you’re going to like irrelevance even less.
—Eric Shinseki
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