Ignorant Armies

About the Book

Ignorant Armies: Tales and Morals of an Alien Empire combines startling stories from the life of an American diplomat with equally startling opinions about the country he represented abroad for over three decades. Charles Sam Courtney chose his book's title to convey bizarreness, the bizarreness of some of the things that happened to him as well as the bizarreness of contemporary America's behavior toward the rest of the world.

In his Forward and in Chapters II, IV and VI he expresses his dismay at what has become of the United States in the post-Cold War era. He depicts the decline of the country from its former status as the world's model nation to its current one as global pariah. He attributes this decline, not to mischievous foreign powers or even to wicked politics at home, but rather to the Americans themselves. He describes how the pervasive culture of consumerism and overweening ignorance of Americans have left them incapable of engaging in the kind of enlightened public discourse a genuine democracy demands. He considers the decline irreparable, and he has come to believe that he has lost his country. After a lifetime of service to America, his loss is personal and painful.

In Chapters I, III and V he recounts some personal episodes in his life as a diplomat. He was a hostage to terrorists twice, once in the Near East and once in the United States Senate. On an earlier occasion, as a brand new junior diplomat, he was fired for slugging a journalist. JFK saved his career, but in a heart-rending way. Not long after that Courtney helped his Turkish secretary in Istanbul pursue an illicit affair, with the result that interlocking sexual and political betrayals disrupted the Soviet Union's espionage operations throughout the Near East. A few years later in Calcutta he was encouraged by the CIA, no less, to fall into a Soviet sex trap. He concludes his personal reminiscences by describing his friendship with a man who probably was the KGB station chief in London but who, in 1992, was seeing his world turn upside down. This poignant tale and those preceding it capture the Cold-War world that was. They also foreshadow the world that was to come.

About the Author

Charles Courtney, known to his friends as Sam, was born on a small farm in the San Joaquin Valley of California. Growing up in an environment characterized by idyllic rural isolation on one hand, and grueling physical labor on the other, instilled in him some old-fashioned American values combined with a passion to get out and see the world. He achieved the latter when he joined the United States Foreign Service. He was undoubtedly the first person from his then-sparsely populated region of the country to become a professional diplomat (in more recent times the area has become a crowded suburb of the San Francisco Bay Area).

During thirty-two years in the Foreign Service he rose to the top levels of his profession. He served in several countries in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia and participated in White House and National Security Council activities under four presidents. After retiring from the State Department he was a visiting professor at the University of Montana where he established the Montana World Trade Center. He has also taught at the National War College, the University of Puget Sound, and Evergreen State College. His education includes undergraduate and graduate degrees from Stanford University and San Francisco State University and post-graduate study at the University of Istanbul and Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School.

Over the years he has published a few poems, stories and articles. Ignorant Armies: Tales and Morals of an Alien Empire is his first full-length book. He lives near Missoula in Hamilton, Montana, and near Paris in Dampierre-sur-Avre, Normandy.