Speaker Biographies

Corporal Richard Gibson joined the Marine Corps in June 1999 as a recent high school graduate. He went to the Camp Pendleton School of Infantry, where he trained as a mortar man. Then he was assigned to the Marine Security Forces School in Chesapeake Bay, Virginia. Following stints in Bahrain and Okinawa, Gibson was stationed in Kuwait prior to the launch of Operation Iraqi Freedom. As a 3-5 Marine, he was at or near the front lines from the beginning of the invasion through the overthrow of the Ba’athist regime. His unit fought its way up to Samarra, and was back in Baghdad in time for the first suicide bombings.

Sergeant J. D. Johannes joined the Marines one week out of high school in 1991. His superiors sent him to combat correspondent training, then to military journalism school at Ft. Benjamin Harrison, Indiana. During Johannes’s active-duty career, he served as a public affairs officer, a combat correspondent, and a platoon leader with the Twenty-Fourth Marine Regiment out of Kansas City. He was transferred to the reserves in 1994, and discharged as a Sergeant in 1999. As the Iraq War approached, Johannes found his way back to his old unit as an independent newsman, providing feeds for local news stations in Kansas and Missouri. By 2005, he was in Iraq covering the Twenty-Fourth Marines out of Camp Fallujah. Johannes accompanied them on ambush operations, ordnance searches, snatch and grab, and security and stabilization operations. He was also present in Baghdad when the members of the Iraqi national assembly finalized their new constitution. His versatile career has included stints as a news photographer, a documentary producer, and a news director. In politics, he has served as an aide to Kansas senator Sam Brownback and as a special assistant to Kansas attorney general Phill Kline.

Lieutenant Lawrence Indyk spent most of his active-duty career in Iraq as the leader of the chemical platoon of the 3-2 Striker Brigade combat team. After a twist of fate kept him from visiting the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, Indyk enlisted in the U.S. Army. Lt. Indyk went through basic training at Fort Sill, then officer training school at Fort Benning. In Iraq, his principal posting was at Talifar, a city of 250,000, roughly eighty kilometers equidistant between Mosul and the Syrian border. Indyk earned a Purple Heart during action on May 29, 2004, when a roadside bomb upended his vehicle as he drove security for a convoy headed from Talifar to Mosul.

Danielle Pletka is the vice president for foreign and defense policy studies at AEI. Her research areas include the Middle East (including Iran, Iraq, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict), South Asia (India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan), terrorism, and weapons proliferation. While at AEI, Ms. Pletka has developed a conference series on rebuilding post-Saddam Iraq, a project on democracy for the Arab world, a roundtable of experts to discuss global energy security, and a project to develop bilateral relations between India and the United States. She recently served as a member of the congressionally mandated Task Force on the United Nations, established by the United States Institute of Peace. Before coming to AEI, she served for ten years as a senior professional staff member for the Near East and South Asia on the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations. Ms. Pletka has also been a journalist based in Washington and the Middle East.

F. J. ‘Bing’ West served in Marine infantry in Vietnam and as assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs in the Reagan administration. He is currently president of the GAMA Corporation, which designs war-games and combat decision-making simulations. West is the author of several books, including: Small Unit Action in Vietnam (Ayer Co., 1979); The Village (Pocket, 2003); The Pepperdogs: a Novel (Pocket, 2003); The March Up: Taking Baghdad with the US Marines (Bantam, 2003); and No True Glory: a Frontline Account of the Battle of Fallujah (Bantam, 2005). The March Up was awarded the Marine Corps Heritage prize for nonfiction, as well as the Colby award for military nonfiction. No True Glory will be published in late September. For Universal Studios, Mr. West is writing the screenplay about the Fallujah battle with his son, Owen, who served in Force Reconnaissance in Iraq. Mr. West regularly appears on The News Hour and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.