four-star general
who is currently serving as the 7th United States Secretary of Veterans Affairs
. His final U.S. Army post was as the 34th Chief of Staff of the Army
(1999–2003). He is a veteran of combat in Vietnam, having been left with a maimed foot.
Shinseki was born in Lihue, Kauai
in the then Territory of Hawaii
, to an American family of Japanese Ancestry. His grandparents immigrated from Hiroshima
to Hawaii in 1901. He grew up in a sugar plantation community on Kaua'i and graduated from Kaua'i High and Intermediate School in 1960.
If you dislike change, you're going to dislike irrelevance even more.
It has been very humbling and gratifying to have these men as our role models... Your generation enabled America to close out the twentieth century as the greatest nation in the history of mankind, the only remaining superpower, the world's leading economy and the world's most respected and feared military force in the world- respected by our friends and allies, feared by our adversaries.
You must love those you lead before you can be an effective leader. You can certainly command without that sense of commitment, but you cannot lead without it.
I do not want to criticize while my soldiers are still bleeding and dying in Iraq.