I was really impressed with the catalogue of his past accomplishments. Here's what the book's back cover says about him:
Ralph Peters is an Army officer with over two decades of service. He has traveled to more than forty countries, from the Andean Ridge to the Hindu Kush, and from Mexican drug havens to the civil wars of the former Soviet Union. He has published six novels on diverse themes, as well as doxens of acclaimed but controversial articles on strategy, military theory and ethics. Regarded as a cutting-edge thinker on culture and conflict, he has cleaned latrines as a private, negotiated with the KGB in the Kremlin, slept in the mud with the Infantry, advised U.S. and foreign ambassadors, gone alone into Fundamentalist-run refugee camps, lectured internationally, cheerfully carried diplomatic pouches for a very confused Iranian embassy, and served in the Executive Office of the President. Mistaken for a soccer player from Haiti, he has been marched off a train at machine-gun point in the former Yugoslavia; he has raided drug traffickers, been guest of the Khyber Rifles, labored in the shadows of Ararat, parleyed with aging Germans in Bolivia, poked around the Amazon, fallen off the odd mountain, and applied himelf to the mosques of Samarkand. He spends his best days with his wife, a journalist, at their home on Capitol Hill.