John Fenzel is a senior Army Special Forces officer who has served on our nation’s battlefields around the world. He has served as a military assistant on the personal staff of the Secretary of Defense, as a Special Assistant to the Vice President, and as a White House Fellow during the Clinton and Bush administrations.
He commanded the Special Forces Training Battalion at Fort Bragg, North Carolina and an Army brigade at Fort Knox, Kentucky. In the wake of the September 11th attacks, he served as Staff Director for Tom Ridge in the Homeland Security Council. He was the principal architect of The Homeland Advisory System, our nation’s color-coded alert system.
In his 30 years of military service, John has served in numerous command and staff positions around the world. During Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm, he commanded a Special Forces “A-Team,” training, equipping and advising a Kuwaiti Battalion and accompanying them during the liberation of Kuwait. He has commanded three Special Forces companies, leading the first Army deployments to Pakistan and the Baltic States. In Bosnia he commanded the special operations teams in the U.S. and British sectors, working closely with the United Nations to secure the indictments and convictions of those responsible for war crimes in Srebrenica. He is the only active duty American military officer to testify at The Hague in support of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY).
John is a graduate of the Naval War College and the National War College. Born in Iowa and raised outside Chicago, John lives with his wife and three children in Annapolis, MD. John is the author of three acclaimed novels, The Lazarus Covenant (2009), The Sterling Forest (2016) and The Fifth Column (2018).
