US Service Personnel Profiles
 By Gary Ledoux, August 2, 2026

“My dad was in the Army Air Corps in WWII, so he and my mother moved around a lot. Even after he got out, his jobs had him moving frequently. Subsequently, I was born in Alexandria, VA, went to grade school in Baltimore, went to middle school in Northport, NY, and graduated from St. John’s Prep in Danvers, MA for high school,” started John Lohmann as he related his story. Extensive travel would be the story of his life as well.

After graduating from “the Prep,” Lohmann went on to Boston College, where he joined the ROTC program. He said, “My father had been in the Army Air Corps, and my brother had been in the Infantry in Germany. At that time, Vietnam was building, and I figured I would have to go anyway, so I might as well go as an officer.” Lohmann graduated from Boston College as a Commissioned Officer; a 2nd Lieutenant in the Infantry. Ironically, this was during the draft. When draft numbers were pulled for his age group, he came up #330 out of a possible 366. Had he not already signed a contract for an Army ROTC scholarship, he might not have served. But now, the die was cast.

Lohmann graduated from college on June 2, 1969. June 5, 1969, found him at Fort Benning, GA for the Infantry Officer Basic Course and Jump and Ranger schools. On December 6, just a few days out of Ranger school, Lohmann married Mary Patricia Graham. It was a short honeymoon because on December 29, Lohmann departed for his first duty station in Germany. Mary, being a year behind her now-husband in school, returned to Boston College, where she completed her studies early so she could join her husband.

Upon arriving at the Frankfurt in-processing center, the personnel there started addressing him as “Captain” despite his wearing his 2nd LT. single gold bar. “I’ll take the captain’s pay if you want to give it to me,” he said. “But I am still a 2nd Lieutenant.” As it turned out, there was another John Robert Lohman assigned to the outfit, but the captain spelled his name with one “N”, not two. And if that wasn’t strange enough, the captain also had a wife named Mary. After that mix-up was sorted out, 2nd Lt. John Lohmann, with two “N’s”, served as a platoon leader and as the company executive officer for the 1st Battalion, 39th Mechanized Infantry. Lt. Lohmann’s wife, Mary, joined him a short time later.

In November, 1971, Lohmann was transferred to Military Intelligence and moved to Fulda, Germany, as the Assistant Regimental S2, better known as the Intelligence Officer. Fulda was a town right on the border of East and West Germany. Lohmann remembered, “I was stationed a short way from what was known as the ‘Fulda Gap’, an area of land mines and barbed wire. If the Soviets were going to come through to the west, they would do it here.”

It was during this time that Lohman’s son, Scott, was born. Lohmann noted, “Mary went to the local hospital there in Germany. She didn’t speak any German; nobody there spoke English.” But babies manage to be born no matter what language is spoken. The process is all the same, and mom and baby were fine.

On May 2, 1972, Lohmann was picking up his wife and son at the Visiting Officer’s Quarters while on temporary duty assignment to 5th Corps. They were preparing to return to the Officers Club when they heard two large explosions. A few moments later they found that the Bader Meinhof Gang had bombed the entrances to the Officers Club and the 5th Corps Headquarters. By the time Lohmann and his wife and son arrived, the place was surrounded by a company of American soldiers and had the area secured. The Lohmanns were planning on having dinner there, but now, that wasn’t going to happen. And unfortunately, it was a Monday night, and all the restaurants in town were closed on Monday. To make matters worse, an Army Lt. Colonel, a dentist, was killed in the blast. He was only weeks away from his retirement.

(Author’s Note: The Red Army Faction, aka the Baader-Meinhof Group or Gang, was a west German, far-left militant terrorist group. They described themselves as a communist and anti-imperialist urban guerrilla group engaged in armed resistance to what it considered a fascist state.)

December, 1972 saw Lohmann transferred to Fort Huachuca in Arizona for some courses in military intelligence. The couple and their young son would spend their next two years at this base. On June 14, 1973, they had another child, a daughter, Christine. Fort Huachuca, originally called Camp Huachuca, was established in 1877 to protect Arizona’s early settlers. The storied city of Tombstone is only 18 miles away. The base was named for the nearby Huachuca Mountains, which, in turn, is an Indian word. Loosely translated it means “a place of thunder.” In 1971, the Military Intelligence Corps centralized their operations there, consolidating all military intelligence training at this base.  Lohmann recalled, “Because this base does not have a typical naming protocol, like being named after high-ranking military personnel, or a military hero, when asked where she was born, my daughter always had to explain where and what Fort Huachuca was!”

Lohmann thought he might end up in Vietnam. But by this time, the war in Vietnam was winding down. In March 1973, Lohmann received orders to go to Seoul, South Korea. Lohmann remembered receiving those orders, “At that time, Seoul was a modern, metropolitan city. The person I was replacing was going to set me up with a nice apartment for my family, and a fairly new American car to drive. I was all set! Then, at the last minute the orders changed. I was being sent to Taegu, South Korea. That was a major disappointment after knowing what I would have had in Seoul. Taegu, at that time was very primitive. I was to be the S2 for the 19th Support Brigade for the next year.”

(Author’s Note: Today, the city of Taegu has changed its name to Daegu and, with a population of 2.3 million, is the third largest metropolitan area of South Korea.)

In June, 1975, the Lohmann family said good-bye to South Korea and hello to the USA. Lohmann was assigned to the Defense Intelligence Agency in Virgina, just outside Washington, DC.

This led to another transfer in June, 1978; this time to the Defense Language Institute in Monterrey, CA to learn basic Russian. Commenting that it was a very picturesque place to be assigned, Lohmann replied, “Yes, but we didn’t see much of it. Every day for 8 hours a day we were learning Russian. I had taken two years of Russian at Boston College. That helped me for the first few weeks, Then, I was as lost as everyone else.”

For a more in-depth Russian experience, in June, 1979, Lohmann was sent to the US Army Russian Institute in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany. This is an alpine ski town in Bavaria in southern Germany, nestled in the Bavarian Alps. Lohmann called it, “the Vail, Colorado of Germany.” It was here that Lohmann became a Soviet FAO; Foreign Area Officer.

While they were stationed in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, the students visited the Warsaw Pact countries: Bulgaria, East Germany, Poland, Hungary, Romania; as well as the Soviet Union on two trips, one, a week in Moscow, and the second, a trip to Leningrad.  They travelled in civilian clothes to be inconspicuous. However, each country’s state dept. knew that they were US Army officers. Lohmann remembered that assignment, “Ordinarily, we spoke in Russian. But sometimes, we would encounter some people who, hearing us speak Russian, just shunned us. They thought we were Russians and they hated Russians. But then we spoke in English and explained we were Americans and that we were there to learn about their country. Then, they were OK with us… and we went back to speaking Russian.” 

This was from June, 1981 to 1983, when Lohmann was assigned to the 66th Military Intelligence Group based in Munich. 

In 1983 through 1985, Lohmann was the S2 for the 10th Special Forces Group (Airborne) at Fort Devens, in Shirley, MA. Lohmann noted, “When I was in jump school and Ranger school, I made the required six parachute jumps. But I hadn’t jumped out of an airplane since 1969, something I had to be able to do in the 10th Special Forces Group (Airborne.) I had not jumped in a long time. While with the 10th Special Forces, I had to make ten jumps. I was lucky. What my brain had forgotten about jumping, my body remembered. I didn’t break anything!”

From 1985 through 1987, it was back to the Defense Intelligence Agency in Virginia.

The Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty was signed on December 8, 1987, by U.S. President Ronald Reagan and Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev, and ratified in 1988. It required both nations to eliminate all nuclear and conventional ground-launched ballistic and cruise missiles with ranges between 500 and 5,500 kilometers, along with their launchers, support structures, and equipment, within three years of entering into force. This marked the first time the superpowers agreed to abolish an entire category of nuclear weapons and implement extensive on-site inspections for verification. In 1988, Lohmann became an Inspection Team Chief, conducting training inspections from California to Georgia and England.  

Then, it was time to go on some official inspections… for real… in Siberia. “That was one long trip” Lohmann remembered. “We went from California to Hawaii, to Tokyo and then to Siberia. If we had been able to fly directly from Tokyo to our destination, a Siberian town called Ulan Ude, it would have been a relatively short flight. But going that way meant flying through Chinese air space and they just weren’t having that. So, it added five hours to an already punishing trip. We reached Ulan Ude on July 2, 1988. It was snowing until just before we landed. By the time we actually landed, the temperature had risen to 40 degrees. Our Soviet hosts kept us in a cocoon. We all had to eat and sleep together. There was no getting out of their sight.”

Lohmann continues, “The following day we had our first inspection, at Barnaul, 1,000 miles west of Ulan Ude, in 80+ degree weather. We had lunch at a cafeteria where one of the waitresses wore some rather revealing clothing. Upon our debriefing session in Tokyo, one of our debriefers commented on her probably just being ‘hot.’ I told him I had been to Moscow several times and that was NOT standard work attire, but more likely a KGB attempt to record the interests of the male inspectors.” In our interview, Lohmann went on to say that the other waiters and kitchen help did not look like standard kitchen-issue either; that they were probably KGB operatives.

Over the course of 1988 to 1990, the team made about two dozen missile inspections along the border of the Soviet Union. Lohmann related the following stories about those inspections:

When we arrived at a site near Vladivostok, the base commander gave us a briefing that included a warning not to go off base since tigers were in the area.  We thought it was just a story to prevent our going outside of the base.  Coincidentally, a few months later, National Geographic had an issue about the Soviet Union, complete with a map of the country.  The area in the Far East where the base was located was marked as the habitat of… the Siberian Tigers!

At the same base, they had built a three-story building to serve as the quarters for the inspectors.  On each floor were two very attractive women in their mid-20s.  They were introduced by the “House Mother” as attendants to assist the inspectors on their respective floors.  They all spoke perfect English.  After meeting each of the women, we returned to the first floor, and I asked the House Mother where they found so many perfect-English speakers.  She told me that they were English teachers in the local elementary schools!  [The KGB types again.]. She then told me that if there was ANYTHING I needed, just to tell her.  I told her, “Sleep” and went into my room.

During a month-long inspection in Kazakhstan, we were invited to a show in the theater of a local town.  I asked what was going to be in the show.  I was told it would feature the latest female negligees from Moscow.  I declined the invitation, much to the frustration of the male inspectors.  [The KGB never slept.]

We inspected a site in Turkmenistan and the entire team came down with dysentery by the time we returned to Frankfurt.

Lohmann retired from the Army on January 31, 1991, a Lt. Colonel. Not long after, he discovered the CIA was looking for a Russian-speaking agent who would be based in an office in Virgina. He took the job. He noted, “Although I was based in Virginia, my job took me to five different continents. I missed Australia and Antarctica.”

In 1991, he became a CIA liaison officer to the Joint Staff at the Pentagon. On September 11, 2001, Lohmann was in the basement of the Pentagon watching the commotion unfold in New York. Lohmann picks up the story, “We sat in the basement of the Pentagon watching TV, stunned at what we were seeing. When the second plane hit, we knew this could not be a coincidence. We anticipated going to war-time operations. Then, much to our surprise, the news reported smoke coming from the Pentagon – it had been hit! Our building was on fire! Fortunately, we were on the opposite side of the building and never even felt the crash. As it turned out, work crews had just finished making repairs and reinforcements on the outside wall, exactly at the spot where the plane crashed. Because it hit a reinforced structure, at almost ground level, the plane was stopped dead. Had the plane hit the fifth (top) floor, it might have sailed across the center court area and into the building on the opposite side, causing more loss of life than the 125 that died. The next day, I reported to work at 4:30 a.m. and had to go through two checkpoints. Security was tight.”

In April and May, 2002, Lohmann found himself stationed in Kabul, Afghanistan with a short trip to Jalalabad. Lohmann remembered a very sketchy flight to Jalalabad: “We flew in an old Soviet helicopter filled with eight men, 50,000 rounds of ammunition, and 3,000 pounds of jet fuel… on a route through a valley where the flight had encountered harassment and interdiction (H&I) fire the night before.”

In 2003 and 2004, Lohmann served as a Counterterrorism Liaison officer to FBI Headquarters in Washington, DC. Lohmann talks about one standout event during that tour. “I worked with the FBI to help stop an attempt on the President’s life. George W. Bush was the President at the time. A guy in New Jersey intended to go to Russia, buy a surface-to-air missile, and sell it to a terrorist who would take out Air Force One in flight. The buyer made it all the way to Russia, and actually purchased the weapon. But Lohmann and the FBI were one step ahead of him. What he actually bought was a tube with the explosive device and all the electronics removed. Upon arriving back in New Jersey, he made the sale of the missile… to an undercover FBI agent. The missile-merchant received 13 years in prison, and George W. Bush lived to fly another day.”

Lohmann retired from the Agency in 2004 and moved to Grantham, NH, where he spent the next three years teaching counter terrorism on-line for the American Military University.

In 2020, Lohmann retired for the third and final time and moved to where he lives today, in Londonderry, NH.