Career
He attended Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, where he won the Infantry Sword of Honour, and was commissioned as an officer in the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry in 1956. He served in operations against EOKA in Cyprus, and in Malaysia, countering incursions by Indonesia into northern Borneo, in the early 1960s. His regiment became the 1st Green Jackets (43rd and 52nd) in 1958, and was merged into The Royal Green Jackets in 1966, becoming its 1st Battalion.
Jones married Suzanne Leschallas in 1965. They had two sons and a daughter together.
He took command of the 1st Battalion for a tour in South Armagh in 1975, and was mentioned in dispatches. During his period of command, the internal operations of his battalion were exposed to public scrutiny in Edward Mirzoeff's film, The Regiment. He also served with the United Nations Peacekeeping Force in Cyprus in 1976.
In the late 1970s, he was the colonel in charge of MO4, the office at the Ministry of Defence responsible for Northern Ireland at the height of the Troubles, when Airey Neave was murdered by a bomb at the House of Commons car park, and Provisional Irish Republican Army detainees undertook hunger strikes.
Jones attended the Royal College of Defence Studies in 1980, and was promoted to brigadier in 1981 to take command of the 6th Armoured Brigade in Germany, his first duty with the British Army of the Rhine. He then took command of a British military team in Zimbabwe in 1983, establishing a working workmanlike relationship with Robert Mugabe in the years after Zimbabwe became independent in 1980, for which he was appointed CBE.
He was promoted to major-general in 1985, and became Director-General of the Territorial Army at the Ministry of Defence. He then took command of the 3rd Armoured Division in Germany in 1987. He received the KCB in 1988 when he was promoted to lieutenant-general, when he returned to London to become Quartermaster-General to the Forces. He was tasked with remodelling the Army's logistics after the end of the Cold War, and continued in that position through the 1991 Gulf War. He was also Colonel Commandant of the Royal Army Education Corps from 1986 to 1992, and of the Royal Green Jackets from 1988 to 1995.
He was promoted a full general in 1992, and became the UK's military representative at NATO headquarters in Brussels, where he was able to make use of his fluent French.
Read more about this topic: Edward Jones (British Army Officer)
Famous quotes containing the word career:
“The 19-year-old Diana ... decided to make her career that of wife. Today that can be a very, very iffy line of work.... And what sometimes happens to the women who pursue it is the best argument imaginable for teaching girls that they should always be able to take care of themselves.”
—Anna Quindlen (b. 1952)
“I’ve been in the twilight of my career longer than most people have had their career.”
—Martina Navratilova (b. 1956)
“I doubt that I would have taken so many leaps in my own writing or been as clear about my feminist and political commitments if I had not been anointed as early as I was. Some major form of recognition seems to have to mark a woman’s career for her to be able to go out on a limb without having her credentials questioned.”
—Ruth Behar (b. 1956)