Robert Williams is a retired Army officer who lives in Northern Virginia. Enlisting in the US Army in 1982 into the Infantry his first assignment was Fort Lewis, Washington. The high point of this first tour was climbing Mount Rainier and many weekends spent in Pioneer Square Tavern in Seattle. His thirty-two-year Army career was one of two halves, the first being assignments with the Infantry and the latter eighteen years as a Russia Foreign Area officer with multiple assignments in Eastern Europe and missions in Russia proper.Born in 1960 in Memphis, Tennessee he lived there a very short time before moving to West Memphis, Arkansas. Growing up as the son of a schoolteacher he was encouraged from an early age to read and to this day remains an avid reader. His summers were spent in Tyronza, Arkansas where he along with his siblings and cousins worked for their maternal grandfather chopping cotton and soybeans. Cotton in the south was a year-round affair beginning with planting in the spring, chopping in the summer and packing down the trailers in the fall when it was harvested. During spare time he read the Hardy Boys and Classics from Mark Twain to include Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.After graduating from high school Bob moved to Salinas, California before moving to southern California where he lived in Ventura. When living in Salinas he became enamored with the famous local author John Steinbeck reading several of his classics. His favorites were The Grapes of Wrath and Cannery Row. After a few years living in California, he moved back to Arkansas and shortly thereafter enlisted in the Army.While in College in 1987 at the University of Memphis and enrolled in a Medical Anthropology course the seed for writing was planted. A course requirement he penned received high praise and encouragement from his instructor Dr. Ruthbeth Finerman. Ms. Finerman encouraged Bob to try at getting the paper published as an article in Memphis Magazine. He never made the attempt but the praise and encouragement from such an esteemed professor who he greatly admired stuck with him for years to come.Years later when in a Master's Program for Russian and Eastern European Studies he would be required to write a thesis on the Russia and Chechnya conflict 94/96. He also dove head on into more reading in the required Russian literature, his favorite being Fyodor Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment. But it was a British author, George Orwell and his allegorical novella Animal Farm that was his favorite. This story would resurface seventeen years later and while on vacation with his family in South Carolina the seed planted in Memphis in 1987 twenty plus years earlier would germinate and he would open Rainbow Farm.
