[TLO.ORG] Gen. Frederick Kroesen led combat troops in three wars, held major Army command posts and served as vice chief of staff of the Army.But when he died on April 30 in Alexandria, Va., at 97, he was remembered as well for narrowly escaping death in an assassination attempt by a left-wing German terrorist group on Sept. 15, 1981.
General Kroesen, the four-star commander of some 220,000 American troops as well as NATO forces in Europe, was being driven to his headquarters in Heidelberg, West Germany, in a Mercedes-Benz with armor plating, a precaution against a possible terrorist attack, when two rocket-propelled antitank grenades were fired at it from a wooded hillside.
The first one exploded in the trunk of the car, partly shattering its rear window, and exited through a fender. A second grenade missed the vehicle. At least eight shots were fired at the auto and an accompanying military police vehicle, but none penetrated the passenger compartments.
"The glass on the back window all broke — and I fell forward — and cut me all over the back of my head," General Kroesen recalled in 1998 in an interview for an oral history project at Rutgers University, his alma mater. "My wife looked over at me, and she thought I was dead, because she thought that the whole back of my head had been blown out."
General Kroesen and his wife, Rowene Kroesen, who had accompanied him on her way to a dental visit, were cut by flying glass and treated at a hospital, then went about their day’s tasks. No one else was injured.