Born in Wurzberg, Germany on February 26, 1948, Nelson Drew was an career Air Force Officer who was killed in a tragic accident while working on the Balkan Peace plan on August 19, 1995.The country of Bosnia and Herzegovina remembers the sacrifice of these Diplomats with a memorial at the crash site. FROM FIND A GRAVE: United States Diplomat. He earned several degrees from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He also earned a degree from the University of Virginia. He served as an operational intelligence officer in the United States and overseas until 1980. From then until 1983 and again in 1989, he taught political science at the Air Force Academy. He was named a National Security Fellow at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government in 1989, leaving a year later to become United States Assistant for Defense Operations and Policy for NATO in Brussels. He became a professor of national security policy at the National War College in January 1994, and was named in January 1995, to serve as NATO Branch Chief in the Directorate for Strategic Plans and Policy of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He had achieved the rank of Colonel. He had recently been named the Director of European Affairs for the National Security Council. He was largely responsible for investing the military and diplomatic initiatives of the United States and Bosnia with a coherent design for peace. He was universally respected for his knowledge, his negotiating skills, his strategic thinking about the future of NATO and Europe after the Cold War. While on their way to Sarajevo to discuss new peace plans in the Balkans, he and two other US diplomats (Joseph Kruzel, and Robert C. Frasure) were killed when a rain-soaked dirt road collapsed beneath the armored personnel carrier in which they were traveling in, sending the vehicle rolling down a 500-meter slope into a ravine. President Clinton awarded him the Presidential Citizens Medal posthumously.