MARK PREUSS

CHILDHOOD

Whether growing up in small town or a large city, the uniqueness of your childhood is with you the rest of your life. We all have a childhood, a past, a beginning. The short story is I lived on military bases until I was a teenager. I'm the son of a U.S. soldier, a career army sergeant.

The long story: I was born during the winter of 1959 in Berlin, Germany. My father, George, was a 22 year old US Army sergeant born and raised in New York. My mother, Margo, was an X-ray technician from Vermont. I grew up during the era of the Vietnam War, the 1960's in America, one of the most turbulent decades in American history.

I was the oldest of four children .We lived almost exclusively on military bases until I was 15 years old. We shopped at the PX and commissary. We had access to base privileges such as the gym, swimming pool, bowling alley, and the movie theater. Everything on base was practically free, but you always had to show your ID card.

Military ideology dominated my life and influenced my core values as a child. Regimentation and structure were ever present in base life. Officers and officers’ children had access to different base privileges than did enlisted personnel. On base, soldiers were held to very high standards of public conduct. I grew up in this regimented, rank-structured world of high personal conduct. I internalized military values and ideology. For military children the military base was the world and off base was the other world, a strange place.

America entered the Vietnam War the year I was born. My father served three separate 18-month-tours in Vietnam. In 1962 he was a US military adviser who trained South Vietnamese soldiers. In 1965 and 1970 he served combat tours with the 101st Airborne Division, “The Screaming Eagles.” Between 1965 and 1972, the 101st participated in 15 combat missions. The 101st was the last combat division to leave Vietnam and suffered twice as many casualties there as it did in World War II. Seventeen 101st soldiers were awarded the Medal of Honor

Television coverage of Vietnam was relentless. The graphic images of protest and rage over Vietnam were on a scale that would be unacceptable today. For me, all war images, news, and movies were a connection to my father. When I saw soldiers on the news. I knew one of them was my father.

While he was home, my father and I built things together. We made book cases and furniture; we repaired cars. I remember getting a lot of instruction on the use of hand tools and wood, along with a heavy dose of a military style discipline.

As influential as the TV was, my father truly brought the conflict of a nation into our house. Few of us could spend months in the jungle fighting and trying not to be killed, then come home to be a normal father, much less a normal person.

My father was no TV or movie soldier. He was angry. By 1971 I think he was becoming anti-military. In 1971 he left for his third and final 18-month tour of duty in Vietnam. When he came home he was a complete stranger; not just to me, but to a society that was just starting to get over the psychosis that was America during the 1960’s.

Anything connected to the military was part of the evil military/government complex. Soldiers like my father went into the military as honorable men. But many of them came out only to be called victims, drug addicts, or murderers. Nobody called them heroes. We all lost our heroes. We were all tainted.

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