Mark Hamilton Berry

CAMP ROBINSON -- Outside the major general's office, at the end of a long carpeted hallway, is a simple two-star doormat. The two stars are for the office, the adjutant general. The doormat is for the soles of your shoes.

Earlier this year Maj. Gen. Mark Berry was sworn in as the TAG -- for "the adjutant general," and commonly given a redundant the -- making him the commanding officer of roughly 10,000 soldiers and airmen in the state's National Guard and agency director of the Military Department.

Up the double helix of the Guard's command, the TAG serves two very important men -- the governor and, because the mission includes readiness for overseas fighting, the President.

And there, outside his office, is a doormat announcing his rank -- two stars. If you're comfortable, go ahead and wipe your feet on the TAG's stars.

"If he gets a third star, does the doormat get replaced?" I asked jokingly.

Lt. Col. Keith Moore, the guard's public information officer, and Sgt. Stephanie Eddington, Berry's office aide, assured me it would indeed. Their affirmations had a kindly condescension common to uniformed staff confronted by civilian liberal arts majors.

Anyway, it's moot. The 59-year-old won't get that third star. In fact, this is his last duty. Like Arkansas state judges, the military forces retirement. Approaching 60 now, he's got about four years. So unlike his predecessor, Maj. Gen. (Ret.) William Wofford, Berry won't serve in Hutchinson's cabinet should the governor get re-elected.

Them's the rules, and don't expect any guff from Berry. "I believe God put me on this earth to do exactly what it is I'm doing right now, which is to be a guy in the military."

In that service, his greatest professional strength is following rules. He was raised military by military men -- Granddad was Army, Dad was an airman, and brother, too; sister went Navy. "Growing up with a military dad," you followed rules because "a lot of times, in the nature of our business, lives can be lost."

Berry is a man who, despite the uniform, and despite an austerity that occasionally rises to eccentricity -- "I will never wear shorts" -- has a lived-in Everyman look about him. His speaking voice has a cottony South-by-Southwest timbre not unlike George W. Bush's. At one point more than two decades ago he was the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville's Air Force ROTC professor, and he must have set young recruits -- and their parents -- at ease.

He was the 188th Fighter Wing's maintenance group commander in 2012 when Wofford effectively called him down to be chief of staff of the state's Air National Guard and gave him his first star. "From his past experience in his unit in Fort Smith ... he was well respected by the airmen who worked for him," Wofford said.

That Berry would succeed Wofford must have seemed improbable then. The state's National Guard comprises Army and Air Force personnel, but far more of the former. Not since 1966 has the adjutant general been an airman. Not that the stress of the job is uniquely suited to a soldier.

"General Berry has an extraordinary record of service to our country, both in leading men into combat zones as well as the administrative area," Hutchinson told me earlier this month. "That's the reason I chose him."

At the University of Arkansas Berry got to know his Army counterpart in the ROTC program, a senior in age, rank and no doubt bearing -- National Guard Col. Steve Womack. He's now a congressman from the state's 3rd District, and when fellow Benton County politician and newly elected governor Hutchinson called on him for his thoughts on a short list of possible adjutant generals, Womack put Berry at the top.

"I spoke to him candidly about how competent I thought Mark Berry would be," he said. "I just thought that Mark probably had the skill set and the experience necessary to navigate through some pretty challenging times."

Berry was born on a Texas Air Force base. Hawaii, California, Illinois, South Carolina were all "toured" before his dad retired and moved the family to Booneville, where Berry graduated high school. He can remember sitting in church at Shaw Air Force Base in South Carolina one Sunday night in 1961 when services stopped for an announcement -- base personnel were to report to stations. It was the Bay of Pigs invasion.

He wasn't an athlete or an academic, a longhair or a vo-tech kid. The first time in his life he was sure he was really good at something was up in an air traffic control tower. "I could push a lot of iron," he says.

Berry's is something of a binary world of either-or, right or wrong, this or that. He is an airman commanding soldiers. He has worn the uniform for four decades but briefly been "a suit." He has a tufted black leather office chair suitable to seat a silverback, that he's hardly ever in. He loves his miniature schnauzer, Harley.

He keeps two sets of chess pieces, a white king and pawn for his computer desk, and a black king and pawn for his writing desk. It's a metaphor, see.

Berry joined the delayed enlistment program for the Air Force months before attending his Booneville High School prom. He had been an enlisted air traffic controller for more than a decade before he got his bachelor's degree from Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach in 1984. That opened the door for officer training at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, right where he'd completed basic.

In 1985 (just one year later) he had a master's degree from Golden Gate University while stationed in Las Vegas -- Area 51, actually.

(I know what you're thinking, so I asked him -- point blank -- "Did you see aliens?" and he was like, "I can't really say," you know, because he was there supporting presidentially directed special projects, and that's like hugely classified. But then he told me -- point blank -- "Yeah, I never saw any. No.")

Back to chess.

"I've been this guy here," he says, holding up a pawn.

"And I'm this guy now," holding up the king.

"I've been that airman at the lowest bottom," he says, with the pawn again. "I started -- you can't get any lower than where I started."

"Now" -- the king again -- "I'm in this position here."

The lesson is there's a time for pawns and, with hard work and good fortune, a time for kings, but there is another occasion altogether -- for fellowship. "When this game is over and I have to take this uniform off, I'm going right back into this same box with everybody else."

One more thing about his desk: Except for the chess pieces, everything is arranged symmetrically and affixed in its place with double-sided adhesive tape. In the military, there's rules, there's regs, and then there's "very anal," he says.

PROMOTIONS

After completing a master's degree and officer training, Berry's promotions arrived on schedule, so to speak: second lieutenant July 3, 1985; first lieutenant July 3, 1987; and captain July 3, 1989. Briefly, in the early '90s, he left active service and became an investment representative for Edward Jones from an office in Logan County. "I always thought it was neat to wear a suit and tie every day," but he soon missed the uniform.

Within a short time he was back in it, this time for the Arkansas Air National Guard.

On Sept. 11, 1994, he became a major, and seven years and two days later, a lieutenant colonel. (That it was two days after the biggest terrorist attack on American soil is coincidental.)

He became a "full-bird" colonel in April 2006, and six years later a general.

Recently, Berry served as the vice chairman for the Air National Guard A-10 aircraft maintenance council, and president of the National Guard Association of Arkansas.

In his lifetime he has served four combat deployments in 13 designated combat locations. What nostalgia a civilian might bear for high school or prom or another customary American rite of passage he bears for his first deployment as an officer, to Osan Air Base in South Korea. There he found a new military family very much in the mold of his actual (military) family.

"Going to prom was just another date to me. The guys I was closest to was the first time I deployed to Korea for a year. Those are close bonds and relationships.

"Any time you deploy -- it was no different in Iraq in 2005 -- that's your family, those bonds and friendships. If there's any play, you do it together ... you sleep together, you eat together, you shower together, you work together, it's just, you're together all the time. What they're feeling and suffering, you share that. You get on the airplane together and come home with that same group of guys.

"You hope to come home with that same group of guys."

FEELING IT

Don't let the rank and title fool you; Berry's an affable guy. And don't let that affability fool you -- he's serious about formalities. National Guard Bureau Chief, four-star Gen. Frank Grass and Brigadier Gen. Patricia Anslow (his direct report) agree he's not a back-slapping kind of general.

"I'm not sure I'd use that term," Anslow said.

"He is what we call in the Army a soldier's soldier," Grass said -- a sentiment Anslow echoed. Further, Berry conforms to the image of the Arkansas Guard within the congress of states' Guards. That is, he's "leaning ahead" and "thinking of the future."

Huh? Arkansas?

"You all led the way not long ago with the 188th Wing out of Fort Smith, switching from the A-10 Warthog platform to unmanned systems. That unit is just doing great work for us as it stands up," Grass says.

Grass says Berry's "already hit me up" on getting a cyber unit stationed in Arkansas.

With the help of the state's congressional delegation led by U.S. Rep. French Hill (R-Ark.), the Guard's making a bid to get a Cyber Protection Team in an existing facility at the Little Rock Air Force Base, one designated for highly classified missions. Part of the sell is that the base and the Guard have the existing facilities and assets to save the taxpayer $4 million. It would be manned by perhaps 70 Arkansas Air National Guardsmen and would train cyber-savvy guardsmen throughout the country, Berry says.

Today, there are Arkansas guardsmen serving in harm's way overseas but no big unit deployments. "Onesies and twosies," the TAG says. The 1038th Horizontal Construction Company left Kuwait in the spring.

During Wofford's term -- eight years beginning in 2007 -- more than 8,000 Arkansas guardsmen served overseas. The Guard has transitioned from a wartime footing to what Anslow, commander of the Army National Guard in the state, called "not quite peacetime."

One of the general's greatest challenges will be maintaining readiness while adapting to "constrained budgets," she says. Womack agreed. The congressman said the Budget Control Act of 2011 (and subsequent across-the-board defense spending cuts) "restrains our ability to meet emerging threats" despite the steadiness with which those threats emerge.

Perhaps that means more collaboration between service branches. If so, Anslow and Womack said Berry is a great collaborator -- the first airman adjutant general in half a century would be.

When it's over no one will celebrate more than his wife, Theresa. The couple agree they could not have prepared for the rigor of this assignment. On weeknights, Berry stays at the TAG's residence at Camp Robinson. On weekends when he should be home with her in Ozark, he often is on some assignment, sometimes in another state.

Theresa's voice cracks talking about the strain. Ten years his junior, she is not only the wife of an airman but the mother of one, too, and a retired guardsman herself. When the opportunity for this service came to them, she genuinely wanted to know, can he make a difference in the lives of those 10,000?

What "I posed to him was, I'm all in ... if it's not about you," she says. "If it's for all those military people out there [because] you can help make a difference in their lives, then I'm all in, but it can't be about you."

And in return, what she would say to all of them is, "I always grew up thinking the generals all the way up were just rigid people, and you just couldn't even talk to them -- it's not at all like that."

NAN Profiles on 07/19/2015