Next month I will be talking to a veterans support group about PTSD in the 70s Army and during the Iraq War. It was fun to try to put my military career in 100 words:
Neil Gussman has a love-hate relationship with the U.S. military. He enlisted in the U.S. Air Force in 1972. He was trained as a missile electronics technician. For two year he did live-fire testing of missiles from the Sidewinder wing rocket to the Minuteman ICBM. He was blinded in a testing accident, left the Air Force, then a year later re-enlisted in the Army.
He then served four years as a tank commander in Colorado and West Germany. He left the Army in 1979, but served in a reserve tank unit from 1982-85. He was a bearded civilian writing about chemistry and electronics until 2007 when he re-enlisted in the Army National Guard at age 54. On his 56th birthday in 2009 he began a one-year deployment to Iraq with a Combat Aviation Brigade.
He finally left the National Guard on May 2, 2016, on his 63rd birthday.
Outside of the military, Gussman is the father of six children--three adopted, two the old fashioned way and one step daughter. Between leaving the Army in 1985 and civilian retirement in 2015, Gussman worked for chemical and electronics companies as a writer and occasionally as a journalist.
In his long life, Gussman has owned 40 cars, trucks and motorcycles and broken 40 bones, repaired by 26 surgeries. He was never the safety NCO in any unit he served in.
