Chapter 1: My Life Before Turkey

A few excerpts from Chapter I:

My Life Before Turkey

NOTE:  This chapter on my life before Turkey is included so that the reader may have an idea of the experiences that influenced me during the first three decades of my life, experiences which in turn influenced my reactions to, as well as my observations concerning the Turkish people in general and especially the Turkish officer corps (particularly general staff [kurmay] officers), the Turkish political system and other things Turkey-related.

Childhood

Mary Kate & Preston Hughes, 1942

 I was born on March 27, 1943, at Walter Reed Army Hospital in Washington, DC.  My father, Preston Lyttle Hughes, was the son of a Virginia farmer. When I was born my father was a 40-year-old Army sergeant, assigned to the newly opened Pentagon to be a driver and enlisted aide for senior Army officers.  My mother, Mary Kate McNeel, was the 27-year-old daughter of a Mississippi politician who had been elected to positions at the county and state level. After graduating from Mississippi State College for Women and then working briefly in two civil service jobs in Tennessee and Arkansas, she came to Washington in the summer of 1941, joining the wave of young women who had rushed to the Capital to find a job in the rapidly expanding pre-war civil service. 

Lyttle Preston Hughes joins the family

Upon arrival in Washington she was quickly hired into a clerical position in the Internal Revenue Service.  Preston and Mary Kate met in the early fall of 1941, a few months before Pearl Harbor, and they married on February 28, 1942. A little over a year later I came along. 

(Soon after I was born, my father began an assignment as chauffeur and enlisted aide to Lieutenant General Brehon Sommervell, Commanding General of Army Service Forces [previously known as Services of Supply]. My father held this job throughout the War.)

Preston Hughes, late 1940s

At home in Arlington, Virginia

A young soldier in the making

With mother,
Mary Kate

High School in Kosciusko, MS
 (Preston, bottom left)

(page 4) I completed Junior High and High School in Kosciusko, graduating from Kosciusko High School in May 1961.

 I had been a good student and graduated third in my class academically. 

Hamburger eating contest, KHS

 As for athletics, I was only mediocre.  I played football throughout high school, playing my last year at 6’ 3” tall and 155 pounds.  

One particularly memorable highlight of my high school years came during my senior year when our football team won a hard-fought 14-13 victory over tough rival Louisville. We went on to go undefeated that year and win the conference championship. 

Being a part of that team was one of my most special memories from those years. 

I also had a dog—a beagle hound I named Pete—during my high school years.  Many afternoons after school and on Saturdays I would take Pete into the swamp behind our house to hunt for rabbits. He had a sweet disposition and a wonderful bay (bark) when trailing a rabbit. We spent many happy hours together roaming over the countryside.

 All in all, it was a good way for a boy to grow up—working in the garden, hunting and fishing, mowing lawns for spending money, attending church and participating in church-related activities and, later on in high school, taking girls to the drive-in movie.  (By this time I also had a “steady” girlfriend.  Because we went to the same church, we got to see each other quite a bit, and on most weekends we went to a movie at the local drive-in theater.  Sometimes we watched the movie!)

At West Point

(page 6)  Life at West Point was hard, but the structure helped me to get through. 

After the first year there, life got much easier and more enjoyable, and I began to do better academically (now that calculus was behind me). Cadets such as I who were not on varsity sport squads played intramural sports, a different sport for each of the three seasons of the school year (fall, winter and spring). Some of the sports I played, in which I had never participated before, were: water polo, wrestling, soccer and cross country.






(page 7)  When I arrived at West Point in 1961, one of the first things cadets were required to memorize was the “Cadet Prayer”.  Because it has remained an important creed for me throughout my life, I include it here:

        O God, our Father, thou Searcher of men’s hearts, help us to draw near to Thee in

    sincerity and in truth. May our religion be filled with gladness and our worship of Thee be

    natural.

        Strengthen and increase our admiration for honest dealing and clean thinking, and suffer

    not our hatred of hypocrisy and pretense ever to diminish.

        Encourage us in our endeavor to live above the common level of life.

        Make us to choose the harder right instead of the easier wrong, and never to be content   

    with the half-truth when the whole can be won.

        Endow us with courage that is born of loyalty to all that is noble and worthy, that scorns to

    compromise with vice and injustice, and knows no fear when truth and right are in jeopardy.

        Guard us against flippancy and irreverence in the sacred things of life.

        Grant us new ties of friendship and new opportunities of service.

        Kindle our hearts in fellowship with those of a cheerful countenance and soften our hearts

     with sympathy for those who sorrow and suffer.

        Help us to maintain the honor of the Corps untarnished and unsullied, and to show forth

      in our lives the ideals of West Point in doing our duty to Thee and to our Country.

        All of which we ask in the name of the Great Friend and Master of men.      Amen. 

I have tried to live my life according to the ideals expressed in this prayer.

VIETNAM

(page 12)  In late May, the bulk of our unit boarded a troop ship in Oakland, California, and sailed for Vietnam. (A small party had preceded us, going by plane in order to establish a base camp before our arrival.) 

Not long after we arrived and settled into our base camp in Xuan Loc, some 50 miles east of Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City), the battalion’s three firing batteries were farmed out to different parts of south-central Vietnam (III Corps zone), each with the mission of providing general support to infantry units. 

Hughes served 2 tours in Vietnam

During the year I was in Vietnam (tours of duty in Vietnam were for one year, though one could volunteer to stay longer), I served as a Forward Observer and, subsequently, as the Battery Executive Officer of Charley Battery.

For the approximately six months that I was with Charley Battery, we were constantly on the move, deploying to and occupying new, unprepared positions—sometimes more than one move a day—in order to be able to support troops who were also constantly moving, patrolling, conducting search and destroy operations.   Many days our six howitzers fired a total of several hundred rounds (on a few days it was more than 1000 rounds), frequently firing in close support of our troops in combat. In fact, Charley Battery alone fired well over 50,000 rounds during its first year in Vietnam, which is a lot of firing for that type of weapon. Charley Battery, as well as the other two firing batteries of the battalion, earned respect from the units we supported for accurate and timely fire support.

My grandmother wrote on the back of this solemn photo:  "The Face of War"        

                "Buster in Vietnam, 1969"

(page 19)  In late October one of my classmates asked me if I would like to go on a “blind date” with a friend of his girlfriend. I accepted, and on October 31, Halloween night, my classmate, his girlfriend, her friend and I went to a movie:  “It’s A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World”—an extra-long, somewhat goofy comedy. My date, Ann Grimshaw, from southern Utah, was teaching kindergarten in California. She was tall, had beautiful, long hair and was quite attractive. The evening went well, and during the next few weeks Ann and I had several more dates. By early December, a little more than a month after our first date, we were talking about marriage. As we would often explain in later years, she was looking for a husband to support her and I was looking for a wife to take to Turkey.

Preston & Ann Hughes
 4/2/1971

We were married on April 2, 1971, in a very small ceremony in the home where Ann was living. The students in my Turkish language class and our head instructor, Bay (Mr) Gençoğlu, attended our wedding and decorated my car with Turkish sayings, such as “Bitti Birader” (loosely, It’s all over now, Brother). 

Ann and Preston in their Salt Lake City apartment. 

 In June 1971, after I had finished the Turkish language course and Ann had finished her year of teaching, we loaded up our few belongings and, singing along with the Carpenters’ “We’ve Only Just Begun” on the car radio, we left California and headed east to Salt Lake City for the second phase of the FAST program: post graduate study at the University of Utah.

Above, with Jonathan in SLC