Home Front: Mike Stockheimer

More than 50 years later, he can see something the young man boarding that airplane could not.

Military service would last only three years. The friendships, lessons and sense of responsibility that came with it would follow him for the rest of his life.

Stockheimer grew up on a dairy farm near Stratford, about a mile east of where he lives today. He attended Stratford High School, played football briefly and eventually found his place in cross-country and track. Running suited him. Over his junior and senior years, he estimates he covered more than 3,000 miles.

Farm life also gave him an early interest in mechanics. He remembers watching his father tear down a tractor engine in the garage despite having no formal mechanical training.

When Stockheimer took the military aptitude test, mechanics was where he scored highest.

The Army seemed like a natural direction.

There was another influence as well. One of the young men he ran cross-country with came from a family with six brothers who had served in the military, all in the Army. Stockheimer and several classmates eventually made the decision together.

His mother was less enthusiastic.

The Vietnam War was still underway, and because Stockheimer entered the Delayed Entry Program while he was still 17, his parents had to sign for him.

His father sent him off with advice Mike remembers more than five decades later.

“I sure hope you learn how to take orders,” he told him, “because you don’t listen around here.”

Stockheimer laughs about it today.

Like many teenagers, he said, he felt “10 feet tall and Superman” and assumed the older generation did not know nearly as much as he did.

“You come to find out later in life,” he said, “they knew a lot.”

His sister recently shared another memory he had never known. After hearing the song “Seven Hodag Boys of ’74,” she told Mike she remembered the day he left from Rhinelander and how difficult it was for her to watch her brother go.

At the time, Mike was looking forward.

He and other Wisconsin recruits traveled to Fort Knox as part of what he remembers as the third and final Hodag Platoon. Four of his high school classmates were in the same platoon during basic training, giving the young soldiers a built-in sense of familiarity as military life began.

Basic training did not overwhelm him physically. Years of farm work and distance running had prepared him well.

Mentally, it was different.

The Army had its own way of doing things, and Stockheimer had to learn that sometimes the answer was simply to follow the order.

He also had to learn to speak up.

At graduation, Stockheimer weighed only about 135 pounds and described himself as extremely shy. Somewhere during his early Army years, he picked up a nickname that would remain with him among his military friends.

“Mouse.”

The shy young man gradually found his voice.

“If nothing else, that’s what basic and the military life itself taught me,” he said. “Respect, confidence and appreciation for life.”

After basic training, the members of the Hodag Platoon separated for their individual advanced training, then were assigned to Fort Carson, Colorado.

Stockheimer served as a mechanic.

His normal duties included everything from injector pumps and radiators to contact teams sent downrange to support infantry, artillery and tank units during field exercises. Those teams determined whether disabled vehicles could be repaired where they sat or needed to be returned to the maintenance unit.

But military life was more than the job listed beside his name.

“You were a soldier first,” Stockheimer said.

There were formations, physical training, guard duty, weapons qualifications and field exercises.

There were also the experiences that make young men remember being young.

Cars. Roller skating. Practical jokes. Shaving cream on windshields.

And friendships.

In 1976, Stockheimer spent approximately six months in Germany during Brigade ’76. Despite having friends nearby, the distance from home sometimes caught up with him.

“There was more than one occasion I went to the chapel at night just to talk to somebody,” he recalled.

It is one of the memories that reveals the other side of military service — the part that does not always appear in photographs.

Looking back, Stockheimer said people often do not recognize how much an experience is changing them while they are living through it.

“You don’t realize how you’re changing in this moment until that moment stops and you look back at it later.”

To be continued