HOWLAND — Mark Japuncha said it was a natural route for him to join the military because many family members had served.

“I served with my brother in the same unit. Great-uncles on my mom’s side were in World War I, and one was a POW. My dad and his two brothers and his half-brother were all in World War II, a couple of my mom’s cousins were also in the military,” Japuncha, 56, said.

Originally determined to sign up for active duty, Japuncha — unlike most young people — actually listened to the advice of others who had been there before him who stated that he might want to consider the Reserve.

“Because if you get into a job you don’t like, just like every job, you don’t want to have to go to it every day. With the Reserve, you only have to deal with it one weekend a month and two weeks out of the year, basically, which was something I didn’t consider initially, but after talking with them and seeing what the Reserve had to offer as far as education benefits, I thought that was a good decision,” Japuncha said.

The biggest difference was that active duty required recruits to follow suggestions based on their Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery (ASVAB) scores, and at the time, study materials were shipped through the mail, unlike today, when everything is available online.

“I was able to actually go and pick what I wanted for my career,” Japuncha said about the Reserve.

He enlisted in 1987 while finishing his senior year at Howland.

“My enlistment papers are older than my diploma. I had gone and did all of the enlistment stuff, but because I was 17 at the time, I had to wait until I technically graduated from high school to get sworn in, but all the prework was done, taking the ASVAB, going for the physical,” he said.

Not long after graduating, Japuncha got sworn into the Air Force Reserve and started his basic training in August 1987. He celebrated his 18th birthday at boot camp.

“I did a six-year enlistment when I went in, so it gave me rank when I got out of basic training. I ended up an E3 (airman first class), then when I retired, I retired as an E7 (Master Sargent), which was my goal when I originally went in,” Japuncha said.

Following basic training, Japuncha came back to the area and was stationed at the Youngstown Air Reserve Station in Vienna.

“I looked into it and found out they had a security / law enforcement section at the air base. At that time, there were two different sections — weapons systems basically dealt with security of the flight line and the security on the line. Law enforcement was basically like you would have city police, but they dealt with the building side of the base.”

Other than travel for different missions, Japuncha did not have to uproot his family and was stationed at the Vienna station until he retired in 2011.

He was a stock clerk at IGA in Howland when he first got married and before long, he decided he wanted to go to the police academy. He worked part-time in Bazetta and Kinsman townships and did a brief stint with the Ohio State Highway Patrol. He was a reserve deputy for the Trumbull County Sheriff’s Office for 16 years before finally getting hired there full-time in 2014.

He stayed at the Trumbull sheriff’s office until 2021 when he started working as a deputy with the Portage County Sheriff’s Office.

Being on active duty or reserve is not a determining factor in whether a soldier will do much traveling.

“My first tour, I went to Frankfurt Germany. I’ve been to Germany twice, my last tour took me to Japan, different bases throughout the U.S., Florida, Hawaii, New Jersey. Did a lot of Air Base defense training. There was a core group of us that did a lot of things. Before 9/11, as a unit we won several Air Force Reserve awards for our unit and made a name for ourselves, not only in the Reserve, but the Air Force as a whole,” Japuncha said.

In addition to traveling, he saw history up close.

“My career started during the Cold War, the Berlin wall was still up, and the second time I went to Germany, it was under a unified Germany. There was no East and West anymore,” Japuncha said.

While in the police academy, he had buddies who went to the Middle East for Operation Desert Storm, and he said his group was “on the bubble to go,” but there was not a base for them to go to.

“I was about the midpoint in my career when 9/11 happened. I was thinking about getting out, my kids were little. I was working midnights at KraftMaid at the time. I got my oldest daughter off to school and was getting ready to take the younger two to the sitter’s when it popped up on the news. That was my turning point if I was going to stay or leave the service. I didn’t know if I was going to go to the base to pull extra security or if I was going to the sheriff’s department to head to the airport, and I still hadn’t been to bed yet,” Japuncha said.

Later that evening, he and a buddy went to the base where they spent a couple of weeks providing extra security while the base made changes in their daily operations.

After returning to KraftMaid, Japuncha let them know he was probably going to leave.

“Every phone call was met with terror. Was it going to be ‘pack your stuff and let’s go,’ or was it going to be ‘you got three weeks to get ready?’,” he said.

“The whole scope of things changed after 9/11. How we did things, handled things, went to different Air Base defense trainings as they popped up, got activated to go to Iraq in 2009. We arrived in Iraq July 4 and on the 6th we were hit with rocks and mortar. (It was) their welcoming of the new group of people. We got home mid-January 2010.”

One story Japuncha related that still chokes him up concerns his oldest daughter who had visited New York that summer.

“My oldest daughter went with my aunt (who lives in New Jersey) and mom on a summer trip, and she saw the World Trade Center, and she was mesmerized by it. She was in third grade, she came home, and she said, ‘Daddy, why did somebody knock those buildings down?’ I told her not to worry that I was going to find out. She got married a few years ago,” Japuncha said.

He wore his dress blues to give her away.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the last in a series profiling Trumbull County veterans. The new season begins on Memorial Day 2026. If you or someone you know would like to be featured next year, call Metro Editor Marly Reichert at 330-841-1737 or email her at mreichert@tribtoday.com.