Interview with Mark Healy, History 150 Spring 2020, Conducted by Precious Carper, April 4, 2020.

BIOGRAPHY

Mark Healy graduated from JMU in 1992. He studied Psychology, Business, and, eventually, History. He became a Teacher’s Assistant at Harrisonburg High School and taught students how to read. He has been teaching Advanced Placement European History for about 20 years and AP Psychology for about 10 years. He grew up in a military family, so he moved around a lot, and his father was an Army General.

RESEARCH

Healy grew up in Europe during the time that Muammar Gaddafi, the Libyan dictator from 1969 to 2011, was alive. The dictator had an adopted daughter who was killed by the U.S. army. “On April 15, 1986, Ronald Reagan ordered major bombing raids, dubbed Operation El Dorado Canyon, against Tripoli and Benghazi killing 45 Libyan military and government personnel as well as 15 civilians.” 

“Muammar Gaddafi and the Elusive Revolution.” Global NATO and the Catastrophic Failure in Libya, by HORACE CAMPBELL and Ali A. Mazrui, NYU Press, 2013, pp. 47–54. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt9qfrnd.8. Accessed 10 Apr. 2020.

INTERVIEW

Precious Carper: Okay, so, um, would you like to give a quick introduction of yourself?

Mark Healy: Yeah. I’m Mark Healy. I’m currently a teacher at Harrisonburg high school, I teach AP European history and AP psychology.

Precious Carper: All right. So could you tell me a little bit about how you grew up?

Mark Healy: I grew up in a military family. My dad was a professional service man. And most of my life was spent outside of the United States traveling to different places. I didn’t realize it at the time why we spent most of our time in Europe. My dad was- one of his degrees was a master’s in German. So I think that’s why we spent most of our time in the theater of Germany in the nearby surrounding areas. But my life was brought up in military schools all around the globe. Occasionally, we came back to the United States, but whenever we came back to the United States, for me at least, it was always Northern Virginia.

Precious Carper: All right. So I know that because you travel, like what was the main reason behind that.

Mark Healy: So for my father, my father was typically, at least during my lifetime when my sister was growing up as much different. But in my lifetime, my dad was the commander of the base that we moved to. And so his tour of duty was typically two years. So we would spend two years in each place and then, typically, move, and my dad really tried to make a conscientious effort to have us move in the summer so that relocating would give me time to make friends to bridge before the new school year started. The most difficulty that I had with that was when we would move back to the United States, and I would not be in a school that everybody was in the same situation. It was easier when you were with everybody that moves every couple years. But when you move back to places where people live there their whole life, making friends and breaking into peer groups that were already established was difficult. My avenue for that, most often, was sports. Sports was a way for me to when I moved in the summertime to, you know, get up with a school, start work, start doing whatever I needed to do for the, I guess, in those days, football season coming in the fall.

Precious Carper: And how did that impact your education?

Mark Healy: My education was when my first my very first school that I remember going to was a French school in Belgium, where I spoke no French. There was not a DLL or an ESL program. So there was no sort of transition for me to learn French I was thrown into a classroom as a kindergartener and spoke no French at all. Fully, fully learn French, but I don’t remember any French today. When I lived in Germany growing up, I took German which made it a little bit easier for me, I guess, off base in Germany but education? School was school.

Precious Carper: Is your current career a result of your experiences? Why or why not?

Mark Healy: Um, that’s hard to say because like, when I when I first entered James Madison in 1987, I had aspirations of going into the military, following my father’s footsteps, majoring in business for after the after the army career. And then, I guess it was probably my third year at JMU where I just had a revelation that that’s not what I wanted to do and that education and teaching was the path that I wanted to take. So I dropped out of ROTC, I switched my major for a third time and had to finish up doing my history recertification and my student teaching and all that kind of stuff. So it took me five years to go through JMU. Started off as a psychology major, switched to business, ended up as a history major. History social science.

Precious Carper: So how has history had an impact on your childhood as well?

Mark Healy: Well, just by coincidence, and by sheer luck, I ended up teaching European history and most of my life was in Europe. So the bases that I teach about, the artifacts that I teach about, the societies and the cultures, I’ve lived in a lot of those places. So that enables me to have, perhaps, some first hand accounts about historical places and, and more cultural aspects of things and, let’s say, historical data or anything like that. So I can I mix it I don’t know if it is or not, it makes it a little bit more relevant for me to adlib and say some things about my experiences in those places.

Precious Carper: And how has the government been like a big part of it? Like how do you feel about the government? Because you grew up in different places.

Mark Healy: I guess between our ambassadors and government, and then the politicians of the local places that we were in. The first time I really began to understand the significance of my dad’s sort of foreign policy involvement was when I was a sophomore in Pennsylvania. And we had dinner parties weekly, in which I’ve reflected back on it now, prominent people from all over the world were invited. And as a teenage boy, I didn’t understand the significance of that moment in time. Reflecting back now, it was pretty cool because I did sort of come in contact with a lot of people that were prominent. Probably overheard a lot of conversations that were probably supposed to be off the record, and stuff like that. But now I can reflect back and be like, Oh, that’s the first- let me get the dog.

Mark Healy: Just some things that I can do. I remember now as a kid hearing this, in those days made no sense to me. But now as a historian, I know exactly what they were talking about.

Precious Carper: What are some instances where you like you came in like contact with the government that like you’re like, oh, like this is real.

Mark Healy: When we moved to Italy, my father hosted many foreign ambassadors. Basically, the second half of that tour in Naples, Italy that happened, my dad’s boss died in office. So then my father assumed his responsibility in addition to his job. So we had way more interaction with foreign diplomats to the point where I would get debriefed on who they were, how to interact. Basically, social cues, especially if maybe the diplomat’s wife was attending, who I extended my hand to, who I didn’t, who, when we shook hands and I embrace with both hands, that kind of that kind of protocol, I had to get briefed on so that I wouldn’t act inappropriately to cause any discomfort for the people that were visiting.

Precious Carper: And in addition to that, like how were you expected to act while you were there.

Mark Healy: So typically, in those settings, I was a server for the dinner party, like I would bring more hors d’oeuvres, or I would bring out the cocktails. I had to dress up in a tuxedo and that kind of stuff. So I worked with the people in my house that were calm and charged with the cooking and things like that, and I was basically their runner. So I had, like, who do I make eye contact with, who do I not make eye contact with, which wife do I greet, which one do I not great? I messed that up a bunch.

Precious Carper: How did you feel having that position?

Mark Healy: I didn’t like it a bit. So what I tried to do was to do everything that I could do visually to myself to embarrass my father so that I wouldn’t have to do that. That’s why I dyed my, now reflecting back, that’s why I probably dyed my hair and spiked it into a mohawk and pierced my ears and all that kind of stuff to do be like, “Oh, you look ridiculous. You shouldn’t have to do that.” But that never happened. I had to do it anyway. And I distinctly remember one time, my father saying, “Spike it up the best you can because such and such is coming tonight.” I was like, all right. So I spent the whole night having to tell all these people that I didn’t know why I looked the way I looked. So that was that was some. For me, that was some sort of a, I guess, rationale of why I was trying to buck the system.

Precious Carper: And, like as a kid, having your father in that role, how did you view the role of a father?

Mark Healy: That would change sometimes, as a kid growing up, I often didn’t know if I should salute or how I should greet him. There were times that, you know, he would be gone for weeks on end for training, and then come back. So, yes, he was an authority figure growing up, and I think that he had a hard time sometimes separating disciplinary and being a disciplinarian for his troops and being a disciplinarian for me. Right. So I often felt that I was just the, I guess, the last straw of a long, bad day sometimes. But what I truly cherish about all of that is that my father had a chance at the end of his career to keep going and get a higher promotion. And he decided not to do all of that and retire to not miss my college experience, like he had missed my sister’s sisters. And he wanted to be a part of that for me and with me, which I’m very grateful for.

Precious Carper: And how have you taken like what you’ve learned from your father and applied it?

Mark Healy: So for, as a young parent, I use that authoritarian sort of parenting style that I grew up with. It’s this way and no ifs, ands, or buts and there’s no reason why you shouldn’t be able to do all of that. And I know it might sound corny, a bit corny, but it was teaching psychology that made me reflect on my parenting style. Then I took a little of because my dad was always a disciplinarian. My mom was always the one that I’d go to to avoid getting in trouble. Alright, so she was the permissive parent. And my dad was the authoritarian parent. So I’ve now adopted the style of sort of an authoritative parent, taking a little bit of both sides, having rules and regulations in place, but explaining and justifying why I think my rules need to be in place where they are. So as a young father, I did exactly what my dad did. And then I realized that that’s not what I wanted to do. Right, and then I just kind of modified, but that was through psychology. They helped me with that.

Precious Carper: Yeah, and also with teaching AP psychology and AP European history, and just teaching in general, how do you feel like being a male in the education field has affected your career?

Mark Healy: Um, I don’t know because it took me a long time to break into the career. Alright, so it wasn’t like I came right out of college and became a teacher right away. That’s why some of the people that I’ve worked with now, that we hire them right as they’re student teacher, and like you all you want to understand. Unlike with you all, you have it lucky. It’s not always like that. So for me, gender, I don’t necessarily think was an avenue that facilitated me or enabled me to get into education. I’m sure there were doors that were open for me as a man that might not have been open for me if I was a woman in those days, but I’m not sure. I think my hard work and my dedication to the school system more than my gender is something that I was rewarded with. Now, I did a lot of things for a long time. Like I’ve been a coach at school for a long, long time, but for many years, I did that without any compensation. I just did it because that’s what I wanted to feel like I should do.

Precious Carper: All right. And finally, I did a little research on like the Libyan dictator like with the uprisings.

Mark Healy: Oh Muammar Kadafi. Okay. Okay. All right.

Precious Carper: What experience Did you have with that?

Mark Healy: Oh boy, that’s probably like 1986 maybe. I can’t remember if it was ’85 or ’86, [1985 is when the highjacking took place] maybe early ’87. But yeah, that was a major milestone and like revamping the family life for the Healy’s. My sister at that point, was living in Maryland as a schoolteacher. She was oblivious to all of that. But, you know, let me just back up a second because when we moved to Italy, I realized immediately that that was different than any other place we had ever moved as a family. And when we got off the airplane in Rome, we were met with people with machine guns and whisked away and put into a car with cops in front and back and stuff that I was not really ever used to. We had an armored car when I was when I was in middle school. It wasn’t anything like that. And then when we get to the villa that the army had allowed us to live in. It was, you know, barbed wire gate, electric fence, guards 24 hours a day.

My dad would take different Mercedes Benz to work and different routes to work every day for security reasons. And then, Gaddafi enters the scene. And I remember my father coming home and sitting myself and my mom down and saying, our lives are getting ready to change and we just need to do the best we can to deal with it. And so my father had the issue the retaliation for Kadafi season a cruise ship to the Mediterranean [Achille Lauro high jacking] and two Americans losing their lives [one was Leon Klingholffer] and know all this now, I didn’t know all of that at the time. I just knew that this red phone would ring all the time my dad would pick it up. Right and what I know now is that President Reagan ordered the bombing raid, my dad was in command of that, so he executed the bombing raid. Kadafi wanted to retaliate so he issued a death threat on myself, my mom and my dad, and from there on, I couldn’t ride the bus to school, I had to be driven in an armored car everywhere, had to have bodyguards or Secret Service with me. So typically there were groups of two, there was an Italian driver and Italian Secret Service that would work together. And there was an American driver and American sort of secret service that would work together and they would rotate. But that’s how it was. And that’s basically how it was until we left Italy. And what’s unfortunate, I guess, for me is I got my driver’s license at 16 in Pennsylvania, moved to Italy where you have to be 18 to drive, and then got to be 18 to drive. Gaddafi issues a death threat and I can’t drive. So that’s kind of how that all went up. But that was a tense moment, or a tense several months for our family. Yeah.

Precious Carper: How did it feel to be a part of that history?

Mark Healy: Um, at the point, it didn’t feel like history in the making. But when I was in class several years ago, and when Gaddafi was on the run, and the Libyans captured him, and they went through that whole rigmarole what we’ve just been talking about, then it became a little bit more historically significant for me. I just always try to downplay the role that my father had in our military growing up, but the more that I learned, the more that his role was much more significant than I had thought, especially in those latter years.

Precious Carper: All right. Anything else you want to add? All right. Thank you.

INTERVIEW PROCESS

I conducted this interview with my laptop using an application called Zoom. I recorded the interview by using the record option through Zoom. I tested the audio the day before the interview and found a quiet place in my basement to record. An hour before I began the interview, I made sure that my family members were aware that I was going to be recording. After the interview, I transferred the audio on my laptop to another laptop to edit the audio on iMovie. To transcribe the interview, I processed the audio through the website Otter.ai and edited the processed version to come up with the final product. An obstacle that I faced was setting a time to interview because we were both busy with online classes for most of the week.

If I could do this interview again, I would probably want to do it in person. The technology that I was working with was not the most reliable. Although most of the interview went smoothly, the audio cut out at points, and I had trouble figuring out how to edit them out. An in-person interview would have also allowed us to better communicate through facial expressions because even though we chatted with video, the video was fuzzy and lagged, so it was hard to know when to move on to the next question or add a follow-up question.