Lt. Col. Mark Berent, USAF (Ret.) was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota on October 24, 1931. He is a 1965 Arizona State University graduate with a BS in Mechanical Engineering. He lived in Phoenix in the early ’60s while attending Arizona State University and has been a permanent Arizona resident since 1996. As an Air Force fighter pilot, he served three combat tours in Vietnam, flying the F-100 Super Sabre and the F-4 Phantom from Air Force bases in Vietnam and Thailand, and the C-47 and the U-10 as the Air Attaché in Cambodia.
More than 1,000 of these 4,300 flying hours were in combat, where he earned the Silver Star, two Distinguished Flying Crosses, the Bronze Star, over two dozen Air Medals, the Legion of Merit, the Vietnamese Cross of Gallantry, and the Cambodian Divisional Medal. He also jumped with the Cambodian army and was awarded their paratrooper wings.