00:00:00BACH: Today is Friday, March 31st, 2017, and this is an interview with Michael Clark who served with the Army 85th EVAC Hospital in Vietnam in '70 and '71. The interview is being conducted at Mike Clark's home in suburban Milwaukee. The interviewer is Bob Bach. Morning, Mike. Good morning. Thank you for taking the time to chat with us. We're going to go through I hope a lot of things and probably start here with the basics would be great. Where were you born and where did you grow up?
00:00:31CLARK: Born in Concord, Michigan. We lived in Jackson. I was not born in a hospital. I was born in the clinic in Concord. I lived in Jackson until I was halfway through kindergarten and we moved to Marshall. I finished my schooling in Marshall, grew up in Marshall which is a small town, 7,800 people, three stoplights in town. We lived on the edge of town.
00:00:55BACH: And where is that near in Michigan?
00:00:56CLARK: That is between Battle Creek and Jackson.
00:00:59BACH: Kind of central.
00:01:00CLARK: Southern central, yeah, south of Lansing, that area.
00:01:02BACH: And you go to high school there as well?
00:01:04CLARK: I did, graduated in 1968.
00:01:07BACH: And what happened after high school?
00:01:09CLARK: After high school, well, I got married two months out of high school. My wife was 17, I was 18, she had another year of high school to go. We've been married 49 years now.
00:01:19BACH: No kidding.
00:01:20CLARK: So I was looking at computer engineering, interesting that when I was in high school, I wanted my career to be an Army officer. That's what I wanted to do. I was look into the possibility of West Point, ROTC, OTC, whatever it was. I wanted be an Army officer. Then Vietnam. I didn't felt, I didn't feel that it was managed well. After Tet of '68, it was pretty much a standard belief in the country that it was not a winnable war, and I did not feel...
00:01:52BACH: This was the Tet Offensive of 1968.
00:01:53CLARK: The Tet Offensive in January, January 29th, supposed to be a ceasefire for the Chinese New Year. However, they launched a major offensive, and pretty much the whole country was overrun for about a week, and even in Khe Sanh for a month or two. So after that it was considered in the country not to be a winnable war ,and I did not feel that it was worth dying for. It's not that I didn't want to serve my country. I didn't want to die for what I thought was a worthless cause.
00:02:23BACH: So these were ideas and notions that you were developing while you were in high school.
00:02:28CLARK: Correct. Yep, so I tried everything I could to avoid the draft. I went to the draft board on a continual basis I got taken out of track in my high school year because I had stomach ulcers and of course the Army could not find any ulcers so I passed my physical and I was I was 1A. I would go to the draft board to check on my status periodically. The the draft at that time they made it so that if you were married, you wouldn't be drafted. And of course, there were lines around the block and all around the country of people getting married. Then they said, well, you had to have a child or your wife has to be pregnant in order not to be drafted, well, and you know what happened then. You could also get a 2S deferment which was for school. I didn't qualify for any of those.
00:03:22BACH: But you were married at that point.
00:03:23CLARK: I was married.
00:03:24BACH: But that did not defer you from?
00:03:25CLARK: That did not defer me. No, this was later. I was the last one drafted from Calhoun County before they started the lottery in 1970. I got drafted in October of '69. They were going to take four people in October and nobody in November and December and then they decided to kick that up to six and I was number six.
00:03:48BACH: How did you feel when you got drafted?
00:03:50CLARK: Ah, I was very stressed, very upset. Ah, did not want to participate, and again, it's not that I didn't want to serve, it's that Vietnam was over everybody's head at that time, and a big concern I have, high school classmates had been killed in Vietnam. I didn't want to wind up like that.
00:04:13BACH: Did you have family members that had served in the armed forces?
00:04:16CLARK: My father served in World War II. He never got overseas. He was still in training in Biloxi, Mississippi, when the war in Europe ended. Never got involved in in action. My brother served in the Army from '66 to '69. He was in Korea for about a year and a half at that time. My uncle Junior was in the Korean War. I have aunts, uncles, grandfather that were in World War II, so yeah.
00:04:48BACH: Really quite a lot of service.
00:04:49CLARK: We have, yes. We do.
00:04:51BACH: So after the draft notice came, and you then had these feelings, as you described, of there was some anger there, and some fear, and trepidation, what happened next?
00:05:01CLARK: Well. I passed my physical and I wanted to comply, I didn't want to. I didn't want to ignore the request, so I went to Fort Knox, Kentucky, for basic training. Then after that, I went Fort Sam Houston. Graduated from basic training. They, we had a formation and they were calling out orders where guys were going for their next training session. And they called my name and they said, "You're going to Fort Sam Houston to be a 91-D-20."
00:05:42BACH: And what in the world is that?
00:05:43CLARK: What in the Sam is a 91 D-20? Well, I asked the sergeant, he didn't know. We went to another sergeant that he didn't know, went to a third sergeant. He said, "Well, 91-810 is a medic. I think this might be an ambulance driver." And I thought, I can do that. I can be an ambulance driver. So I got to Fort Sam Houston.
00:06:03BACH: And where is that located?
00:06:04CLARK: In San Antonio, Texas. And to hurry up and wait, you know, if the bus has been a long day of travel, it's late at night, and the sergeant said, "Private Clark, you are going to medical training center for ten weeks, where you will be trained to be a medic, after which you go up on the hill to medical field service school for twelve weeks, and you will become an operating room technician. Well, it's a wonder I didn't pass out, right then. I'm sure that I was pale, and the blood left my face. And I said, "You know, Sarge, I have no problem with blood, but I hate needles. I can't even hardly look at a picture of a syringe in a book without getting lightheaded. I don't know if I can do this. I think you've got the wrong guy." And he said, "That's fine. Sign right here." He said, "You will be at Fort Polk tomorrow, six weeks from now, you will be in Vietnam to carry a rifle." And I said, "Wait a minute. I can this. I know I can." [Both laugh] So I went through the training, graduated in June. I think it was like May when everybody got their orders. There were 120.
00:07:08BACH: This was in 1969?
00:07:09CLARK: This was in 1970,
00:07:12BACH: 1970, Okay.
00:07:14CLARK: June of 1970 is when I graduated.
00:07:16BACH: And how was school? I mean you had this fear of needles as you mentioned it, but yet you went through these I would imagine pretty exhaustive trainings. How did you get through that?
00:07:27CLARK: I handled it fine. The only thing that bothered me was when they were showing pictures of eyes and eye surgery. That got to me a little bit. But other than that, I handled the training fine and did just fine with everything. Of course, training to be a medic, we would pair off and you would start an IV on the guy in front of you, then he would start and IV on you, and then you would give him an IM shot, he'd give you an IM shot.
00:07:50BACH: And what is an IM shot?
00:07:51CLARK: Intramuscular. and then we would do the subcutaneous injection and we'd go back and forth intradermal and we practiced like that for about two weeks and our arms were just black and blue and marked up. It looked like we were junkies by the time we got done, but handled it fine. State of mind. Um
00:08:11BACH: Now the medic school was that all men that were in there?
00:08:14CLARK: Yes.
00:08:15BACH: And the operating room assistant training was that all men also?
00:08:21BACH: Yes. yep, all men.
00:08:23CLARK: And out of my class of 120, 117 got orders for Vietnam.
00:08:28BACH: Really?
00:08:28CLARK: The only three that didn't were guys who re-upped and had been to Vietnam and came back. It was a critical MOS, meaning that the military occupation specialty, the job was in severe demand. There weren't enough. They needed them in Vietnam and everybody went. Got my orders.
00:08:49BACH: And how were you and your wife doing at this time that you were in training? Was she traveling with you to these spaces?
00:08:55CLARK: She came to San Antonio with me when I was in medical field or a medical training center. I managed to find a place it was a trailer park and they rented half trailers and I found for $35 a month remember my base pay was $135 a month so she came down and she got a job at Seagrave's Restaurant, which was a Japanese restaurant and the guy was a retired sergeant and a lot of the personnel from Fort Sam Houston would visit their restaurant. So she was with me for most of the training. When I was in medical training center, I'd get weekends off. We could be together in the evening and on weekends, but during the week I had to stay on base. When I got to medical field service school, I got a class [??] pass and I was allowed to go home at night. So we were together when I was in training.
00:09:48BACH: So what happened after the training though? You've been through two different forms of it. What happened next?
00:09:54CLARK: What happened next? I got a one-month leave. Left on actually July 4th was my day to leave San Antonio. A friend and I went into the orderly room on July 3rd, about after 5 o'clock when everybody else went home and the sergeant [of the guard??] was pretty much the only one there. And we happened to have with us a bottle of Black Velvet whiskey. And we told the sergeant that if he'd be inclined to sign us out at midnight so we could leave early, that we'd be incline to leave this bottle of whiskey here, and he felt inclined to do so. [Both laugh.] So we got about a six-hour head start going home, came home for a one-month leave. Um
00:10:44BACH: How did you get home? You drive?
00:10:45CLARK: Drive, yeah. Yeah, we had a car, '64 Chevy at the time, transmission was failing, but there was no money for car repairs at that time.
00:10:54BACH: Quite a trip from Texas then back to Michigan.
00:10:55CLARK: Yeah, yeah, yeah. My navigator, my wife, I got turned around in Dallas. She fell asleep. But it took me about twenty-four hours, and I drove all but about two hours of it. But when I was home, I wasn't sure if I was going to Vietnam. I always adamantly stated, I am not going to be Vietnam. I'm not going to Vietnam, and it was about three days before I was to report that I actually decided that I was going to Vietnam. We only lived 100 miles from Canada. And that's, I didn't know if I was going to Canada or if I was going to Vietnam. I felt very strongly about it, but again, I, I didn't want to desert. I didn't want to, you know, ignore my country, but I didn't want to be in Vietnam. So, my thoughts were that being an operating technician, I thought that I would be back out of the way, at least, not dodging bullets every day. And I had a much better chance of coming home and perhaps I could make a difference in someone else's life. And it was with that mindset that I decided about three days before I was to report to Fort Lewis Washington that I was going to Vietnam. I left for Fort Lewis, Washington, August 9th. August 10th was our second wedding anniversary.
00:12:18BACH: Well, really.
00:12:20CLARK: And, uh, shipped out on the 12th of August.
00:12:24BACH: And where did you go? You left from the state of Washington. Where did you--? Did you fly, take a boat?
00:12:27CLARK: Yes, Flying Tiger Airlines. Went to Anchorage, Alaska. Spent an hour at the airport there. On to Tokyo. Spent about five hours there, but we were not allowed to leave the airport. And then on to Vietnam. It was about sixteen hours. We were late at night, 9, 10 o'clock at night when we got there.
00:12:46BACH: And where did you land in Vietnam?
00:12:49CLARK: Cam Ranh Bay. Got off the plane, and it was, even though it was like 9, 10 o'clock at night, thereabouts, it was like walking into a sauna. It was the 100 percent humidity, the heat, it was just instant sweat. We were assigned transient barracks. They had mattresses rolled up, and unrolled the mattresses, and no matter how hard you beat the mattress, it was just covered with sand. It was like sleeping on a beach without anything under you. We didn't get sheets or pillowcases. There was no air circulation in the Quonset huts, still very hot from the day. No fans, no circulation, no sleep.
00:13:28BACH: Quonset huts are these kind of half-round metal buildings?
00:13:32CLARK: Correct, yeah. And if you can imagine being in a metal building with temperatures of 118 degrees during the day, it gets quite miserable.
00:13:40BACH: You mentioned it felt like a sauna. Did it have a certain smell? What did Vietnam smell like when you got there?
00:13:46CLARK: I don't remember a particular smell. I do not recall that.
00:13:49BACH: So here you are in the Quonset huts, of course. Do you know what's going to happen next, other than the fact that you landed in Vietnam?
00:13:59CLARK: I have no idea where I'm going and where I am going to be assigned at that point.
00:14:03BACH: And how did that occur?
00:14:04CLARK: That about the next day they told me that I was going to the 101st Airborne Division and we flew a C-130 in about three hours thereabouts into Phu Bai, there's an airport in Phu Bai.
00:14:17BACH: And where is Phu Bai exactly?
00:14:18CLARK: Phu Bai is in I Corps, which is the northernmost combat zone in Vietnam, includes Da Nang to the line is a little south of Da Nang. It goes to the DMZ borders, Laos on the west, in the South China Sea on the east.
00:14:36BACH: How far would Phu Bai be from the demilitarized zone?
00:14:39CLARK: About fifty miles. Went to. I spent a couple days in transient barracks there, and flew to, excuse me, went by convoy to Camp Evans. Being that far north in Vietnam was a little unsettling to me, and going even farther north was less desirable. My recollection of shipping out was when I got, when we got to Phu Bai. We got off the plane, and we fell into formation. And there's the white sand and the temperature. I mean, it's just 100 plus, 100 percent humidity. And I had a baseball cap with a brim. But I could not open my eyes without sunglasses cause the sun was so bright coming off that sand, it felt like it would burn my eyes out of my head. I just --. It was painful to open your eyes without sunglasses. The convoy of course had the 50 cals on jeeps front and back, probably a twenty-, twenty-five-mile trip to Camp Evans for in-country training, where we learned about booby traps, the jungles, things to do, things not to do. Being in the 101st Airborne Division, I've never jumped out of a plane and I'm happy about that. [Bach laughs.] They assigned medical personnel without having jump school. But we did have to rappel down a 50-foot wall, and I'm not comfortable with heights either, and I made it. But there were times when guys would have to rappel out of helicopters, and we practiced rappelling a couple of times.
00:16:16BACH: Now the terrain of Vietnam that you were in, what was that like?
00:16:22CLARK: Where I was was was flat near the coast, but there are hills all around, especially to the west. Farther west you went, the more mountains it got. But it was where Highway 1 went north and south, which is a main highway, about the only paved highway in northern part of Vietnam at that time. It was pretty flat there, but you didn't have to go very far west to start getting into the mountains.
00:16:47BACH: And the camp that you were at later on, was that in mountainous terrain?
00:16:51CLARK: Ah. High ground, but not mountains, that would have been Camp Eagle. My first experience on the way on the convoy on the way, we stopped because there were F-14 Phantoms dropping napalm on the hillsides within a half mile from where we were, and we were watching them drop the napalm, which was an interesting experience.
00:17:17BACH: So you had seen pictures of Vietnam, probably saw some news accounts of the war while you were in high school on the nightly news, etc. And now you're there and you're seeing F-4 Phantoms dropping napalm and you were feeling the heat. What was that like?
00:17:34CLARK: I thought, what the hell am I doing here? That's not quite what I thought. But that's what I'm going to say for this interview. You know, I was just kind of awestruck thinking, you know, what'd I get myself into?
00:17:51BACH: You were with certainly a group of men that were having this experience as well for the first time. Did you travel to Vietnam with any other soldiers that had gone through you had gone through training with?
00:18:03CLARK: I did not travel with any. I met with several of them when I was there. Some of them were assigned to the same hospital as I was, some of them in Quang Tri area, some in Da Nang, and I did have contact with several people that I went to school with when I was in Vietnam.
00:18:20BACH: So did you have a little bit of a feeling of unity with these guys, that you had known the same kind of training and what have you or?
00:18:28CLARK: One of the guys, when I was at the 85th, Don Gates, well, let's back up.
00:18:32BACH: Sure.
00:18:33CLARK: Back to the 101st, Doug Bolen and I were friends. Matter of fact, Doug Bolen is the one that went into the orderly room with me when we were going on leave.
00:18:42BACH: How does he spell his last name?
00:18:43CLARK: B-O-L-E-N, he's from Iowa.
00:18:45BACH: Okay.
00:18:48CLARK: He was the other guy that was with me when we took the pint of whiskey into the orderly room to get out earlier. He was married also. His wife was named Jan. But he was at the 101st at Camp Eagle when I got to I was with the 326th Medical Battalion and it was a battalion aid station. And he was working there as an operating technician. He got there a couple of days before me. Before I got there at Camp Evans, we had to pull guard duty at Camp Evans. My first experience on guard duty, they had about every 30 yards around the complete perimeter inside, just about 20 feet inside the concertina we had foxholes. The foxholes were about 4 feet deep, about 2 feet wide, and about four or five feet long. we had to carry. 100 rounds for the M16, 100 rounds for the M60, my foxhole was assigned an M60 machine gun. Every other foxhole had either an M16. The next one would have an M79, M60, I'm sorry, M60 all the way around. So we had to train with both the M79 and the M60 machine gun.
00:20:00BACH: What was the M79?
00:20:02CLARK: M79 was a grenade launcher.
00:20:03BACH: Okay.
00:20:04CLARK: Looks like a shotgun with a short barrel. Pretty good recoil, had to be careful so you didn't take your thumb off when you shot it. But we had a hun -- an M60, a thousand rounds for the M60, a thousand rounds for the M16, a case of hand grenades, and Claymore mines that we had to set out in front of the foxholes.
00:20:25BACH: This is some serious firepower for perimeter duty. Was that a particularly dangerous base camp?
00:20:31CLARK: My first night ever on guard duty we had contact in the wire.
00:20:33BACH: Meaning what? It was troops or the enemy in the barbed wire?
00:20:38CLARK: They had enemy at the wire the very first night I was ever on guard duty and they called in Cobras and this was somewhere around midnight.
00:20:47BACH: And this is a special helicopter?
00:20:49CLARK: This is an attack helicopter. This is the first attack helicopter before the Blackhawks came out -- 36 inches wide so that for obvious reasons to minimize the area we could be shot at that. But you could hear the rotors as they were going to their climb, and the rotors sounded like they were almost stopped until we reached the peak, and when they started their dive, it would rapidly escalate the sounds of the rotors. And when they got down, they had rockets pods, two rocket pods on each side, and they had a minigun, which is a machine gun, which fired 1,200 rounds a minute, and he had grenade launchers on the front. Every fifth round on the minigun was a tracer, a red tracer. Red versus green is very important in Vietnam. Red being American tracers, green being Vietnamese tracers. But it looked like a laser beam. I mean, there was no break, even though it was every fifth round. It was just like a red beacon going to the ground. It sounded like a buzzsaw. And you had the rockets with the red, excuse me, the white sparks as trailing as the rockets went down. And you had a back blast with the eddy currents. And I just, it was an amazing sight after dark to see this. And they had two of them that were working in front of us. And all I could think of was, holy cow, I'm glad they're on our side. I mean, it was amazing. But that was my, I only had two episodes where I experienced live fire in Vietnam.
00:22:25BACH: Your first night and --.
00:22:26CLARK: First night on guard duty.
00:22:28BACH: Was the hospital that you were assigned to at Camp Evans?
00:22:33CLARK: No, no. From Camp Evans, then I went back to Camp Eagle. Camp Evans was my in-country training for a week. Then I went to Camp Evans assigned to the 326th Medical Battalion. A little interesting story, when I first went into the Army, they asked me what I wanted to do during my time in the Army. I told them that I had worked in my father's garage as a vehicle mechanic, and rebuilt some engines. I went by working in the motor pool as a light vehicle mechanic. They said, you want to be an MP or a cook? I said, no. So I went through all of this training, and I got to Vietnam. When I got the 326th Medical Battalion, they had two slots for a 91-D-20, an operating room technician, and they were both full. So they didn't have a place for me. So they put me in a motor pool working. And I thought, isn't this interesting that you sent me through all this training and now you put me back where I said I wanted to be in the first place. I was assigned to convoys during the day as a medic. Sometimes we would do day patrols, but I never spent time in the jungle. I never spent I never had to spend time overnight outside the wire. There are times when we wouldn't get back until after dark, which is, I found, extremely scary. Being outside the compound, they ruled the night. There's no question about it. They ruled the night. And there's no way you can get sixty guys that march quietly after dark. And it was a pretty a pretty stressful time getting back on compound. Fortunately, we never encountered anything during those patrols.
00:24:10BACH: So did you have to treat anyone medically, as a medic?
00:24:14CLARK: Did not actually. Not in the field. Not when I was with the 101st. We never encountered fire when I was up.
00:24:27BACH: So how long did you stay in the motor pool before the next event took place?
00:24:33CLARK: I put in for a transfer pretty much immediately, didn't have a slot for me, and I knew about the 85th Evac Hospital. I don't know how I learned about it so soon, but I knew it, and the company clerk came to me a week later and he said, you know, CO, commanding officer, he has your transfer in the bottom drawer and he intends to do nothing with this. He said, inspector general is coming tomorrow. He said why don't you go see the inspector general. So I went to see the inspector general and like a transfer cleared company and battalion that day. Well, it was expected that I was going to be transferring out then. So they sent me temporary duty to the 85th Evac Hospital at the end of September. At the 85th. I was there for two months, temporary duty, November, around November 12th my transfer had not gone through yet, so they called me back to Camp Eagle, and I got back to Camp Eagle. The next day my transfer went through, so I went back to the 85th Evac Hospital. It was a bad time for me to be in transit because the second of the 502s, one of the infantry divisions from Camp Eagle with 101st. They were at a landing zone, an LZ, and they got ambushed, and there were heavy casualties and I was supposed to work night shift, and we were short of techs anyway, and taking me out of the rotation put them in a pretty good bind. But I went, I was there for about three days and I went back to the 85th, I had to fly to Da Nang for about three days to transfer out of the 101st and into the 85 and then I was at the 85 permanent.
00:26:30BACH: And what were your experiences like there? Do you remember arriving there for the first time and seeing the place?
00:26:34CLARK: Yeah, I do. When I was in the back of the deuce and a half.
00:26:41BACH: This is a special kind of truck, is it?
00:26:43CLARK: Yes, a large truck, a dual-tandem truck. It's the one that you commonly see with sometimes the canvas over the back, but it's got the big bed on it. Two and a half ton truck. There was a guard shack at the gate at the 85th Evac Hospital, and the hospital was surrounded with concertina wire, although it was in the middle of a base camp. We did not have an outside perimeter at the 85th. There is a field to my right, as we were pulling in, and there are guys playing football. Well, that looks interesting. It turns out that the 85 had a football team, and they would go to hospitals and play. And their last game was, like, the first week I got there, when they went to the 95th Evac in Da Nang and played their football game. The driveway is unpaved. It's a pretty muddy driveway during monsoon season. The hooches were on stilts about two feet off the ground, because during monsoons season, it rains, and it rains and it rain, and to keep the floor dry, it has to be off the grounds.
00:27:50BACH: And the hooches are the houses you live in?
00:27:51CLARK: The hooches are the houses. The huts, they were plywood sided. They had corrugated steel roofs but they had plywood underneath them that would help deflect some of the heat on the inside. They were about a foot high wood shutters that would fold down and was screened in areas so during the Summer months you could open them up and get a little bit of a breeze During monsoon season you could close them up. People don't realize it in Vietnam it could get quite cold. I remember specifically temperature of 38 degrees.
00:28:27BACH: Wow.
00:28:28CLARK: And it's raining and there's absolutely nowhere to get warm and when you get up your clothes are damp and when get in bed your bed is damp. Everything mildews. I put my boots under my bunk at night and when I got up the next morning I'd have to brush the mildew off my boots. Some of the bigger hills to the west would actually get a little snow on them at times.
00:28:51BACH: Really.
00:28:52CLARK: So you don't, people think of it as being a very warm climate. Well it's very warm during the summer, but if you don' t have heat it's just a bone-chilling cold. When you get in bed it would take twenty to thirty minutes to get that one spot warmed up enough so that you're comfortable enough to go to sleep. And if you roll over in the middle of the night it was quite startling. I mean it was very cold and you'd get back into the position that you were. A guy going home sold me an electric blanket for $10, and that was, oh man, what a huge difference. I could put my clothes in the bed for the next day and get up and have dry clothes. I could sleep at night comfortably. I have never taken it for granted that I had a roof over my head every night. I am forever grateful for that. I was not sleeping out in the cold and the rain. To have a bunk to go to in a roof over my head, if it was cold or whatever, at least I wasn't out sleeping in a poncho.
00:29:51BACH: So let's get the little timeline reset here from when did you begin your work at the 8050 back hospital and for how long?
00:30:01CLARK: From the end of September of 1970 until I went home. August 11th is when I got home of '71.
00:30:13BACH: So, and how long altogether were you in Vietnam?
00:30:16CLARK: One year to the day.
00:30:19BACH: Tell me about your assignment then at the evac hospital. Do you remember how that all unfolded and what you did and what order it came in and so forth?
00:30:26CLARK: Sure. I was assigned to the operating room. Shifts were 7 a.m. to 7 p.m., 7 p m. to 7 a.m. We had two guys on overnight. We ran the operating room and CMS, central material section. We were responsible for all sterile supplies for the entire hospital. We had two autoclaves which are sterilizers. Looks kind of like an iron lung with a submarine wheel on it to close the door to latch it so that we could get the temperatures and what have you to sterilize the items. Instruments when they came back from the operating room would be put into a plastic laundry tub. We had to hand wash them with soap and water, clean them up, package them, and re-sterilize them.
00:31:11BACH: How big was this hospital? I mean, was it the size of two or three tents put together?
00:31:20CLARK: I wanna say it was, I'd put it at an acre, about an acre of land that it occupied in several buildings. We had our own motor pool. The mess hall, it was a completely contained unit, initially came into Quy Nhon, which is south of Da Nang, and when the 85th came to Vietnam in '66, they operated out of tents. When it moved to Phu Bai in '68, they had permanent structures.
00:31:49BACH: So this is a building made out of cement block or some such thing or?
00:31:52CLARK: No, they were all made out of wood, even the operating room. We had plywood walls. We had cement floors. The cement floors were left rough sandpapery because when it got wet, you didn't want you to slip and fall. There was a drain in the middle of the floor. Between cases, we had a hose in the operating room, and we would literally hose the blood down into the drain, take cane brooms with buckets of soapy water, use a cane broom to scrub the floor, hose it down again, redo the room, and we're going again.
00:32:26BACH: How many soldiers could be treated or in surgery at one time in this facility?
00:32:31CLARK: We had four operating rooms. Generally, we used two, sometimes three, a couple times we used four. The fourth room was actually used mostly for storage, linen packs, instrument sets and what have you.
00:32:44BACH: And as an assistant in this environment, what did you do with exactly?
00:32:48CLARK: It depends on the day, depending on the case. Most of the time, passed instruments, loaded sutures, assisted with some cases. There were times when if there was minor debridements, then we would do the minor debridements. We would do suturing. Essentially that's it in the operating room. When we would get mass casualties, the word would go out and everybody would start in the emergency department. We had six metal racks that would hold litters, in other words, the canvas stretchers, and they would bring the guys in on the litters and they would fit on the rack, and that's where we would actually work. We wouldn't even take them off the litter. And that's where the lines would get started, the tubes would get placed, and everybody would report to the ER to get the lines, get everything established. When they started going into X-ray, which was a step before them, with the operating room, that was usually my cue to leave and scrub and get things prepared. There were times when guys came in and they were rushed right to the OR. There are times when I had time for no more than just a light wash. There are time when I did no more that a rinse. There are a times when i didn't have instrument sets open and set and the surgeon is calling for the knife or the scalpel and I'm scrambling trying to get instruments out to get things going because you got blood going, you got IVs going, people scrambling to keep this guy alive. You're trying to get him open. You are trying to control the bleeding. The pace is absolutely hectic. There's no time to think about it, you just have to react. Getting sutures loaded, always behind in sutures, just feeling like you're always behind. Of course, when you try to get things out in a hurry, that tends to make a tangled mess. But there were times when it was just absolutely hectic and then once you got things controlled then it would settle down and then get things organized a little bit.
00:34:55BACH: Was this a loud environment, was it a frantic environment, or were things hectic as you describe but still under control and somewhat subdued sound-wise? How did it sound?
00:35:09CLARK: In the era, I describe it as organized chaos. I mean, if you would have six litters in there and you have about six people with each one and everybody's communicating with each other and the litters are only a couple feet apart. You're almost kind of bumping into each other as you're between the liters and everybody is getting in line. So you got all these people. I mean you got thirty, forty people in there in this one very small room and they're all talking back and forth and trying to get things organized, trying to get lines and everything going. It looked very chaotic, but at the same time, it was very orchestrated. In the OR, again, it could be very chaotic especially at first, when you get in there, things happen very fast. You can't keep up, it's just like you're always three steps behind at least. But once you got the bleeding controlled, you got vital stabilized, then things would be a little more low key, a little more relaxed, although I never said, relaxed is probably not the best word for it. I don't know if it was ever relaxed, but at least controlled.
00:36:22BACH: And the wounded themselves, were these soldiers mostly unconscious, or were they conscious in pain and crying out, what was their status?
00:36:33CLARK: That is the most difficult thing for me in my experience. The wounded soldiers coming in, they didn't know if they were going to live or die. They didn't know if they're going to lose a leg. They were on a full adrenaline rush. They were hyperverbal. You know, Doc, am I gonna lose my leg? Doc, don't cut my leg off. Doc, I'm I gonna live? Doc, Am I gonna die? Doc, you gotta tell my wife I was thinking about her. Um. That never goes away. But at the same time, you are, you have your job to do and although you're you're trying to be reassuring, you're trying to make them feel better ,you're just you're trying to let them know that you know we're there to help that things are going to be all right But at the same time you're trying to start an IV, you're trying to put in a tube, you trying to put in line, you are trying to do things. And it's not like you're not paying attention, but it's an automated response. But again, you've got to get things done because there are a number of guys that need things done. And when you get this one done, then there's somebody here, somebody here or somebody here. You don't have time to think about it. You don' t have time dwell on what's done. One of the hardest things. This is what, when we'd get mass casualties, and there were three classifications of guys from triage. One was expectant, in other words. Not much you can do for the guy, he's probably gonna die. Salvageable, you can save these guys. And then there was minor. If we got mass casualties the guys that were expectant were put over in a corner, started an IV for pain medicine and allowed to die. And that because if you spend your resources here, then guys over here that could live won't. So you have to make that decision. And again, you know that that's happening, but you can't dwell on it. You've got to move on. You got to keep going. And once you get the guy stabilized in the ER, then it's in the OR, and it's that frantic pace and you're in the OR, and there are times when I was scrubbed in for ten, twelve hours at a time without a break. One of the things I learned real fast is before you go into the operating room, if you don't have to go pee, you go pee. Because you don' have a chance to empty your bladder for a long time. The case when you're busy, you don't have time to think about it. You're passing instruments, you're anticipating the next move, you're figuring out what you have to do next, your mind's occupied. When you start closing twenty to thirty minutes, that's when you realize that fatigue sets in and it just feels like you're so exhausted that you just can't make it through the next twenty minutes. You need a break, you need to sit down, you need something to eat, you need go to the bathroom. It's very difficult to make it through that last period of time when you're closing when you can kind of kick back a little bit and you're ready to end the case.
00:40:20BACH: After you had gone through this experience a time or two, how were you able, how did you go about making yourself able to go back in there again and again and again and again?
00:40:40CLARK: You have to put it in the back of your mind. There are things that we would do to try and forget. You have to try. Every day, seems like when you left the OR. you just wanted to try and forget the day. Some guys turned to alcohol, some guys turned to substance. During the winter, they actually had a basketball league. They cleared out a building and put up a couple of basketball hoops during the summer. We had softball teams. We'd play softball. On Sundays during the warmer months, they'd get a Chinook, a big helicopter, twin-rotor helicopter, and we'd fly to Eagle Beach, which is on the South China Sea, and spend a day at the beach if you weren't working. I did get to see the Bob Hope Show. But there are a lot of times when we would just get a bunch of guys together and try to drown the day. We had a place called The Room. That was a little L coming off one of the hooches. And we had huge Sansui speakers and a Kenwood receiver and a Pioneer turntable and we had a couple hundred albums in there and we'd just go in and get lost. Tried to get rid of the thoughts from the day with this accumulating in your mind, not being able to process what you have seen. It seemed like every, about every four or five weeks, my mind would just implode. It's kind of the deer in the headlights. You could look somebody in the eye, but not make eye contact with them. It's like they're looking right through you or they're not seeing you. And it takes about a week to get through that. It was just the deepest, darkest depression that you could ever imagine. But that's when the guys would pull together. That's when you needed your core group. I have three guys that I consider brothers from Vietnam. And when you're in that depth of depression, the word would go out, and we would know not to leave that guy alone for a while. Somebody had to be with him. and you open up your deepest, darkest parts of your soul and you get to know each other like you can't know anybody else. I can't be as honest and open with my wife, my family, anyone as much as I was with these guys and they would open up with you and I call it that we became connected at the soul. I mean we almost became a part of each other. And we would help each other through that and it would be me one week and it'd be another guy the next week and be another guy the week and for a couple days you'd cover for the guy because it's almost like they're non-functional for a couple of days until they start to work through this. And every time I came through it I thought, all right, I've seen it all, I'm hard, you can't hurt me anymore, but there was always a next time. There's always something that you just cannot imagine that you would see, you'd have to do, that you'd hear -- something. And all of this from the last several weeks would build up and your mind would just vacate. I mean, it was gone. It was like there's almost no thinking. You went on automatic pilot for a while.
00:44:31BACH: How about the doctors? Were they mostly younger officers that were the surgeons or were they veterans themselves of Korea perhaps that had done surgery there or were they just a bunch of young guys that happened to find themselves in this situation?
00:44:47CLARK: Pretty much young guys that happened to find themselves in this situation. Excuse me. Gus Kappler, Roger King, Charlie Carroll, those were trauma surgeons that were there and they were about 30 years old and hadn't even completely completed their training and found themselves as trauma surgeons in Vietnam, making all these decisions. Very good guys to work with. Casey Blitt was an anesthesiologist. I want to say he may have been 30. He went to the colonel when he got there and he said, you know, we can run this hospital two ways. We can run it like the Army, which doesn't work, or we can run it like a civilian hospital and make it a real facility where we can help people. And Sugiyama, the company commander said, you know do what you feel you need to do. So it was ran like a civilian hospital. We were on a first-name basis. We worked together elbow to elbow for hours on end. So there was no private this or corporal that. It was not amongst us. And it drove the Army nuts. Mike and Joel and Ben. It was Gus. It was Roger. It was Charlie. It was Patty. We did have some of our career soldiers that would not allow that. It was rank. Everything was official, but 90 percent of us, we were there essentially because we were drafted and we were told to be there by our country. Much like MASH, and MASH was incredibly accurate, whoever wrote MASH had to have been there because that's the only way you could know the ins and outs.
00:46:37BACH: And you're talking about the black humor kind of stuff.
00:46:41CLARK: The humor, the antics, as you remember they were not Army. They were surgeons. They didn't tend not to pay attention to Army protocol and what have you, and that's the way it was at the 85th. If the career soldiers, what we call lifers, would catch it, we'd get in trouble for it. The worst of them were the sergeants. The officers didn't care, but the sergeant, the career sergeants. No, can't do that. They're the ones that would call us out on it the most. But we, I mean, we'd party with the officers. We'd go to the officers' club. The sergeants would see us there and throw us out. But we'd go out on the patio and they had a grill and sometimes we'd get there, steaks to grill out. But, yeah, we were a very cohesive unit.
00:47:37BACH: I think stories out of Vietnam are rather notorious for soldiers and Marines that were counting the days, kind of marking them off on a calendar or whatever, and could tell you to the day how much longer they had to serve. Did you find yourself doing that while you were there?
00:47:53CLARK: Absolutely, I still have my short-timers calendars.
00:47:57BACH: And what is that? The short-timers calendars?
00:47:59CLARK: Short-time calendars. There are different kinds. Some of them were naked ladies, but the ones I have are the steel pots with boots coming out of it, and they have irregular shapes all around, and there were numbers in each one. And I had a half-year calendar, which you start filling in the first number, you'd pay attention, and every day you'd color it in. I'd use a different color. And then you had your short-timers calendar We would call ourselves a two-digit midget when you got below a hundred days. And it's the same thing. You'd color in one every day and you yes, you kept tracking when you became a two-digit midget then You would walk around and you forget in a group of people. There's somebody who would yell short And somebody would turn around and they'd say shorter and then there would be the competition of who has the least days left. And it was a big deal
00:48:59BACH: Was that kind of a contradiction you had such a close relationship with the men that you were serving with and can recall their names for instance vividly to this day, but yet counting the days until, let's face it, you'd be leaving all of that behind.
00:49:15CLARK: I wanted to get out of there so bad, all I wanted to do was go home, but yet when I went to the airport, I actually cried because I was leaving the guys in my unit. And I knew the camaraderie we had, that depth, that connection we had at the soul, that I would never experience that again in my life.
00:49:37BACH: Have you?
00:49:39CLARK: No. No. Unless you're put in a position similar to that, I can't imagine that you would, that anyone would ever know.
00:49:51BACH: So the day came that you left. What was that like?
00:49:57CLARK: Mixed emotion. Um. A couple guys Chuck Carroll and Dave Anderson Tree -- Tree was one of my brothers -- rode with me in the back of the dukes and a half to the airport. I don't even remember where I went from there. There was a transient base that I had to fly to. Turned in my equipment and then flew back home on commercial airliner.
00:50:26BACH: What was coming home like?
00:50:30CLARK: When the plane landed in Washington, I was glad I went through Washington rather than San Francisco because San Francisco had the riots, had the protesters, guys getting off planes were spit on. They had rocks thrown at them. They had bottles thrown at him. Some of them were injured just getting off, on and off the plane going to and from Vietnam. Fort Lewis didn't have that. But when the plane was ready to touch down, all I could think of was, please God, I made it to Vietnam, let this plane down safe. And getting off the plane on cement, I got down on my knees and absolutely kissed the tarmac. Happy to be home.
00:51:11BACH: What rank were you when you came back?
00:51:12CLARK: E-5.
00:51:13BACH: So you were a sergeant?
00:51:14CLARK: It would be be the equivalent of a three-stripe sergeant, but it's called a Spec-5, because I didn't have a combat MOS, I didn't have hard stripes.
00:51:24BACH: So you landed in Washington. Did you immediately turn around and head back to Michigan or what happened next?
00:51:29CLARK: Took me one day to process out. You could take a couple, three days if you wanted to or you could process out in one hectic day. And it was in the morning when we got there and I spent a long day in Fort Lewis going from place to place to process out. One of the most disappointing things to me when I was still at Fort Lewis, they had contracted some civilians to do one part of the processing and I don't remember what that was, but I know I walked into a warehouse and it had anti-war protest sites on the wall on an Army base, and my heart sank. I was extremely disappointed to still be on an Army base and be subjected to it. When I was there, there was a full-bird colonel that came in and, I mean, he just ripped the place apart. I mean he tore the posters off the walls. They were ripped into shreds. He was ripping into guys. I don't know who had to pay what for that, but somebody was going to pay for that. but it's one of those things you can't unsee something. You can't un-feel that. But a long day of processing out. I want to say it was probably 10, 11 o'clock at night when I was in the cab to the airport. I flew into Chicago. We had to travel in uniform, and people in airports would be assaulted, spit on, people would scream at you. So I tried very hard to stay in the shadows, try to avoid people as much as I could, as much you can in Chicago. Fortunately, nothing happened when I was there. From there it was a flight to Detroit. My wife met me in Detroit. Some friends, Leo and his wife, Karen, drove my wife there. Leo was a friend from school, married my wife's maid of honor. He was also a Marine Vietnam veteran. in the Battle of Khe Sanh in '68, he was there during Tet of '68. After hugs, kisses, handshakes at the airport, as prearranged, my wife brought me civilian clothes. I went into the bathroom in Detroit, changed out of my uniform, put on civilian clothes, and Vietnam was in the past. Go to Marshall. First stop was to the A&W for a cheeseburger and french fries at London Ranch. Didn't get a good cheeseburger for a long time. It was just first stop on the way home.
00:54:19BACH: Did you ever wear that uniform again?
00:54:20CLARK: No, I still have it, but I never put it on. I had a fatigue jacket, which was the standard shirt, and I put peace signs in Southeast East Asia War participant, 1771, the big patch on the back. And I wore that, but no, I never put the uniform on again. It was tucked away in some space in the back of my head and never to be opened again. There were, of course back then they didn't have yellow ribbons anyway. That started back in the '70s. There was no welcome home party. Friends who were best friends when I went to Vietnam were now acquaintances.
00:55:10BACH: Really? Why was that?
00:55:11CLARK: Because I knew from before I went in the Army, when I was going through high school, that the word, the mumbling among the general populace was, Vietnam vets will turn on you in a minute. They're nuts. Leave 'em alone. And although nobody ever said that to him when I came home, I certainly lived it. People that I knew were good friends. We didn't do things, we didn't party together. Developed new friends at that point. My best friend throughout my adult life was Leo, and he was a Vietnam vet. And my comment about that was that we never talked about Vietnam. We didn't have to. We just understood. But life coming home, yeah, we were considered the scum of the earth for about twenty years. Not accepted back into the population. I would not offer the fact that I was a Vietnam vet. If somebody asked if it came up, then I would admit to it. I wouldn't deny it. But I would never bring it up. I would offer that to anyone.
00:56:36BACH: What happened after you got home? Did you begin to pursue a career of one kind or another?
00:56:42CLARK: I was a machinist at a shop, a factory, before I went and got drafted from there. Of course, my seniority accumulated when I was gone. When I came back, theoretically, I would have my job back. Being in Michigan and being a machinist in the shop that made car parts, there was a recession and so goes GM, as goes GM so goes the economy in Michigan. And my job was not there. I was laid off. I was able to draw unemployment and actually subsistence pay from my work. Quite honestly, knowing that I was laid off, I went and signed up immediately because I felt I needed some time to try and get my head screwed on again, trying to get things straight in my mind. As time went on, this was August, as time went, still no jobs available. I'm running out of unemployment, I'm out of all my benefits, so I have to find something and there just weren't any jobs available,
00:57:44BACH: Hmm.
00:57:45CLARK: The last thing I ever wanted to do was see the inside of a hospital. That was gone. I wanted nothing to do with medicine. The only job I could get was in an orderly in a hospital, so I took that job. I think it was $2.35 an hour. I'd get patients from the floor and bring them down to the OR. I'd clean their rooms in between, get things set up, do shave preps for patients. About three months after hiring on as an orderly, one of the OR techs who had been a Navy corpsman went back to college. He left an opening and they moved me right into that spot. And moving into the, as a tech, I also got a job with a general surgeon. Working for him on Saturdays, he had a minor surgical clinic in the ER at that time. And I would work from 11 till whenever we got done 5 or 6 in the afternoon doing minor procedures. After being there for a while, I got a call back to my job, but left my job. I started going to school part-time, actually was accepted into nursing school. I was thinking about becoming a nurse anesthetist. Then decided that I would see if I could go on to medical school and went to Kellogg Community College for a couple of years, went to Michigan State University for most of a year. Did not care for my education there and actually dropped out. Went to Albion College, which is twelve miles from Marshall for the last three semesters. I got my bachelor's degree. Busy at the time. I did take the MCAT. At Michigan State University that year they had 1,500 qualified applicants for 150 positions. And although my grades, everything else was good, I did not get accepted, and I didn't continue to pursue that. Kind of went from job to job, worked as a machinist, set up man in machine shops and what have you. Worked for a few months, get laid off. And everything I was able to get in the bank would go. You know, you get back to work for a few months, get a little money and then it would go because I was laid off again. And I just got tired of that. Something's got to change. So I went back to school. My son was born in '79. We bought a house in '80, and I quit my job, went back to school full-time in '83, went to P.A. school at Western Michigan University and graduated in '85.
01:00:32BACH: P. A. school is what?
01:00:34CLARK: Physician assistant.
01:00:34BACH: Okay, graduated in '85?
01:00:36CLARK: Graduated in '85.
01:00:40BACH: And then you went to work as a physician's assistant?
01:00:41CLARK: Yes.
01:00:42BACH: Really.
01:00:43CLARK: Yeah, that's when I moved to Wisconsin. I wanted to work on a heart team in surgery. The reason for my going back to PA school was not only because I was being bounced from job to job, but because when I worked in medicine, it was the only time I didn't I hate going to work. I did not mind going to at that.
01:01:07BACH: So what brought you to Wisconsin, the hospital or something?
01:01:09CLARK: I accepted a position in general surgery in Milwaukee with the thought that I wanted to work on a heart team, and they had some heart programs here. And I was here about four months before I was able to hire onto a heart team. We did bypass grafts
01:01:28BACH: At what hospital was that?
01:01:30CLARK: I had privileges at nine different hospitals. St. Luke's was where our office was. We primarily worked there. But Mount Sinai. Columbia and St. Mary's were separate at that time. I had privileges at both of those. Children's Hospital, Trinity Hospital, which is now St. Luke's South Shore, ah, Waukesha Memorial. Um.
01:01:50BACH: So this was really the start of your, what became a life-long career.
01:01:57CLARK: Yes, yep.
01:01:57BACH: Hm hm. Are you still working?
01:01:59CLARK: Yes. I'm working.
01:02:00BACH: And where do you work now?
01:02:01CLARK: I'm working at All Saints in Racine in the emergency department. I've been there twenty-one years now.
01:02:10BACH: When you began your work as a physician's assistant, what happened to all of the memories of your evac hospital days in Vietnam? Did they come up from time to time? Did they never come up? Did you keep them at bay? What happened with all of that?
01:02:24CLARK: They were locked away. They were locked away for the longest time. I was sitting at a blackjack table at actually an intensive care conference in Las Vegas. I think it was '91, maybe '92, somewhere in there. And a guy walked up to the table and he had something that identified him as being in Desert Storm. And the people at the blackjack tables turned to him and thanked him for his service and welcome him. And he said, thanks. He said, I appreciate it. But you know, if you see a Vietnam vet, tell them thanks because they never got it. And it was the first time anyone had ever positively recognized me as a Vietnam vet, even though it wasn't me in particular. He wasn't addressing me, didn't know I was a Vietnam vet. But I actually cried. It was very touching to me. It was, again, it was just locked away. It was not, not touchable, nobody could go there. My unit, again very close, started having reunions in 2006. We had slides, presentations, talk, party, a lot of BS, but it was a positive experience, and I decided that being, you know, getting up in age, I was 20 when I was there, and the surgeons were 30s. We have people in their 80s that are still going to reunions now. We have one every two years. Very positive for me, very healing. I came home in 2012 from the reunion. very enthused, excited, and decided that the story has to be put down on paper. That being September, it's the deer season, you can't do anything during deer season. So it was November, December that I started writing a book in 2012. I finished it in December of 2013, did some investigating, called a company and had the book published. I had to pay out of pocket to have the book published.
01:05:01BACH: What is the name of the book?
01:05:02CLARK: One Man's Story, Memoirs of a Vietnam Vet. It took a while for the editing and the cover design and everything to get done and it came out in May of 2013, 2014, I'm sorry. And I got the first hard copy to review and make sure that everything was okay, although I had it edited. They still made me responsible for any errors, and I'm not happy to say that there are two typos in there. I got the book, everything was okay. I signed the book Happy Mother's Day and sent it to my mother in Florida. So she has the first ever copy.
01:05:49BACH: And was that the act of re-opening all of these memories and letting them come out for you?
01:05:56CLARK: The reunions was the start. They were the start of it. Every year, you know, a little more, a little more and it started being able to face what was there and open up that space.
01:06:11BACH: Why do you think those memories stayed locked inside, as you described it, for that period of time?
01:06:17CLARK: I had --. My thought on this is when you experience something like that, it's so traumatic and so painful that you can't face it. You can't bring it to the front. It's too traumatic for you to experience again. And over time, things scar over a little bit. Some healing takes place. Some of it's forgotten. And you can generally, over time bring it to the front a little. But it takes time for that to happen.
01:06:57BACH: In what you've shared with us, Mike, there's clearly still deep pain that are associated, that is associated with many of the memories that you've share. But does it help for you to be able to feel those feelings and express them?
01:07:15CLARK: It helps, yes. Over time, I feel that I am getting better. I read a book by Edward Tick, who is a PhD psychologist. It's called War and the Soul, and it's about PTSD and getting over this. And his thoughts, he went through the different cultures and how they dealt with their warriors and helped them back into society. In Vietnam, I came home, one day later I was back in society I mean there was there was absolutely no decompression there whatsoever. And the treatment of PTSD has been treating the symptoms, treating the anxiety and the depression and the anger and what have you. And the actual act was not to be approached. We did not bring that up. And he said, that's wrong. In order for people to heal, you've got to bring that out. You've got talk about it. You've got to write about it. You've got to to bring experience that again in order to get over it. And with that, I've been giving presentations, talks, interviews, trying to help people understand, hopefully helping other vets as well, but trying to heal myself.
01:08:37BACH: That's quite a journey.
01:08:40CLARK: Yeah. I feel that I'm doing better. I get it, it'll never go away.
01:08:49BACH: How old are you now?
01:08:52CLARK: 66
01:08:53BACH: Prior to the book that you wrote, did you share any of these things with your wife or with your son?
01:08:58BACH: No. No
01:08:59BACH: Did they ask you to?
01:09:02CLARK: No. No, they knew that it was someplace that I couldn't and would not [??].
01:09:11BACH: So this is quite a change.
01:09:16CLARK: My first experience with bringing it back out was at a conference in Denver, Colorado, in '84. And they had a meeting of the Veterans' Caucus, maybe I'll go. And they have slides from Vietnam, and they had Good Night Vietnam from Billy Joel, and I was a basket case. I mean, I couldn't hardly get back to my room. And all I want to do is get drunk and try and forget. And then it was locked away because it was still too fresh, too new. Even now, it was about four years ago, we went to see a movie. It was a pretty harmless movie, but it was a military movie. And they had casualties coming into an emergency department and of course when they came in and they had the screams and the sounds and everything. And it was like I was there again. And my wife had to drive home. So even, you know, even addressing it, even continuing to try to get better, still a work in progress.
01:10:51BACH: It's amazing, isn't it? After all these years, we're talking almost fifty years for Vietnam veterans. And these memories still have such, what do you call it, a sting?
01:11:06CLARK: It's painful and there are times when I don't even know why I hurt, I just know that I hurt. And there are a lot of guys that still can't go there and never will.
01:11:23BACH: Just think of the folks that you are connecting with that have had such similar troubles in expressing themselves or even a willingness to go back to try to reconnect with some of those memories and thoughts and bring them out. You're helping them, aren't you?
01:11:41CLARK: I hope. That's one of the reasons I wrote the book was to help me, but I'm hoping that I help others as well. Some of the guys still can't handle it, and hopefully their family members can read this and help them understand what they're going through.
01:12:06BACH: What do you make of where we are today? That is to say, in war, in at least two places, I mean, Afghanistan and Iraq still continue, and men and women continue to volunteer for service in these theaters and others. Do you have some advice for them as they embark on that part of their life?
01:12:37CLARK: Advice I don't. I don't know if I can offer advice other than maybe you can't imagine what you're going to experience until you experience it. I mean, it's just things that are beyond human comprehension.
01:13:10BACH: Looking back on your own experience, Mike, would you do it again? Would you have rather become a cook or a MP than move into the hospital or even leave entirely and go to Canada?
01:13:30CLARK: If I, if I had to do what I had to do again, no, I would not change what I did. I feel that I helped, I contributed to thousands of guys coming home alive that would not have. The surgeons bear the primary responsibility, but I was certainly a part of that. And that's why I went to Vietnam, was to help, to try and make a difference in other guys' lives, knowing that a lot of them didn't want to be there either. And I feel that I accomplished that. The 85th, we had a 95 percent survival rate, which is amazing. But I would not change my MOS with what I did. If I had the option of not going to Vietnam, go back, I would not go. I would necessarily go to Canada, but if I had an option to not go, I wouldn't have gone. If something happened today where somebody invaded our shores, I'd be there tomorrow with my own AR. I'd use my own ammunition. I'd there. But Vietnam, I would not do Vietnam again.
01:14:51BACH: I would like to thank you on behalf of the Veterans Museum for the courage that you've shown to share this story with us. I think that is a purely courageous act on your part.
01:15:03CLARK: Thank you.
01:15:04CLARK: You're welcome. Is there anything we didn't touch on that you would like to add in or should we wrap it up?
01:15:12CLARK: I think at this point we've done a pretty, pretty good job.
01:15:16BACH: If you don't mind, I'm just going to ask you to clarify, slowly for me, these three men that you cited who were like brothers to you in Vietnam. Can you give me their first and last names and spell their last names?
01:15:28CLARK: Donn Gates. D-O-N-N G-A-T-E-S.
01:15:33BACH: G-A-T-E-S?
01:15:36CLARK: Duane Wall.
01:15:37BACH: D-U-A-N-E?
01:15:39CLARK: Yep. W-A-L-L.
01:15:41BACH: Okay.
01:15:43CLARK: And David Anderson.
01:15:45BACH: A-N-D-E-R
01:15:48CLARK: S-O-N
01:15:49BACH: And you mentioned a Leo.
01:15:52CLARK: Leo Chichester.
01:15:53BACH: Yeah, how does he spell his last name?
01:15:54CLARK: C-H-I-C-H-E-S-T-E-R.
01:15:55BACH: C-H-I-C-H-E-S-T-E-R. Chichester, interesting. And he was from where? Michigan?
01:16:06CLARK: Marshall. Yeah, we went to high school together.
01:16:07BACH: Oh, high school, chum. Okay. And a couple of the doctors that you mentioned.
01:16:13CLARK: Gus Kappler.
01:16:15BACH: K-A-P-L-E-R?
01:16:16CLARK: K-A-P-P L-E-R. Roger King.
01:16:18BACH: Okay.
01:16:27CLARK: And Joe Patin, P-A-T-I-N. Those are the three that I had tremendous respect for. I don't know if it matters, but Dave Anderson, his nickname was Tree.
01:16:45BACH: Why was that?
01:16:46CLARK: When he first got there, he was actually working with Joe Patin and Joe Patin kept saying, hey buddy, hey buddy. And it just seemed to strike a note in Dave. And he said, he finally had enough, he said my name is not Buddy. He said, I don't care what you call me. He said I don' care if you call house, garage, plant, tree. Don't call me hey buddy so tree stuck.
01:17:05BACH: Ha, ha. That's a good one.
01:17:12CLARK: Dwayne was nicknamed Dew, and Don was nicknamed Deej, Deejee.
01:17:21BACH: Do you still have contact with those guys?
01:17:23CLARK: Yes, they were at the reunion. Tree recently died, but Duane has been to almost every reunion. Duane or Don started coming to the reunions. He's been to the last two. Dave made it to one. He was here or there as to whether he would be able to get there or not and I talked to him on the phone and I told him I said you know the four of us getting together is on my bucket list. So you've got to be there, and so he did get there. it happened to be the only one he could make because he died before the next one.
01:17:57BACH: Had you had contact with them prior to the reunion through these years?
01:18:02CLARK: Duane and I had been in loose contact for some time, but in 2006, we certainly reestablished the contact. And people ask me why we weren't in close contact if we're so close. It was a reminder. As close as we were, it was still a reminder. Don came to visit me a couple of times after he came home, and Tree, Dave, they came together, and that was in the early '70s. That was a couple years after we came home, and we kind of wandered apart and I sent notes out to every Don Gates in Michigan and Don responded to me And we got back together and then he said last he knew Dave was in Iron Mountain. So I sent letters to the four Dave Andersons in Iron Mountain and he gave me a call and that's how we got back together. But which it's been just it was just the one time that the four of us were all together since we came home from Vietnam
01:19:00BACH: It's a powerful narrative and I'm so happy and grateful that you chose to share this with the Veterans Museum. Thank you.
01:19:07CLARK: Thank you. I appreciate the opportunity, and hopefully somebody else will get some benefit from this as well.
01:19:08BACH: Absolutely.
