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By Al Zdon
Anybody who's ever watched a war movie has seen the scene where a brave soldier is engaging the enemy and he suddenly takes a bullet.
And — as the bullets are whizzing by and the bombs
are exploding and the grenades are flying through the air — what's the first thing he and his buddies scream?
"Medic!!!"
Mike Clark knew that call well. During his tour of duty in Vietnam, he served as
an Army medic. "It was important that the guys have confidence in their medic. And so if it was at all possible to get there, I would. We didn't run blindly to our deaths, but if it was possible, we got there."
Once there, the job was to keep the soldier alive until he could be evacuated to a hospital. Even in the jungles of Vietnam, a wounded man could often be in a hospital setting within 20 minutes of when the medical
helicopter touched down.
Growing up in St. Cloud, Clark never suspected that there would come a day when he would be a medic. And, as a medic, he never knew when that medevac chopper would be coming for him, but
it did.
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Clark graduated from St. Cloud Tech High School in 1965, and two weeks later he was at basic training at Ft. Knox, Kentucky.
"I wanted to join up, and it was just a matter
of which one I picked. I got seasick one time on Lake Mille Lacs, so I ruled out the Navy. The Air Force uniforms weren't that neat. They looked like postal uniforms.
"I liked the Marine dress blues, and my dad
was a Marine, but they couldn't take me right away. And so it was the Army. There was no delay getting into the Army."
Clark did well on his tests, and was asked what schools he would like to apply for. "I told
them, 'You pick it.' They picked medic school. All I knew is that I didn't want to be an Airborne Ranger or anything like that."
Clark was hoping his military career would take him to Germany. "I wanted to try
their strong beer and frolic with the frauleins." In fact, most of his class at Ft. Sam Houston did go to Germany, but Clark was kept back to take additional operating room training.
For several months, Clark was
stationed at Ft. Leavenworth, Kansas, but he found the work tedious. He asked his first sergeant if he could transfer to an infantry outfit. "He said, 'Clark, are you crazy? Well, it's your funeral.'"
In April,
1966, Clark was at Ft. Riley, Kansas, where the 9th Division was being formed up. In fact, Clark was one of the first people there, which meant he got the job of going around the massive camp and painting over all
the signs that said, "Big Red One." The First Division had just left Ft. Riley for Vietnam.
By October, the Division began packing for duty overseas. Many of the men still had dreams that they would be stationed
in Europe or some other choice locale. "But then the Junction City newspaper ran a story that the 9th Division would be heading to the Mekong Delta in Vietnam."
Clark was assigned, as a medic, to headquarters
division of the 9th Division, 4th Battalion, 39th Infantry. He was assigned to Company A.
The men in the division were not officially informed of their destination until they were several days at sea aboard
the troop ship, General Alexander Patch. "I was lucky because I was already an E-4. We were sharing a room above sea level that had two portholes. I felt guilty, but not guilty enough to want to join those guys down
in the hold.
"On December 26, we pulled into Okinawa, and they put us in a restricted area where we all got drunk. Back on the ship it was awful, with everybody sick, toilets overflowing, the works."
The
troops went ashore at Vung Tau, which was an Australian-run port of entry into Vietnam. "The Aussies strung two bodies of VC up in the trees with a big sign that said, 'Welcome, Yanks.' I was wondering what kind of
deal is this? I mean we had just stepped on shore."
The bulk of the division got on trucks and was transported inland to Bearcat Base. Along the way, the Australians were guarding the road, and yelling
encouragement to the new combatants like, "Only a year to go, Yanks."
The division had to build up the base, do sandbagging, and begin to do patrols in the area of the base, mainly to build up their own stamina
in the heat.
"I found out pretty quick that the two canteens they wanted us to carry weren't enough for me. When guys would get dehydrated, I'd give them my water, and I'd soon be out. I started carrying six
canteens."
The first casualty in Clark's unit was a soldier from Michigan who was shot one night by another American soldier in the dark. It was an honest mistake, Clark said, and the real tragedy was that the
soldier who shot him later committed suicide.
The patrols from Bearcat kept going further and further into the countryside, and began encountering more booby traps and more quick ambushes. The country itself was
a major enemy.
"There were the damn leeches that would fall on you, and the swarms of mosquitoes, and the fire ants. If a fire ant was biting you, it felt like someone pinching you really hard. When a guy got a
bunch of fire ants on him, we'd just take his clothes off him and try to beat the ants off of him."
And, from shorter patrols, the soldiers were now going out for weeks at a time. "We never knew how big the whole
effort was. It might have been a whole battalion, but all we knew was our little platoon and where we were."
Clark said a soldier never knew how he would react to being in a combat situation until it happened,
and the same for medics. "What they taught us in medic school and what I learned in the operating room didn't prepare me for Vietnam. The first time out, you didn't know if you'd freeze or not. You're going to see a
lot mutilated men. It was the stomach wounds I hated the worst."
When a medic arrived on the scene, he would first ask the wounded man where he was hit, but then not trust that completely. "One wound may hurt
more, but it may not be the worst wound. You'd just try to stop the bleeding anyway you could, and do whatever else you could to keep the guy alive. I did two tracheotomies while I was there. That's a pretty scary
thing."
The use of morphine was always controversial, and the medics had to do paperwork to show where every dose had gone. "I would always leave the serette in the guy's clothing so that they'd know at the
hospital that I'd given him morphine."
Clark always carried an M-16. He was offered a .45 pistol when he got to Vietnam, but turned it down because he had never trained on it. "Until I was needed as a medic, I'd
fire it. I wasn't anxious to kill people, but I did want us all to get home. I can't say I ever did kill anyone. You're usually firing at muzzle flashes or shadows."
It was important for a medic to earn the
confidence of the men, Clark said. And part of that was a quick response to their call. Still, there was some common sense that went with it. "I learned from another medic that you don't have to run directly at a
wounded man. Sometimes it make sense to come at him from the side or the rear. You try to run where the fire will be the least. It's no good to that guy if you get killed or wounded on your way to him."
Being in
the countryside at night could be scary, Clark said. "I remember waking up one night and finding out that everyone one of the guys in my squad were asleep. To this day, I don't sleep well, if there are noises I
don't understand."
On one patrol, Clark's unit brushed up against an entire North Vietnamese company. "We just hunkered down and hoped nobody would see us. If they did, we were goners. After they passed, we
called in the artillery and got the heck out of there."
The Division eventually moved out of Bearcat entirely, and parts of it began operating in the Mekong Delta. "I didn't like the Delta very much. You'd get in
mud up to your waist, and it was like moving through a vat of glue. If you came under fire, there wasn't much you could do, you were just stuck in the paddies."
One time, the unit was heading for high ground to
be picked up by the Huey helicopters, but the men were stuck fast into the mud. The helicopters hovered over the men and let them grab onto the skids. "As the chopper lifted off, you could hear these loud sucking
sounds."
The wet terrain also meant a constant battle with trench foot for the men, and bad feet put more men in the hospital than anything else.
By now, Clark's platoon was not attached to any base. They
would patrol for a few weeks, and then come back into the relative shelter of an artillery base, which they would guard. The time at the artillery base was considered their rest time. "Your clothing would rot away
and you'd have to get new clothes every now and then."
"I didn't like the artillery camps very much. They had bunkers, and so they had rats. You don't get a very good sleep at night with rats running over you
all the time. And then, of course, the snakes would come after the rats."
One time, the platoon bumped into an enemy company and got into a firefight. "We called in the artillery, and they were right on the mark.
When they were done, we got out of there. We were there to observe and not to engage. That was a scary night."
The next day, Clark had to be evacuated to a hospital because of the dust in his eyes from the
artillery attack. They put gloop in my eyes and covered it with an eye patch. That was the first night I'd slept in a bed since I'd been in Nam, and I slept hard. I dreamed that somebody had gone nuts. The next day
they told me that a guy a couple beds down had gone nuts and they had to subdue him."
Back at an artillery base, Clark was watching the men at the base launching mortars. "All of a sudden, there was one that
didn't have the usual sound. It had kind of a tinny sound. All the guys started yelling. The round had gone straight up, and it was coming straight down."
Clark began to run, but soon stopped and just hit the
deck. "I realized I couldn't get away from it, so what the hell? I just lay there." The mortar round landed six feet away from him, but didn't explode. The firing pin failed to come out. "I had my share of luck with
me."
Because of his role as medic, Clark found out that he had other, unusual duties at times. "The men would sometimes come to me with their personal problems. I guess I was as close as they could get to a
counselor, or a father confessor. I'd do the best I could with my advice."
The best psychological stance, Clark said, was to take it day by day, and not to ever consider how much time you had left on your tour of
duty. He saw one medic refuse to go into combat because of supposed moral objections. That soldier ended up at Leavenworth Prison. Another time, Clark witnessed a fellow soldier calmly put his M-16 up to his
shoulder and pull the trigger.
"The sergeant came up and started yelling at the guy, 'You're not going to get out of this war that easy. You'll be back. You'll be back.' But they took him out on medevac, and we
never saw him again."
The war was a tough adjustment for anyone, he said. "I grew up a Catholic, but no matter what your religion, you believed in the sanctity of life. Over there, there was no sanctity of life.
We were trying to kill people because they were trying to kill us. And pretty soon that just seemed to be the normal way of life."
Clark said he had a few run-ins with officers in his time. On one occasion, his
platoon had killed some armed Viet Cong, but then found out that the enemy had brought their families with them. An injured 10-year-old girl was among them.
"The lieutenant colonel was circling overhead in his
helicopter and saw we were trying to evacuate the girl so she could get medical care. He told us to leave her. I got on the radio and told him we weren't leaving her."
It was hard slogging through the jungle
carrying the girl on a poncho. "We did slow the platoon down, but after a few hours we got to our objective, and the girl was medevaced out."
The next day, Clark was called over to see the officer. "He really
scared me. He had six purple hearts, and he was something of a legend. I didn't know what he was going to say about saving the girl. I was really scared."
The officer fixed Clark with a level gaze, paused, and
said, "I've really got a headache. Do you have any APCs?" Clark quickly produced the medicine. "He just said, 'Thank you,' and that was it."
Another time, Clark's unit was crossing a stream when one of his
comrades took an AK-47 round in the chest and was killed instantly. "He was a good friend of mine, and he was from Minnesota. He also had a great sense of humor. His name was Larry Welk, and at this time Lawrence
Welk was very popular. I used to joke with him about the champagne bubbles, and he'd always laugh."
Back at the base, Clark was asked to take Welk's personnel records to the battalion office. Once there, the
lieutenant behind the desk casually cracked a joke about Larry Welk's name. This time Clark didn't think it was very funny, and a shouting match broke out between him and the officer.
The officer called in a
sergeant and ordered that Clark be arrested, and the sergeant quickly hustled Clark out the door. As a parting remark, Clark turned and called the lieutenant a "staff weenie."
The next day, as to be expected,
Clark was called into the first sergeant's office. Clark expected the worst. The first sergeant looked him up and down and finally said, "Doc, maybe it's time you had a rest. There's openings for the R&R camp up
in Taiwan. Why don't you take a few days off?"
"I didn't want to take my R&R right then. I wanted to wait until November. But then I thought, I might not be alive in November. So I said yes. And that's how I
got my R&R."
One day, after his return to duty, a replacement came in. "You could tell he was new because he was husky. All of us were skinny from being in country for so long. After a few weeks, he
complained that his feet were bad and he couldn't go on patrol. The captain told me to look at his feet and make a recommendation. I examined him, and I told the captain that the guy's feet weren't any worse than
any of ours."
The next day, the replacement not only went on patrol with the platoon, but he was put on the point. Sometime later, as Clark was marching along, he heard gunfire and the call for "MEDIC!!!"
Sure
enough, it was the replacement, wounded in the chest and bleeding profusely. Clark did what he could to stop the bleeding, but wasn't having much success. A medevac helicopter tried to land, but was driven off by
enemy fire. Clark saw another chopper hovering overhead, the executive officer of the unit.
"I got on the radio and asked that he pick this man up. He didn't want to. He didn't want blood all over his
helicopter. I told him, 'If this man dies, you're going to have some blame in it.' He came down, and we loaded the guy into the chopper. I knew I made an enemy, but I didn't care. All I wanted at that point was to
do my job and go home."
Not long after that, Clark was accompanying what he now calls the "Buddha Patrol." He and a squad were in a hostile village when they poked their head into a building that was full of
candles and religious pictures.
"The guys thought those pictures were really cool, and they started taking them. I told them not to, it was a religious shrine, but they didn't care."
A week later, that same
squad, without Clark, was on patrol and was ambushed. Several were killed and every man was wounded. "It was sort of a message, karma, or whatever you want to call it. They shouldn't have taken those pictures."
Superstition and ritual were all part of the survival skills of the Americans in Vietnam, Clark said. One of the superstitions had to do with him. "I was considered good luck by some of the guys. I suppose it was
because I'd been under fire so much and never been hit. I had bullet holes in my back pack, and bullet holes through the floppy end of my jungle fatigues, but I'd never been hit. Our RTO (radio operator) Lydes
Gardner always walked with me on patrol because he thought I was good luck."
One example of his fortune happened when Clark's unit was in a firefight in a rubber plantation. Clark went to treat a wounded soldier,
but found the man was dead. "I heard a slight noise and saw a VC pointing what looked like an American .45 at me. I didn't have my rifle, but I reached for a .38 I'd got from an aircrew. As I fell, he fired and the
round cut my jacket at upper stomach. I'd almost lost big time in my only 'Old West' shootout."
Clark described his last patrol. "We were rousted out in the darkness and told to get our stuff together. We had a
new medic, and I couldn't find him. He was hiding. When I did find him, I tried to reassure him and get him ready. We went to the assembly area, and the choppers arrived. We got on the Hueys, and it was still dark."
Clark said the mission was fairly routine. On the third day out, the unit was crossing a stream. "As usual, Gardner was right behind me. I stepped out into the stream, but I just had a bad feeling about this
branch over us. I turned just in time to see Gardner reaching up for the branch, and then the grenade fell out."
The grenade exploded at waist level, killing Gardner instantly and sending a shower of shrapnel
into Clark's legs. "I knew enough as a medic that it wasn't life threatening unless I went into shock. It might be crippling, but it wasn't life threatening. I was glad to see the new medic come right up and start
to treat me. That meant he was okay."
The medic offered Clark morphine. "I turned it down because I thought he might need it later for someone else. I regretted that later."
The medevac sent for Clark couldn't
land in the jungle, and so it lowered a cable down and Clark was hoisted upwards. "I was a little nervous about snipers, but they got me inside the chopper okay. That was the end of my war."
Clark was brought to
the 24th Evacuation Hospital. The shrapnel had done considerable damage to Clark's legs, and had severed the Achilles tendon on one leg. "There has been some long-term effect, but at the time I thought it was a
million dollar wound."
An interesting sidelight was when he was in his bed one day and he looked up to see the replacement who had been hit after Clark had told him his feet were okay for duty. Clark was a
little apprehensive, but the soldier simply thanked him for his help on the battlefield and said how happy he was to be going home.
Surgery was done on Clark, and he was eventually evacuated to a hospital in
Japan, where the doctors were fighting an infection in one leg. "They put me in the amputee ward. They said it was because they didn't have any room anywhere else, but you have to wonder. It's a very humbling
experience to be in an amputee ward as the only guy who didn't have an amputation. Guys had one, two or three limbs gone, but for the most part they were very upbeat. They only worried about how their girlfriends
would react to them."
The infection finally cleared up, and Clark was sent back to Ft. Riley. He served out his full three years in the Army, although he could never do physical work or exercise again. The wounds
healed slowly and left one of his legs noticeably smaller than the other. "I can walk okay, but it affected my gait, and that seemed to affect everything else, my legs, my hip and my back."
Doctors at the VA
Medical Center in Minneapolis still pluck a piece of metal from Clark's legs every few years.
Clark said he drifted around a while after his discharge, but eventually earned a degree in teaching at Mcalester,
and a master's as a media specialist at St. Cloud State University. He taught in several schools, spending most of his career in an elementary school near Princeton.
In 2001, his position was cut by the school
because of budget problems. At the same time, Clark's disability rating was raised to 100 percent because of recurring PTSD. He has been retired since.
He said the PTSD is better these days, but for many years,
the anniversary of his wound, September 6, 1967, was traumatic for him. He would dwell on the loss of his good friend Gardner as he contemplated his own life.
"I've been very lucky. My wife, Mary, has always been
there for me. She is my rock." The couple have two grown sons, and four grandchildren and live in Anoka.
Clark feels a deep sense of responsibility to give back to his country. "Retirement for me doesn't mean
sitting on my butt watching TV. I like to work with my fellow vets. They're my therapy group. We don't talk about the war very much, but we support each other."
Clark is active with the Vietnam Veterans Color
Guard, a unit that serves at funerals throughout the Twin Cities. It is known as one of the best color guards in the state. Clark is also active in the Anoka Post 102 American Legion, the DAV, the VFW, the Purple
Heart Association and other service groups. "I'm easy to talk into things."
In the end, he said he is grateful to have served. "I worked around some very brave people. Those infantry men just go out there into
Indian Country. They slogged through it over and over and over again. And then they'd get up and do it again.
"There were so many medics in Vietnam that were killed or wounded. A lot of those medics were just
something special. It was a humbling experience just to be around them. I'm awed at what they did. I don't know how I got through it."
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