By MATTIE WONG
My grandfather, Neil Clark, was born in the 1920s in southern Arkansas into a poor farming family. He joined the Army as a young man, scarcely twenty, and fought in WWII. For the longest time, the only thing we knew about Neil in the war was that he had earned a Silver Star, but none of us knew how or why.
The thing is, my grandfather never talked about the war. Not to anyone. Our family pieced together stories over the years, even going to a reunion of his infantry division in Memphis, Tennessee.
There we learned Neil had been instrumental in keeping himself and three other soldiers safe after they had gotten separated from their battalion in France. In trying to return to their battalion, they had stumbled across a camp of German soldiers set up in small depression. Neil spearheaded a plan to shoot over the heads of the Germans from multiple angles, making it seem as if there were far more American soldiers than there were.
Their battalion finally found them, and were able to capture an entire camp of German soldiers without any injuries to either side. We never knew until 2004, years after Neil had passed.
After the war, Neil ran one of the newspapers in Pine Bluff, Arkansas. That was my family’s business, and sparked my own interest in newspapers. (I am currently the layout designer for the newspaper you are holding in your hand!) My mom would tell me about Christmas Eves spent in the print shop, the whole family pitching in to lay type for printing the next day’s paper. In those days, you had to physically make each newspaper plate by placing metal type together in the form before running it through the ink presses.
My grandfather never spoke of the war, but he was quietly and vehemently anti-war. He would run a full page in the paper that merely said,
“WAR IS HELL. Seems to me we should figure some way to stop it!”
He got a lot of push back in Pine Bluff for publicly using the word ‘hell’.
Later, an internet search pulled up a gift my grandfather sent to Lyndon B. Johnson. During the Vietnam War, he sent a shovel to the White House with a note saying that Lyndon should personally bury every soldier who died in Vietnam. That shovel is kept somewhere in the National Archives, in an interesting collection of “gifts” sent to Presidents over the years.
The memories of the war were hard for my grandfather, and he never really recovered. These days we’d probably say he suffered PTSD along with addiction, which often go hand in hand. He is remembered fondly and loved, though the alcoholism was a constant ghost in his relationships with his family.
Neil Clark died in 1998 when I was 8 years old, and my memories were of a gentle man who gave me his old binoculars and would go on walks with me around the trailer park in Pine Bluff he lived in, pointing out birds and trees. He taught me how to identify my first plant – sassafrass. Everytime I see sassafrass or smell anything that smells like sasparilla or root beer, I think of my grandfather.
He lived his life struggling with the aftermath of war, and knew very acutely that war was never to be entered flippantly, under false pretenses, or before every other diplomatic option had been exhausted.
MATTIE WONG is the layout and graphic designer for the alley. She daylights as a ecological landscape designer with Radicle Land Collective.
