The morgue on a U.S. foreign military installation, is normally—by cliché and fortunately, also in practice—a quiet place. A place where the occasional victim of illness or misfortune finds their way before going home for good. And this was certainly true of the Clark Air Base morgue when I first laid eyes on it in 1980.
The building itself was not so remarkable, a small flat structure with a loading dock out back and a nice little green lawn facing the street. But even a casual inspection revealed this was once a busy industrial complex. First, there were several rows of massive refrigeration units aligned to the rear and in a L shape behind the building. They were sheltered by tin roof structures which I’m sure kept them cooler and also allowed crews to load them, even in the monsoon season. The whole complex appeared to be abandoned at the time. It didn’t matter. My eyes saw history. Because it was said that here—at this singular point on the map—a majority of the 58,000 American fatalities from the Vietnam war paused briefly as they awaited transportation back to the US.
By the time I arrived at Clark the war was long over. But my first visit to that facility struck a deep cord in me. It connected me with an unanswered question from years before. I remembered the death counts on the nightly news programs during the late sixties. As a child of ten, they were incomprehensible to me at the time. Walter Cronkite might say something like “13 troops were killed in Vietnam today”, and I would wonder how many people he was really talking about? To me the word “troop” had little meaning. My boy scout troop was 30 kids, is that what he meant?
It often takes an artist to bring home the impact of a large, but fragmented social issue in a cohesive way. Photographic artist, Chris Jordan has a series of stunning works titled Running the Numbers, in which he brings a remarkable visual clarity to our consumer culture and excess. Imagine seeing 426,000 cell phones (the number Americans throw away every day) in a single glance. At first it doesn’t soak in, then as you realize the concept behind the mural, the shock begins to wash over you. The moment I first laid eyes upon those hundred or so apartment sized refrigerators, lined up in neat military order, that single word from Mr Brinkly came flooding back to me. “Troops”.
Standing there, I finally felt I knew what the word actually meant.
In 1980 there were very few points on the earth which could communicate this message about the war. Congress had not even authorized the Vietnam Veterans Memorial and so Maya Lin’s beautiful realization of this very same concept would not exist for another two years.
My dad always watched the news reports during the sixties. The war worried him. His nephew Jerry was headed over there and my brother would be graduating high school soon and thus eligible for the draft. As a veteran of World War Two, my father well understood what a troop was. And he had no wish for any of us to be part of this bitter tally.
But it didn’t work out that way. My cousin, Jerry Wayne Gleghorn likely passed through Clark morgue in late February of 1968. He had only been in Vietnam for 2 months when on February 7th, he was killed by small arms fire in Quang Ngai. He was 20. He had plenty of company. Most of the Americans who died in Vietnam were the same age as he and most also died during 1968, with February being the deadliest month of the war. This facility could have been averaging 100 bodies a day at that time.
The day we drove to Jerry’s funeral in Tulsa it was bitter cold—so removed from the tropics where he died. Dad did all the driving of course. He chain smoked his cigarettes in time with the odometer and I don’t believe he said more than three words during the entire trip. It would be many years before I began to imagine what was passing through his mind during those hours. He would have known by then that they were scaling up the draft again. And every time he looked in the rear view mirror, he would have seen the face of his oldest son, my brother Tony.
Tony would end up joining the Navy in the summer of 1968. This was a pretty common strategy for young men at the time—you had a much better chance at surviving the war in the navy as opposed to the army. This must have lessened dad’s anxiety to some degree but not entirely. It turned out well for Tony. He ended up spending two years on the beaches of Florida before coming home to join dad in the family business.
The Vietnam war was officially over before I entered high school. When I joined the Air Force in 1977, my father was shocked and very angry at me. I had expected this. Dad had always seemed to hate the very idea of war. He would not watch a war movie. Nor would he ever speak of his military experience. He staunchly hated handguns; stating they were only invented “for killing people” and thus had no other use.
And he believed just as strongly that wars were paid for with the blood of the poor and usually served the net purpose of someone’s enrichment. He saw the Korean war as a betrayal of our military by politicians who could not commit. He was deeply suspicious of Vietnam for the same reasons. When president Johnston increased the draft and escalated the number of troops to be sent to south east Asia, dad told most of his friends he would never vote for another democrat again.
So I never believed my father would be proud of my military career. For me, real understanding didn’t start to come until 1991, when my parents traveled to England to visit us. Near the end of the trip, we spent a day in Cambridge, where almost as an afterthought I suggested we visit the American military cemetery. Something changed in his demeanor when we entered that gate. He began a dogged search to find the graves of men from his unit. Eventually we found two. I’m not sure if he even knew these men, but he cried for them. It was the most emotion I had ever seen him display, and it strengthened my respect for him tremendously.
That evening he opened up to me for the first time. I learned that on June 7th, 1944, one day after the invasion commenced, my father passed through his own bitter nexus of sorts—the beaches of Normandy. The sight of such recent horror would have probably been enough to silence any man for life. Dad was part of an engineering unit—bridge builders. He was especially proud that his unit was the first to bridge the river Elbe, where we met up with the Russians.
If you visit the American cemeteries at Normandy today you will find a sense of place and plenty evidence of sacrifice. If you visit the morgue at Clark, perhaps not. I hear the freezers are gone and the building was torn down to make room for a business of some sort. But I think such locations should have just as much place in our memory as the formal places we have set aside to honor the dead.
Were I standing in front of those freezers with my granddaughter today, I would want her to know that it was here that we—in a testament of both our humanity and our excess—built an industrial complex to handle a logistical river of despair. It was here that men and women worked around the clock to bring a scant but desperately needed measure of comfort to parents, grandparents, brothers, sisters, sons and daughters. I’d want here to know that ‘here’ can be a powerful thing to feel.
© 2009 by Rodney Gleghorn
