Commemoration 50th Anniversary End of Vietnam War

Medal of Honor Museum
Arlington, TX
April 30, 2025

Allen B. Clark, Jr.
CPT (U.S. Army Retired)
West Point Class of 1963

Today represents the final Roll Call for those of us, who participated in that controversial for all and tragic for many, Vietnam War. It is my privilege to represent for the program today “A Soldiers View on the Ground.” My participation in that war ended 58 years ago on June 17, 1967, three days before my 25th birthday, on a very small piece of ground at Dak To Special Forces Camp in the Central Highlands. What follows my personal story are my final takes on the history of that war, which has taken years of research and reflected in a book I wrote in 2012 titled Valor in Vietnam.

A heavy enemy mortar barrage began at 0430 hours during my two-hour watch period five hours before I was to have been evacuated from the camp, due to a heavy enemy presence in our area. As a Military Intelligence officer, I was assigned to Detachment B-57, Fifth Special Forces as an undercover infantry officer in a clandestine mission collecting intelligence against the privileged sanctuary of Cambodia. As I began grabbing men to man our mortars and yelling instructions to our mortar pit crews to return fire and to shoot flares up, a round hit to my left rear, knocking me forward with an incredible force. Two Green Beret combat medics, SGT St. Lawrence and SGT Jimmy Hill, saved my life. Our A-Team Green Beret medic Hill reported, “CPT Clark was bleeding to death, with both femoral arteries severed and many other wounds. St. Lawrence had no clamps/instruments of any kind with him. He used his fingers to clamp down on the bleeding,” and he hung on until another Green Beret showed up to place me on a litter and carry me to Hill’s bunker just a few feet away. There is no doubt that without St. Lawrence and Hill my name would be listed on the Wall in D.C.

Hill, continued, “You were alert and oriented, however you were in shock, from massive blood loss. You kept telling me to help others outside, even though you had traumatic injuries to both your legs! Your blood pressure was dropping, your veins were collapsing, weak pulse. You told me you were going to die. I told you, ‘…not today…because you are my first American patient.’” In a later conversation, I told him had I known I was his first, I would have asked for a second opinion. He told me there was another one in the bunker that morning. I know it is only by the grace of God that I was allowed to live without going into a coma or feeling any pain! It is always dispiriting for me to recall that fateful day!

My left leg was amputated below the kneecap that day at the Pleiku MASH and my right leg was fractured in five places. An amazing occurrence happened at that army hospital. My blood type is A-Neg and they ran out of replacement pints. They made announcements at the Green Beret camp and air base and twenty-five or so soldiers and airman came in to donate blood for me. The next day the chaplain told me, and I wanted to thank them, but he said, “No need, we Americans take care of each other.”

Fast forward for the next several years. Right leg amputated at Brooke Army Medical Center, twenty surgeries, fourteen weeks in a closed psychiatric ward with severe PTSD and several more years with psychiatric care and antidepressants. My resurgent PTSD caused me to leave a coveted position in 1970 as personal financial asst. to Ross Perot. My personal faith journey as a Christian by the mid-1970s made me as emotionally and spiritually whole as I could be after my ordeal.

Then the first of many attempts to make sense of this war began.

FIRST OBSERVATION: In May 1962 I attended General Douglas MacArthur’s Farewell Speech to the Corps of Cadets at West Point. The general is quoted from a 1962 personal meeting with President John F. Kennedy, “Never get involved in a land war in Asia.”

SECOND OBSERVATION: Immediately prior to ending his presidency in early 1961, President Dwight Eisenhower, whose 1957 Inaugural Parade as an “Army Brat” I watched from stands opposite his at the White House across Pennsylvania Ave., warned about the ever-increasing influence of the “Military-Industrial Complex”. Personally, it is my opinion that many of their stockholders prefer “manufacturing swords than plowshares”.

THIRD OBSERVATION: Did we ever really need to be mired down in that quagmire? Allow me to state I am all for our noble and strategically critical quests to support down-trodden free peoples such as those in the Republic of Vietnam. However, there is extensive evidence in my research that President John F. Kennedy, in whose 1961 Inaugural Parade I marched with the Corps of Cadets, began developing a secret National Security Action Memorandum 263 as of October 2, 1963 (fifty days before his assassination) for a phased withdrawal from Vietnam beginning with 1,000 troops back by Christmas 1963. This NSAM was signed on October 11. On November 26, 1963, succeeding President Lyndon Johnson, who reportedly had close ties to Military-Industrial complex companies and Big Oil, signed NSAM 273 basically going full blast ahead on our participation in the war.

FOURTH OBSERVATION: Within days of the assassination our military advisers developed CINCPAC OPLAN 34-63, a secret operation to setup “intensified sabotage raids against the North, employing Vietnamese commandos under U.S. control.” This represented a significant escalation. On January 24, 1964, a celebrated, but outside special operations circles, relatively unknown Army Colonel Clyde Russell took command of Military Assistance Command Vietnam Special Operations Group (MACVSOG). His son Chris Russell was also a Vietnam veteran and friend of mine. It is time-consuming to relate all that is on record for this unit. Operationally, it initiated cross beach raids into North Vietnam that “provoked the North Vietnamese retaliation against the destroyer Maddox, which became the first Gulf of Tonkin incident.” From these incidents in Yankee Station, the United States became committed to what was to be an eleven-year war! A personal interview by me of Colonel Ed Sayre on the Saigon MACV staff reflected his opinion that his close friend Colonel Russell had no question in his mind that his mission was to get the United States into a war with North Vietnam. President Johnson, locked in a tight presidential race against Barry Goldwater, a flag rank Air Force officer, perhaps believed this could earn him his military spurs.

FIFTH OBSERVATION: I harbored for many years questions about why we did not bomb Haiphong Harbor and unleash our South Vietnamese allies into the north. In the mid-1970s I was visited in my office in downtown Dallas by Bill Moyers, former press secretary to President Johnson. I “interrogated” him politely, but emphatically. He indicated what he perceived President Johnson, and his own “Wise Men” decided they were concerned that heavy direct escalation by us against the North might ally Russia and China against us. Of course, these Communist powers were basically allied towards us anyway.

Vietnam veterans, family members, and Vietnamese allies seated in this Museum tonight are the current “Nobility” of the United States of America, land of the free only because of you, the brave! And just as my Lord has blessed and healed me, I pray the same for all of you and for our nation to remain free.

Peace was not to be, nor has it been peaceful for many of us. We returned to a land torn apart by dissension, discord and protests, a land where we did not return to parades or applause, but, instead to a land at war within our own borders. We were vilified and called names. But, my fellow veterans and family members, that was then fifty years ago. Today our nation honors our service through this commemoration event. Today we hold our heads up with pride. Today we are survivors and still here to enjoy our freedoms and our families.

In a 1969 farewell to his son, LT George B. Winton Class of 1967 deploying to Vietnam, Colonel George Winton, Class of 1939 spoke these words and they are most fitting:

When they go out to fight for us, they should not go with our pity. They are fortunate to have the opportunity to serve. As the Justice Holmes pointed out, referring to his service in the Civil War in which he was wounded three times, “To our great good fortune, in our youth our hearts were touched with fire.” No, these fighting men should not go out with our pity, but may they always go out with our gratitude and our admiration.”

Men and women of America always carry the torch of freedom burning brightly in your spirit and hearts. I will. I did not “lose” my legs, I “gave” my legs in the cause of Vietnam’s freedom. Go forth with the blessings of our Lord and may our causes be just and winnable.

*WPAOG does not endorse the contents of this speech.