The One Time My Dad Was Scared

My dad, Harold Luther Clark, was born in 1926 into about as pure a form of poverty as you could find in America.

He was born in a log cabin in Doe Run Valley near Ellington, Missouri. My grandparents, Clarence Wheeler and Della, raised a pile of kids in a bartering economy. Bartering because there wasn’t any money.

The family got by farming, raising a few animals and bartering. That worked until the Depression hit.

Eventually, the family had to break the chains that bound them to nothing and make their way to St. Louis. They landed on the South Side, where my grandfather found a job shoveling coal at a power plant and the older kids picked up whatever odd jobs they could find.

They went from being dirt-poor Missouri hillbillies to being dirt-poor working people in South St. Louis.

Dad was the youngest boy and apparently nothing but trouble.

They called him “Little Dillinger.”

That tells you something.

He got into fights, got arrested and generally created enough trouble that by the time he was 16, the United States Navy started looking pretty good to him.

Dad had already been rode hard and put away wet enough times that he probably looked 30, and at that point in the war there wasn’t much scrutiny.

The Navy didn’t immediately cure Little Dillinger.

He got himself into more trouble, including a stay in the brig in Hawaii. Eventually, he was released and sent into the South Pacific to help the war effort. Dad ended up at Subic Bay in the Philippines and wound up aboard a small landing craft that had been converted to launch electrically fired rockets.

And then came Okinawa.

I knew almost none of this growing up.

Dad and his buddies would occasionally sit around telling war stories. But like a lot of men who actually saw combat, they didn’t tell the horrible stories. They told the funny ones. They talked about the Philippines, getting a little time off, drinking with their buddies and meeting the locals.

I assume the pretty ones.

Okinawa was never part of the conversation.

At least not until the night before my father died.

Dad had smoked most of his life and had been battling emphysema and God knows what else. For a while, we had gotten into a strange routine. Someone would call and tell us, “You better come home. He’s dying.”

So we’d fly back from wherever we were to say goodbye.

And the old codger wouldn’t die.

He’d rally, get released and somehow keep going another few weeks. Then we’d get another call and do it all over again.

But this time was different.

It was late, probably 10 or 11 at night. Everybody had come and gone. Brothers, cousins, nephews, old employees and friends had all paid their respects.

Eventually, there were only three of us left in the room.

My father, my son Shawn, who was about 10 years old, and me.

I was dozing on the couch beside Dad’s hospital bed. Shawn was wide awake, sitting beside his grandfather. The two of them were talking quietly.

Dad knew he was getting close. He told Shawn goodbye. He told him he loved him.

Then Shawn asked the kind of question only a 10-year-old would ask at exactly the right moment.

“Grandpa, are you scared?”

There was a long pause.

“No.”

Another pause.

Then Shawn asked, “Grandpa, were you ever scared?”

I heard my dad say, “Yes. I was scared one time.”

That woke me straight up.

I could not imagine Harold Luther Clark being afraid of anything.

“When?” Shawn asked.

And for the first time in my life, I heard my father talk about Okinawa.

He told Shawn a terrifying story about being 19 years old aboard that little boat. They would load the rocket launchers, turn toward the Japanese-held island and run as fast as that little boat could go. Then they would unleash everything at once.

Dad said the noise and firepower were almost impossible to describe. When those rockets fired, it felt like the boat itself was exploding.

Some of the sailors couldn’t take it. One man jumped overboard. Dad said they had to physically hold another sailor down to keep him from jumping.

My dad remembered thinking about the choice.

Stay aboard this little boat that felt like it was exploding underneath you, or jump into the Pacific and take your chances with drowning and the sharks.

He stayed on the boat.

And he told his 10-year-old grandson that was the one time in his life he remembered being truly terrified.

He told the whole story briefly. No drama. No embellishment. Just enough for Shawn and me to understand what had happened to him as a 19-year-old kid almost 60 years earlier.

The next morning, my father died.

I left there wondering whether the story was even true. It was so incredible, and I had never heard a word about it before.

Later, I was able to verify the story through Bob Boelloeni, Dad’s old friend from St. Louis who had served aboard a destroyer in the Pacific.

Through an almost impossible series of circumstances, Bob had actually found my father’s tiny boat among thousands of vessels gathering in the Philippines before Okinawa.

The two old friends got to spend a couple of days together before sailing into battle.

Bob looked at the little boat my father was going to Okinawa on and didn’t believe Harold would ever come home.

Before they separated, my father told his friend that if he survived the war and ever had a son, he would name him Bob.

Bob didn’t believe that either.

But Harold Luther Clark survived Okinawa.

Fourteen years later, he had a son.

And here I am.

Bob.