Miracles in the Making — Johnnie Clark

My platoon of around twenty Marines had been humping the bush for weeks somewhere in Thua Thien Province and somewhere near the A Shau Valley.

Johnnie Clark under shelter (half poncho) in A Shau Valley. — Johnnie Clark under shelter (half poncho) in A Shau Valley.

I had four hundred-round belts crisscrossing my flak jacket like a Mexican bandit, four canteens on a cartridge belt with my .45 automatic, a few frags and a K-bar knife. I don’t know how much my pack weighed but after weeks of going through jungle, wading across rivers and up and down mountains it felt every bit of fifty pounds. My 24.6 lb. M60 machine gun rested in a little saddle of callous that had formed on top of my shoulder like some odd birth defect. It is amazing how the body adapts to pain. I mean, I expected callouses on my feet but only the Marine Corps could build a saddle of callous for an M60 machine gun on a man’s shoulder.

The fatigue numbs your mind as much as your body. In an ink black Vietnam night under a triple canopy of jungle and trees where not even the moon could give light, your eyes strain like never before. You try to block out the whine of malaria filled mosquitoes or any other jungle sound because if you miss hearing that one rustle of leaves that only a human can make it can cost you your life and the lives of your buddies.

The Tet Offensive was going on and after months of ambushes at night and patrols all day we were some pretty hard core Marines. I had seen what was left of NVA soldiers who’d been chewed up by my M60 and I had carried too many buddies up the ramp of a Chinook chopper with their mud caked boots hanging out of the end of a bloody poncho.

So I was pretty salty and more than used to the routine when we set up an ambush in a small valley in Thua Thien one night in June. We’d been set in a couple of hours when my buddy, our radioman Cpl. Bob Carrol crawled over to my gun position and whispered, “Saddle up, pass the word.”

I was immediately ticked off. Moving the platoon in the middle of the night was insane but very Marine. My A-gunner was a Marine named Richard Chan. He’d been born in China and was a Christian but this news could make even a Christian cuss.

“Somebody’s out of their fricken mind, Bob!” He whispered angrily.

“There’s a gook Battalion moving through here.”

A Battalion is about five or six hundred men. Now I was only a dumb PFC machine gunner who barely passed Business Math at St. Pete High but those odds seemed to suck as far as I was concerned. I didn’t know if we were moving to avoid a Battalion of NVA or trying to make contact but I knew my Marine Corps and we were probably trying to make contact.

I passed the word to men on my left who were as happy about it as we were. Moving at night was always extremely dangerous and it seemed like we did it way too often.

As we moved out in column Chan and I found ourselves near the front of the column. The gun team is supposed to always be in the center of the column so that when we make contact with the enemy on either end the riflemen can hit the dirt and scream Guns Up!. That’s the call for the machine gunner to run to the point of contact so that I can lay down suppressing fire. Front or tail-end Charlie, on this night I was just happy to be in the column at all and not lost in the dark.

We had probably moved about three or four hundred yards when our point man came under fire from AK-47’s. The column hit the dirt. I dropped to my left thinking I was getting down but didn’t realize that there was an embankment there so I was sort of just leaning against the embankment and not really down at all.

At that instant the enemy opened fire on me. I will never know how many enemy soldiers opened fire but because of the amount of tracers hitting all around me it was probably a .30 caliber machine gun. Machine guns are usually the only weapons with that many tracer rounds.

I could do absolutely nothing but bury my face against the embankment and wait for a bullet to go through my brain. As the rounds struck the hardened dirt all around my head, the sizzling green phosphorous tips on the tracer rounds were breaking off the lead bullets and burning my face like someone putting out cigarettes under my eyes. I guess I was terrified but there was nothing I do except grit my teeth and wait to die.

The next morning Chan got some cream from our Corpsman for burns and put it on the fry marks on my face. We both marveled at the fact that I was alive. The best marksman in the world could not have grouped that many rounds around my head without hitting me. We both knew it was God. He kept me alive for some reason, for His purpose.

As remarkable as that moment was for me, it seems barely note-worthy compared to the miracle God did to me and for me on a mountain in North Carolina. There is no way I can tell you that story without the war stories that led me to Gray Beard Mountain, but this new book is not a war book. The working title is “WALK A LITTLE FARTHER” and it’s the most personal manuscript I’ve ever attempted. If it gets published, I hope you'll read it.