FOREWORD

Jack Clark at age 15 months

In 1994 my father gave copies of a book to my two brothers and me. The timing was the 50^th anniversary of the Normandy Invasion of World War II, and the book was the definitive Stephen Ambrose title D-Day. The golden anniversary of the event fixed the nation’s attention on that history-wrenching event, and my father, who was a very real part of it, was reliving his involvement, sharing it with a new generation and reflecting on its impact on his life as he settled into his 70s.

Without reading it myself, I had originally given my dad Ambrose’s book on the Father’s Day prior to the anniversary. I had clear memories as a child of poring through dad’s Army snapshots of Paris, the Eiffel tower, his Army buddies, a mascot dog named “Mookie” and her puppies. My father was 20 to 23 in the pictures—only slightly past boyhood. Here was the man I’d known all my life, before he’d met and married my mother.

I always felt attached to those old photos. There were other items I remembered as well: two metal castings of the Eiffel Tower, a few patches from a  uniform, a mess kit, a hat and talk about a Purple Heart. The photos are all that remain. And as we discussed dad’s wartime experience in light of the impending anniversary, the fate of his decorations and campaign medals resurfaced. “Don’t you remember?” my mother asked my father. “You gave those to Jack Jr. (my brother, born in 1950) to play with. I told you to save them, and you said you didn’t care about anything connected with the Army.”

I began making calls to find out how, if indeed it was possible, to replace those decorations. It was possible, but required dad’s signature. It took him a couple years to send in the form, but he finally received his replacement decorations in May 1997—nine months after filing his request. He thanked me for finding out what was involved and encouraging him to do it. His thank-you reminded me that I still had that book to read. And taking it down from the shelf, I opened it for the first time to see the inscription in his hand, “To my daughter Susan.”

Jack's senior photo from
1940 Taleoken  (New Kensington
High School yearbook)

My husband discovered an internet site called “My Dad’s War” with a picture of the developer’s father in uniform and lists of resources on finding and preserving your own family member’s World War II story. That site linked me to others, many of them government-related, and gave me the idea of contacting old army buddies. I knew of one, and my dad confirmed that Ray Bilicki was the only one with whom he’d kept in contact. Many of the men in Battery A of the 474^th Anti-Aircraft Artillery Automatic Weapons Battalion hailed from Pennsylvania. My father was from New Kensington, near Pittsburgh, and Ray was from nearby Arnold. They met at Camp Edwards, CT, during basic training.

I met Ray a few times as I was growing up, but the last time I’d seen him was close to 20 years prior. He generously gave me two of his wartime treasures—a book written in 1966 about the 474^th and a map tracing the exploits of the VII Corps, of which the 474^th was a part. The map was discolored and crumbling. Ray sent it to me in its original mailing tube with the addressing to his parents still visible.

“I sent one to my parents, too,” my dad said upon seeing Ray’s, “but it wasn’t like this. Mine was white.”

“Hmmm,” I replied. “I think maybe this one was white 50 years ago, too; don’t you?”

He smiled. “Yeah, I guess you’re right.”

The book, entitled The Maverick Outfit and described in CREDITS, served as the basis for jogging my dad’s memory. The war he remembers, however, has more funny stories, public relations nightmares and politics than found in The Maverick Outfit. It’s more of a combination “Beetle Bailey joins McHale’s Navy.” My dad joked so much that his rank was “Major Goof-Up” that as a child I thought it was an actual rank and bragged about it to my friends; after all, none of their dads were majors!

Jack returning home from rehab in 2011

Dad’s recollections also reflect his own personal brand of humanity—a fierce independence and sense of fairness—that has defined his life. “I remember that your father was very intelligent,” Ray Bilicki writes. “He probably had the highest IQ in the outfit. He was liked by his superiors and could have been anything he wanted to be. [But] he was a lot like Frank Sinatra: He did it his way.”

That impression should come through in the recollections recorded here. Were Jack Clark and the thousands of others like him heroes? He would say no, that so many others gave so much more than he. Bob Dylan, the American singer/songwriter, says, “a hero is someone who understands the degree of responsibility that comes with his freedom.” And by that definition, the citizen soldiers of World War II DO qualify as heroes. But the fighting they did for their country was only a small part of their heroism. Peggy Noonan, a presidential speechwriter, puts it this way:

Most people aren’t appreciated enough, and the bravest things we do in our lives are usually known only to ourselves. No one throws ticker tape on the man who chose to be faithful to his wife, on the lawyer who didn’t take the drug money, or the daughter who held her tongue again and again. All this anonymous heroism.

My father’s heroism came in doing his part during the war, in coming home to make a better life for himself, in putting his family first, and in doing the right thing when the demands of his job asked otherwise.

—Susan Clark Lawson