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BY MICHELLE BAUGH
Rows of mourners sat with eyes staring down
at their hands folded, fighting tears at St. Anthony’s
Church in Providence, Rhode Island. On May 5, 2007, more
than three hundred mourners gathered to honor Special Forces
SSG Lewis Clark Walton, Sr., who had returned home after
his remains were located and identified December 2006 in
Quang Nam Province.
Clark Walton was a “soldier’s soldier,” in
the words of his friend Joe Hannon, who served with him at
Ft. Devens in Massachusetts. Hannon, a Vietnam veteran who
served with the Special Forces, says he formed a bond with
Walton and tried to talk him out of going to Vietnam. “I
had already been to Vietnam when I met him. I told him to
stay the hell away from there—it’s no good.”
Against
his friend’s advice, Walton dropped everything
and went. He was assigned to Support Headquarters Company,
5th Special Forces Group. They were assigned to Military
Assistance Command Vietnam-Studies and Observation Group
(MACV-SOG), an unconventional warfare task force engaged
in highly classified operations throughout Southeast Asia.
On
May 3, 1971, SSG Walton was a member of a six-man reconnaissance
team dropped some nine miles east of the Laos border, fourteen
miles south of the southern edge of the A Shau Valley. Their
mission: to penetrate that enemy veil of secrecy and report
on their activities.
On May 4, their Forward Air Controller
tried to make a scheduled radio check with the team, but
was unable to make contact or a visual sighting.
On May 5, two pilots reported seeing
mirror and panel signals fifty meters west of the LZ. These
signals were monitored for about fifteen minutes, and then
they stopped. Recovery helicopters were launched that day
but could not be inserted because of weather. An SAR team
arrived May 14 but left the same day without finding any
trace of the missing patrol. Walton and his team members
were listed as missing in action on May 10, 1971.
For the
family of the 37-year-old Green Beret, however, the nightmare
had just begun. Clark’s wife Virginia knew
that patriotism ran deep in her husband’s blood. After
serving a tour in Korea, he was anxious for Vietnam.
“It
meant a lot to him,” Virginia Walton said. “He
had a great sense of pride in it. He loved being a trooper.” She
said that her lifelines were her children, Jacke (six years
old when her father was listed as MIA) and Lew Jr. (three
years), and her faith. “I wasn’t alone,” she
said. “If I hadn’t had the kids, it would have
been much worse.”
Virginia Walton made certain that
her children grew up in a home filled with love for their
father. Jacke Walton-Williams said: “I don’t
know if I could have done what my mother did. She’s
a survivor.” She and her
brother always were reminded that whatever their sacrifices
were, their father was going through bigger trials.
Jacke
remembers her father’s good-bye: “I’ll
be back. Be a good girl, make me proud, respect your mom
and love her dearly.” She speaks of how fortunate she
is to have those memories, unlike her brother, Lewis Clark
Walton, Jr., whose recollections are blurry at best and more
likely the product of photographs and home movies. “I
remember some of his uniform paraphalia being around, his
jump boots,” Lew Walton said. “Jacke and I would
take turns wearing them.”
As the boy grew up, a need grew to fill in the blanks of
his father’s career. Lew Walton discovered that his
father and namesake wasn’t just any soldier, and that
the Special Forces were “the elite of the elite.” The
term “missing in action” confused him: “When
you’re missing, people look for you.”
He credits
his mother for tackling her role of MIA wife and mother with
grace. “My mom did a wonderful job handling
it all, trying to explain it to two young kids,” he
said. “I think that’s where my sister and I get
a lot of our strength from—going through the experiences
we saw our mom going through.”
Difficult times were
inevitable for Jacke and Lew Walton. Jacke recalls Operation
Homecoming in April 1973. Shortly after the announcement,
the gleeful seven-year-old packed for California. When her
mother tried to explain that her father’s name was
not on the list of returning POWs, Jacke became agitated
and decided he was planning a surprise. “You
don’t understand,” she
told them. “Dad’s coming home.” But when
Saigon fell two years later, she despaired. “I don’t
think I truly had a concept about missing until that moment,” she
said.
For Lew Jr., resignation came quietly as a teenager. “It
was a Tuesday night, I was laying in bed thinking about a
bunch of things: ‘It’s been a long time and we’ve
spent so long waiting for him to come home, it’s time
to face facts. Maybe he got captured and died in a prison
camp.’ I don’t think it really struck me until
the next morning that I looked at things differently.” He
wanted to find answers “rather than wasting so much
energy hoping he’d come home.”
After high school,
Lew Walton joined the Army. “I always
wanted to live up to the standard that he would want if he
could look down,” he said. Lew serves as a military
police officer. He completed one tour in Bosnia and two tours
in Iraq. During his second tour, he received information
about the identification of his father’s remains. He
put his emotions on hold when he heard the news.
“I was in theater [Iraq] at the time. It’s not
a place where I could escape mentally and collect my thoughts.
It may sound cold, but I just had to put it to the side and
say, ‘I’ll deal with it when I get home.’”
In
December 2006, the Walton family was told that Lewis Clark
Walton’s remains had indeed been identified and would
be returned in May 2007, 36 years after he went missing.
Lew and Jacke’s trip to the SDIT Fathers Day reunion
in 2005 had begun the chain of events. Bill Duker, of VVA’s
Veterans Initiative Task Force, met the Walton siblings and
called Dickie Hites, who was working at JPAC.
“The VI had a list of cases,” Duker said, “and
the Walton case happened to be one we were pursuing.” Duker
discovered that the location was a JPAC excavation site.
Clark Walton’s remains were located and identified.
In addition, one item was recovered that left no doubt that
the remains were indeed his: a St. Christopher medal with
his jump wings soldered to the back. Jacke Walton believes
that if her father, a devout Catholic, were to leave a sign
for his family, it would be that medal.
The family decided
that as a soldier and as SSG Walton’s
only son, Lew Jr. should accompany his father home. First
he met with the archeologist responsible for excavation. “She
was wonderful and actually nervous. I felt so bad because
she was shaking,” he said. After the initial meeting
with the archeologist and the head of JPAC, Lew Walton viewed
his father’s remains. He was able to spend time alone,
and he spoke for the first time in 36 years to the father
he barely remembered.
“I spoke my peace,” he said.
During the eulogy
at St. Anthony’s, Jacke Walton thanked
the men who had served alongside her father and welcomed
them home. Then she read a letter she had written to her
father 36 years ago.
“Once I read my letter to him, that was my goodbye,” she
said. With those words, written by a little girl and read
by a woman, Jacke Walton laid her father to rest.
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©2006-
2011, Vietnam Veterans of America. All Rights Reserved. 8719 Colesville Road, Suite 100, Silver Spring, MD 20910