ShareThisBy MARYLYNNE PITZ
Thursday, November 16, 2006
In the sizzling jungles and rice paddies of Vietnam, John Clark, a retired U.S. Marine sergeant, often served as the point man during patrols. While his squad moved beside a river one day in 1966, Clark experienced firsthand one of the Viet Cong's booby traps.
"I bent down and went under a broken tree branch that hung over a path. I went down. I felt this pain in my foot," said the retired Pittsburgh firefighter.
Clark looked down and saw a barbed black punji stake protruding from the front of his right boot. For 20 agonizing minutes, he froze and waited while a technician disarmed the explosive attached to the steel stick lodged in his foot.
As a medic used a scalpel to cut out part of the feces-covered steel stick, Clark lay still on the ground, smoked a cigarette and tried to ignore the intense pain.
"You couldn't pull it out," he recalled, "because it had that barb at the end." Punji stakes, usually made of wood or bamboo, were designed to wound a soldier and tie up his squad while they waited for a helicopter.
The punji stake that pierced Clark's foot is among 200 artifacts, art works, photographs, oral histories, letters, diaries and music that re-create this decade of thunderous upheaval in a new exhibition called "Soul Soldiers: African Americans and the Vietnam Era." The show opens Saturday at the Senator John Heinz Pittsburgh Regional History Center.
In a way, the 1960s were like that punji stake for African-Americans, who served in record numbers during America's longest war. As black military members fought and died in Southeast Asia to control strategic plateaus such as Khe Sanh, they heard news about church bombings in Birmingham, Ala., and the murders of young black girls.
"The whole nation was going through hell," said Albert French, who was wounded in Vietnam and wrote a memoir about it called "Patches of Fire."
The History Center's exhibition, running through October 2007, rekindles memories of the years of assassinations, bombings and body counts, hawks and doves, peaceful protests and destructive riots.
Curator Samuel Black collaborated with 21 veterans, nurses and their spouses to collect memorabilia and memories.
At the exhibition's entrance, visitors will hear the unmistakable sound of Huey helicopters as they walk past a wall bearing the names of some African Americans who died in the conflict.
Around the bend is a "hootch theater," where a flat-screen television plays a 12-minute orientation film. Viewers will see footage shot by soldiers, who, after putting down their M-16s, used Super 8 cameras to record events in Vietnam between 1969 and 1971.
In Vietnam, soldiers called their living quarters hootches, which were underground bunkers designed to protect them from attacks. Like those dug overseas, the exhibition's hootch theater is lined with corrugated metal walls, sand bags, 55-gallon drums and ammunition crates.
