At Lake Central High School, C103 is more than just a room. It’s a giant memory box dedicated to Indiana soldiers killed in foreign wars. Display cases line the walls with uniforms, helmets, medals and other war memorabilia. It’s not an in-school museum though—it’s Tom Clark’s U.S. History classroom. Clark is a veteran teacher of 31 years as well as a veteran of Afghanistan and a U.S. Army Policeman in Germany in the late ‘70s. For the past 28 years, his students have conducted research on Hoosiers killed in Vietnam, Korea, World War II and even World War I. The project has touched families of those killed, as well as students. Clark had no intention of this though—it was one big snowball effect. In 1983, after the Beirut bombings in Lebanon, Clark first got his students involved in a hands-on experience approach to learning.
“It was in the news and I was a brand-new teacher and I was like, ‘how am I going to get my students interested in this kind of stuff?’ I had them write letters to the Marines that survived. They started writing back to us…Almost every single student was getting a letter back,” Clark said.
At the time, the U.S. had recently invaded Grenada. Because of the effect the media had on Vietnam, the U.S. would not allow the media in to cover the Grenada invasion. The letters the students received, however, described the invasion. With the content of these letters, Clark decided to put them on display in the school library.
“At the time there was a young kid in the school named Doug DeVries. I didn’t know him. He must have seen that display because when he got in my class years later, he said, ‘Hey, why do we have a plaque down there [by the office, which has since been removed] for the boys that died from World War II, but we don’t have one for Vietnam?’ And I told Doug -this was like 1985-86, around that time- I said, ‘Doug, I don’t think anyone from the school died in Vietnam.’ Doug was a reporter from the newspaper. He went and he found two names,” Clark said.
That summer, Clark found two more names, and when school started, Clark offered Doug a leading role in putting together a memorial for the Vietnam casualties from Lake Central High School.
“He took it over, he became the leader. Doug was kind of a quiet individual, he didn’t talk a lot, but he was a leader and a half. We found the fifth name of a boy from this area, a kid named Darrill Trent that lived in Dyer, he ended up saving like 40 guys’ lives. He got the Navy Cross, the nation’s second highest medal for valor…Wouldn’t you think that people here would know that? I mean this is one of the biggest heroes of Indiana, and he came out of this school, and nobody knows it. In fact, when I first started this, there were teachers here that had had him in class, and they didn’t even know he had been killed.” Clark said.
With help from other students, DeVries and Clark were able to produce a memorial to the Lake Central alumni killed in Vietnam. Their names were etched into a piece of leftover stone from the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, D.C. They were able to obtain the stone thanks to Rogan Granite Industries of Chicago Heights, IL., just yards over the Illinois-Indiana border, which obtained the original stone from India and provided it for the D.C. memorial.
“I thought, ‘wow, this is pretty awesome to see students get this involved.’ The students the next year came to me and they were like ‘Clark, we like that, we liked what we saw, could we do something like that?’ I go, ‘what the heck, what are we going to do?’ In Lake County, I thought there might be 40 from Vietnam that died. There are 261. So we started to interview the families, we called the families. We were going out to the homes, sitting with them, crying with them, laughing with them,” Clark said.
Then the project reached out to Porter County, home of 32 boys who were killed in Vietnam. Then they expanded to Newton County and found three more. Then it was all 92 counties of Indiana.
Around 1995, Clark and his students found out that the State of Indiana was planning a Vietnam memorial for downtown Indianapolis. Upon examining the list, Clark found misspellings and over 100 omitted names. So, he decided to bring his students down to speak in front of the planning committee, led by former South Bend Mayor and Vietnam P.O.W. Joe Kernan, to fix the state’s errors.
“We went down there to make this presentation and he wasn’t there yet. We’re sitting there at the table, and all these high honchos in the State of Indiana are saying, ‘well, you’ll probably be the researcher, so don’t expect any money.’ We went in there and made the presentation once he arrived…He bought us a computer, it was unbelievable,” Clark said.
According to Clark, the memorial is flawless. Not to mention that as the group was leaving the meeting, the committee asked them to also research the Korean War memorial. Three years later, the group conducted research for the state’s World War II memorial as well.
Today, Clark’s students continue to research these soldiers and their families as a class assignment. Each student is assigned two soldiers whose families have yet to be tracked down by previous students.
“Of the 1,621, we have found 1,350 [soldiers’] photographs. We probably have the largest collection of not only pictures, but items than any state in the United States. We started doing this when we didn’t have computers to do it with. Now, computers have accelerated. There’s so many websites and everything. [The students] keep finding more and more. We only have like 300 to go. If they find 50 or 60 I’ll be like, ‘wow.’ But who knows, they’ll probably find over 100,” Clark said.
“There’s such incredible stories inside some of [the files]. That’s why I like doing it because I’ve noticed something—if they have this file, and they’re reading about it and they’re like, ‘why did he get killed, what was Vietnam?’ And then they start reading it and start looking into it and asking questions. You can’t just sit there and say, ‘ok, read all this stuff about Vietnam.’ They won’t read it, but that’s why I did the letters. When the letters started coming back from Beirut back in ’83, it made it personal. It made it where they were involved and they were part of it. And so they felt interested so they started learning more about it,” Clark said.
This work has not gone unrecognized. In November of 2012, Clark and some of his students were featured in a 13-minute long video on the Wall Street Journal’s website. CBS News also picked up on his project. Last month, Clark traveled to Houston to receive the American Legion National Education Award at the 95th American Legion National Convention.
“The American Legion Award was very special because it is from veterans who are saying thanks. I received this for all the hard work of the past students who have worked on this project. This award is not about me, but the ones who gave their lives for our freedom and the great students who I have had in the past 28 years that have worked to remember their stories and lives,” Clark said.