Comes the bad news this week that my boyhood pal Clark Hunt has died, of a fast-moving cancer thought to be the result of exposure to Agent Orange when he was serving as an Army officer in Vietnam. As one who successfully dodged the draft, I’m feeling a bit of survivor guilt, but mostly I’m just feeling sad. Although the war separated us, we have remained in touch and on friendly terms, most likely because the two of us were once comrades engaged in a mutual struggle—to free ourselves from the strictures of small town life.
Both of us were raised in the Mormon faith, though neither of us understood why. My forebears weren’t religious pilgrims; they’d come to Utah not pulling handcarts but pushing ore carts. Mom’s father was a hard-rock miner; my father’s folks mined coal. Clark’s ancestors were coal miners and uranium prospectors, and, well, outlaws. His great-grandfather John Giles Hunt won distinction as the most disreputable character ever to live in Wayne County.
That said, young Clark was as clean-cut as they come. Like me, he wore his hair short, sported horn-rimmed eyeglasses and buttoned his shirts all the way to the top. We didn’t smoke and drink; we attended church meetings and each rose to the rank of priest, which meant we were obliged to conduct monthly visits to the homes of ‘inactive’ church members in the company of older men. Clark’s assigned companion was none other than the uber-sanctimonious “Brother Chris.” Here’s how it went, in Clark’s words:
“I went ‘ward teaching’ every month for about two years with Brother Chris! He would call ahead to make sure that the family would be home, but sometimes the families seemed to forget our planned visit and just did not answer the door.
“We shared tears, devotion and stories every month. Bro Chris also let me know that his challenge (mission) was to ensure that ‘our’ families were encouraged to accept the Gospel and return to The Church. Beyond providing a message to the family, we were really spies to determine how ‘Mormon’ the families were living. A monthly report of each visit was sent to the Bishop. This was probably good training for my later work in Military Intelligence.”
As boys, both Clark and I were being groomed to serve two-year missions for the church; however, when the time came to answer the call, we both ran for cover. Well, sort of. Clark attended the University of Utah in Salt Lake, where he joined a fraternity and discovered the salubrious benefits of beer. I foolishly went to Brigham Young University in Provo, where I struggled mightily to fit in. There I fell hard for a redhead who was momentarily also attracted to me—that is, until she found out I hadn’t served a mission and was thus an “unworthy” mate. In the late summer of 1964 she sent me a Dear John letter, which would have resulted in me committing suicide had not my friend Clark Hunt intervened.
“Let’s take a trip into the desert,” he said, and off we went into the land of his outlaw forebears, just the two of us with sleeping bags, tent, and a six-pack of Lucky Lager. My first sip of alcohol, how can I describe it? It was just so refreshing! And of course sinful, in that the consumption alcoholic beverages was forbidden by the religion we both theoretically belonged to. Yet I felt no guilt. By the time I’d drained the third bottle, the pain of having being dumped by some uppity BYU coed had melted away, and in the days and weeks and months to follow I came to realize that Dear John letter was my luckiest break ever!
