A story that never grows old
06:49 PM CDT on Saturday, May 1, 2004
Dave Clark never understood why an Olympic silver medalist didn't protect himself, why Cliff Cushman didn't try to get out of Vietnam.
Quiet, introverted, a world-class hurdler and "perfect gentleman," Cushman hardly seemed like a warrior.
Hardly seemed like a guy who'd go to war and not come back.
"We're told to remember Pat Tillman," said Clark, Cushman's roommate at the 1960 Olympics.
"Golly, I'm still thinking about Cliff Cushman."
Here's what he remembers:
A two-time All-American at Kansas out of Grand Forks, N.D., Cushman was "just the most gentle guy you've ever seen."
Never boasted. Once, driving together more than 800 miles for a meet where Cushman would compete in the 400-meter hurdles and Clark in the pole vault, Cushman told him they should have rented a plane.
"Who'd fly it?" Clark asked.
"I would."
Clark had no idea Cushman was a pilot. Never would have imagined he'd join the Air Force, either.
Or that five years later, only a couple days home from the hospital with his wife, Carolyn, and their first child, Colin, he'd get his orders for Vietnam.
Colin wasn't even a year old when word came: Capt. Cushman's F-105 Thunderchief went down over the Haiphong area on Sept. 25, 1966.
His flight leader saw him eject; officially, he was listed missing in action.
In one story, villagers found him bleeding from a mortal head wound. Another said a bullet killed him.
Official North Vietnamese position: Capt. Clifton E. Cushman, 28, died from his wounds, was buried, and his grave washed away in a flood.
Clark never knew any of those stories. Only the anxiety.
"Every time they'd find some MIAs," said Clark, 68, who grew up in Grand Prairie and lives in Duncanville, "I'd check to see if it was Cliff."
But it never was. Over the years, any time local Olympians gathered, they'd remember Cushman's speed and work ethic and humility.
And the letter.
Attempting to qualify for the '64 Olympics, Cushman fell at the trials in Los Angeles. On the flight home, responding to sympathies, he wrote newspapers in Grand Forks, Iowa and Kansas.
Told everyone not to pity him. "You watched me hit the fifth hurdle, fall and lie on the track in an inglorious heap of skinned elbows, bruised hips, torn knees and injured pride. ... In a split second, all the many years of training, pain, sweat and blisters and agony of running were simply and irrevocably wiped out.
"But I tried!"
He cited Romans 5:3-5, about the link between suffering and endurance and character and hope.
And then he dared young people. Dared them to cut their hair, clean up their language, honor their parents, go to church, help someone less fortunate, get in shape, read a book.
"I dare you to look up at the stars, not down in the mud," he wrote, "and set your sights on one of them that, up to now, you thought was unattainable."
Looking back on it, Dave Clark never could have imagined that Cushman would write such a bold letter, as quiet as he was.
Clark wonders, too, how it might have changed Cushman's life, even saved it, had he not hit that fifth hurdle and fallen.
Still, you read the letter, and it sounds a little like Pat Tillman, a hero for this generation.
