39 Years Later, Vietnam War Medic Reaches Out to Family of Dead Soldier

Vietnam memorial rekindles medic’s need to reach out
Randy Ark wanted to tell David Crilly’s mother how the soldier died on the front lines in Vietnam.

By Megan Gildow

SPRINGFIELD, Ohio — Randy Ark didn’t know what he was getting himself into.  Just out of Greenon High School and already tired of the college courses he was taking, Ark enlisted in the U.S. Army. It was the late ’60s and the deployment orders came soon: Vietnam.

Today, married and living in Moorefield Twp., the retired Northeastern school teacher now knows what he got himself into. But then, he was 20 years old and wanted to leave the world of academics for a while.  He would soon be caring for wounded soldiers on the front lines of the conflict as a medic affectionately dubbed "Doc" by his comrades.  "A lot of us thought that as medics we would be in a nice, clean, safe hospital," he said with a rueful chuckle.

In February 1969, after a run-in with a ranking officer, Ark made it to the front lines stationed in Binh Duong, Vietnam. On his second night there, gunfire erupted throughout the night and he tended to 17 wounded soldiers, stabilizing their injuries the best he could until they could be sent to an Army hospital nearby, he said.

In six months there, none of the soldiers he cared for after attacks died, Ark said. "I don’t remember losing anyone," he said. But the unit did lose one soldier, one Ark would think of often over the next several decades of his life.

David ‘Kid’ Crilly

Hours after his 40th high school reunion and a discussion about the classmates lost in the Vietnam War, Stewart Resmer was still thinking about David Crilly.

Crilly, a classmate with Resmer at a school in Santa Monica, Calif., entered the Army at just 17 years old and began a tour in Vietnam in January 1969, a few months after his 18th birthday.  In Vietnam, his fellow soldiers called him "Kid" Crilly because of his youthful appearance, said Ark.  "I guess we were all kids but he just seemed like more of a kid," said Ark.

Crilly served as a "60-man," who took care of the large infantry’s large guns. He took to writing letters to Ark’s sister, Nora, whom he never met, just to get more letters in the mail. 

David A. Crilly died June 7, 1969.

Forty years later, Resmer searched for David Crilly’s name on the Web — and found a message Randy Ark had posted on a Vietnam Memorial Wall Web site.

June 7, 1969

After a night of attacks, Ark was in another area of the camp when Jesse Fugate, the third soldier in the communications bunker Crilly and Ark occupied, came to him.  "Crilly shot himself," he said.  Within hours, the news came back that David Crilly had died. Not as a result of conflict, not on purpose, but in an accident the Army would later term as a "non-hostile, ground casualty, accidental self-destruction, body recovered," according to records.

Always curious about how things worked, Crilly had been looking at Ark’s gun when it discharged, killing him. After the night’s battle was done, Ark was supposed to unload the pistol; he hadn’t.  "It hit me really hard," Ark said, choking on his words. "I felt guilty about it."

The Wall

In the early 1990s, Ark and his wife, Sharon, went to see the Vietnam Memorial Wall for the first time. As a veteran, it was an emotional experience for him. Then he saw the error. Crilly’s name was not listed properly in the book created to help guide families and loved ones to the right section of the 500 feet of names. "That was when I really felt a need to find (Crilly’s mother)," Ark said. "If she had gone to the wall, she wouldn’t have been able to find his name."

But his searches for Crilly’s family members led him nowhere, until he received an e-mail in November from Resmer.

‘A blessing from God’

"I just searched for his name (on the Internet) and there was a man who had been searching for someone who knew David so he could tell us what happened," Resmer said. When Resmer looked on the Internet for David Crilly, he found Randy Ark’s post on a message board. A few exchanged e-mails later and the people Ark had been wondering about for nearly 40 years were within his technological reach.

In addition to the Wall, Ark wanted to know for certain what his family had been told. "I was worried they might have been told he meant to kill himself, and that wasn’t the case," said Ark. In fact, Crilly’s mother Eleanor Kitchen, 85, had been told that it was an accident, but she had always wondered, she said. Being able to talk to someone who was there that day, who knew her son in Vietnam and knew his state of mind, rested those worries, she said. "It was a relief to hear it from Randy," she said. "It was a relief to hear it from someone who was there with him. It was a relief for Ark, too, who has exchanged family photos with Kitchen and is planning to visit her next summer. "It really is a miracle," he said. "It’s a blessing from God that I was able to find her after all these years."