Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, April 14, 1991 TAG: 9104120487
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV10 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: KEVIN KITTREDGE NEW RIVER VALLEY BUREAU
DATELINE: BLACKSBURG LENGTH: Long
A minute or two later, his buddy Roy Jennelle did the same.
The Sardonic sank in three minutes. Both men were rescued. They were shipped back to California and eventually to Chicago - where they parted company on separate trains.
They didn't see each other again for 45 years.
"He went to Northern Virginia. I went to Christiansburg," said Jennelle in his living room last week.
Clark sat across the room.
It is nearly a half century later and the two are buddies again - like they were when they went tom-catting together through Miami and Brooklyn and Mexico, working their way toward Japan and mayhem aboard the Sardonic.
Both men have raised families in the meantime. They have found jobs and worked and retired, watched their hair grow gray - and forgotten a lot.
One thing they had forgotten was each other - until about a year ago, when Jennelle's son, Joe Jennelle of Wilmington, Del., started asking him questions about Okinawa.
And the old sailor, retired now from Appalachian Power Co., began thinking back.
He talked to his son for hours. Afterwards he talked to his wife.
"I said, `There's one guy I remember real well,' " said Jennelle, meaning Clark.
His wife, Marie, suggested he give Clark a call.
Jennelle did.
Jennelle and Clark had been good-time buddies. With the rest of their Navy pals, they had explored the world together - had shot at Japanese kamikaze pilots and watched shipmates die. They had treaded water while war raged around them in the Philippine Sea.
It could have ended then for both of them. Instead they were rescued and shipped home to live out their lives.
Fredericksburg information gave Jennelle the number in nearby Dahlgren. Clark himself answered the phone.
Jennelle said he was looking for the fellow who was on the Sardonic when it was sunk off the coast of Okinawa back in 1945.
And Clark said, "Who the hell is this?"
"To start off with I couldn't place him," recalled Clark, a retired equipment tester for the Department of Defense.
Later, he and Jennelle exchanged pictures. "It was all clear in my mind, the first picture I saw of him," said Clark.
"We're survivors," said Jennelle. Both men are 65.
They met in Miami, two Virginia kids being trained to staff a new light gunship called the P.G.M. 18 - code name Sardonic.
Over the next several months, as they went through training and shakedown cruises, the two became buddies.
They went out on liberty together in Miami, in Brooklyn - where Clark got a tattoo - in Connecticut and back in Miami again.
There were, they insisted, no girls.
"We went out looking. They just weren't available," Clark grinned.
Finally, aboard the Sardonic, they headed down the East Coast and into the Gulf of Mexico. They passed down Central America, through the Panama Canal and on up to Mexico - where they were given liberty.
"I went on shore," said Jennelle. "I'm not going to say any more than that." He later conceded some tequila was involved.
After Mexico, the Sardonic headed to San Diego - Clark still has a photograph of himself, beer in hand, with a pretty California barmaid cuddled close - and into the Pacific Ocean, bound for Pearl Harbor and then Okinawa.
At the Marshall Islands they went ashore to play a game of ghostly softball. The beach was littered with bomb shells, Jennelle recalled. The palm trees had been lopped off at the tops by whistling shells and shrapnel. "Most all the greenery was gone."
Near Okinawa they linked up with many other U.S. ships, and soon found enemy fire.
Clark recalled the kamikaze raids, in which clusters of Japanese planes freighted with explosives would fly out of the sun and into the U.S. fleet. The Japanese pilots would race to crash into the biggest ships, sinking them, before they were shot from the air.
Clark said the Sardonic shot down three kamikaze planes before she went down herself, at 7:04 a.m. on Easter Sunday, 1945 - a huge hole blown in her bottom by a Japanese mine.
Clark was on deck manning his gun when it happened. The ship immediately began to list, and he ran down its side and leaped into the water.
Jennelle was below deck drinking coffee. He had to find his way out in the dark, then climb up the nearly vertical deck to the ship's side. Had he jumped out the other way, he said, the ship would have taken him along when it went under.
Jennelle passed a boy clinging, terrified, to a lifeline on deck. Jennelle knew the sailor, and knew he couldn't swim.
"He went down with the ship, along with a lot of others," Jennelle said.
Meanwhile Clark, watching from the water, saw Jennelle emerge on the boat's bottom and stand there.
Clark, and the other sailors treading water hollered "Jump!"
Jennelle did. Clark said Jennelle was the last sailor to leave the Sardonic before it went down.
Clark found his way to a life raft and clambered inside. He recalls that Jennelle clung to the side of the raft for awhile. Jennelle said he had to fend for himself in the shark-infested waters.
In any case, they both eventually were picked up by a U.S. boat and shipped home.
When the two met up again last year, on a visit Jennelle made to Dahlgren, "I had some strange feelings," Jennelle said. "I never would have recognized him. We'd both aged so much."
The strangeness faded, and these days the two sailors talk every couple of weeks or so.
"We just talk and yak," Jennelle said. Clark made his first trip to see Jennelle in Blacksburg last week.
Are they glad to have met up again?
"Yes - my Lord," said Clark, one arm around his pal.
by CNB