Happy Birthday Cliff

My cousin, Cliff Reed, died February 15, 2009. If he had lived, he would be 68 years old today, November 4, 2013.  As he did his entire life, he fought a valiant battle to the very end. In the final analysis, his ravaged body finally gave up, something his spirit never did. For those of us who knew Cliff and his strong faith, there is no question where he is right now…worshipping and praising his Lord and Savior Jesus Christ…with a new body.

Cliff was not your average Joe, although because of his nature, he would be the last to characterize himself as special. But special he was. In so many ways.

First, of course, as mentioned above, was his unshakable faith and love for his Lord. A faith that only grew stronger the longer he lived. While there is no question that Cliff would say that was the most important single aspect of his life, there were others that bear mentioning.

Cliff graduated from Campbell High School in Smyrna, Georgia in 1963 and enrolled at Georgia Tech, where he excelled scholastically. His brother Ben, who was a year older and also a student at Tech, and also a student who excelled scholastically, told me one time that he had to study and apply himself like crazy to achieve his success, but Cliff, on the other hand, hardly had to crack a book…it came so easy to him. He was just plain smart. How could he be otherwise, coming from a mom, Jessie, who was probably one of the smartest women to walk the earth, and a father, B.F., who had as much down to earth street smarts as any man you could know.

While at Tech, Cliff joined Army R.O.T.C., and upon graduation, began his twenty-one and a half year career as an officer in the U.S. Army, which included two combat tours in Vietnam. Cliff went to Nam the first time as a Second Lieutenant Platoon Leader in a Ranger unit. He was subsequently promoted to First Lieutenant and then to Captain. Cliff shared with me some of his exploits as a Ranger. One, that bears retelling, involved the night his rifle company was being attacked and almost overrun by a NVA (North Vietnamese Army) unit. One enemy soldier got to him and stabbed him with a bayonet in his right arm, which was holding his M-16 rifle. As fate would have it, the bayonet went through Cliff’s arm and was pinned to a tree. As the NVA soldier tried to pull the bayonet out of the tree and Cliff’s arm, Cliff grabbed his .45 pistol (my dad’s personal sidearm as a B-17 bomber pilot over Germany during WWII – that’s another story) with his left hand, with which Cliff blew his head off. According to Cliff, his senior medic did a great job sewing up his arm from the bayonet wound right there in the field in the midst of the battle. Cliff said he was too busy directing the battle to be medivacked, and besides, he said he was in the best position on the ground to direct and control the fire of the Cobra helicopter gunships overhead. In his unassuming manner, Cliff gave credit to the Cobras as the reason he and his unit were not overrun. Of course, without his direction from the ground, the Cobras would have been blind.

Cliff’s wound from the bayonet resulted in the third of his three Purple Hearts. The first one came from a landmine explosion, and the second was from a gunshot. With the humor many of us were privileged to witness from time to time, Cliff said he also got malaria from a communist mosquito.

Cliff shared this story with me the year before he died, while helping me write a story about my father, Bill Reed, and his experiences during WWII, and the above mentioned M1911A1 .45 caliber pistol. Over the years, when I would visit Cliff and we would talk, he would pull out the .45 and let me hold it. I told him if he ever thought about selling it, to give me first shot. He laughed and told me that there was no way he would ever part with that pistol…it had saved his life too many times.

Before Cliff died, he relayed to his family how I always wanted Dad’s .45, and that he had told me that he could not part with it…while he was alive. He directed them to give it to me. On the day of his funeral, with full military honors, I was honored by the family to be one of those to give an eulogy for Cliff, during which I shared some of this story. After the funeral, I was presented with the .45. I must admit that my eyes were not entirely dry.

Cliff will be missed by all of us who loved him, none more than his fellow worshippers at Reverend Stanley’s First Baptist Church of Atlanta, where when he was able, Cliff was a fixture on the front row. I venture to say that Cliff is on another front row right now, this time looking into the eyes of Jesus.