American trades subterfuge for mission to help orphans
During the Cold War, Darell Clark knew Ukraine like a few other people in the world – through the lens of an aerial camera used to photograph Soviet military sites on airborne spying missions.
Now the former U.S. special forces pilot is seeing a different side of Ukraine when he visits its orphanages and children’s hospitals to deliver humanitarian aid. Retired after a glamorous 31-year military career filled with cloak-and-dagger derring-do, the 57-year-old career pilot, parachutist and underwater specialist has discovered he can do a lot of good on the ground battling the poverty and sickness that plague thousands of underprivileged Ukrainian children.
‘When you watch the roads and the rivers and you know everything from sixty, seventy, eighty thousand feet above, you always wonder what is on the surface – what the people are like and what is really there,’ Clark says. His first glimpse of what life was like in post-independence Ukraine came in 1995, when he visited Kyiv as a member of an advance team for Operation Blessing, a humanitarian aid project that brought a custom-built airborne medical center to the region in the fall of 1996. Clark was responsible for selecting and purchasing the aircraft and designing the interior.
It was then that he saw firsthand how the young were often hardest hit by the changes sweeping through the former Soviet Union.
He recalls a 7-year-old girl he encountered in Minsk. ‘Anya latched onto me as I walked in the door and was virtually with me every minute of the day. She was the blondest blonde and had the bluest blue eyes. She was always wanting to snuggle and be close. And, when I walked away, she had tears in her eyes,’ Clark says, his own eyes watery and his voice shaking. ‘She died of leukemia six months later.’
Now Clark is president and co-founder of Ukraine Children’s Project, a U.S.-based charity that provides medical and humanitarian supplies to orphanages and children’s hospitals. Over the last 16 months, Clark, along with partner Carey Adams and a team of American and Ukrainian volunteers have delivered shipments to 10 children’s facilities in Kyiv, Vinnytsya, Pervomaisk and Kremenchug. Donors from across the United States pitch in. A store in the midst of moving provided a crate of new Nike sneakers; a 100-year-old woman in Washington state gave socks and mittens she knitted herself. Clark estimates the value of the shipments at $200,000, with another $50,000 worth of medical supplies en route.
‘We’ve poured almost everything we have into bringing people and stuff here. … Putting it into dollars is meaningless. It is the changes on the faces of the kids,’ said Clark. ‘It isn’t easy getting the stuff in [through customs]. It’s not a job for the faint-hearted. … But when you take the stuff to an orphanage and you see a Dima or a Sasha or an Anya, you forget all about the other stuff.’
Clark’s organization is also helping orphaned children become independent by teaching them vocational skills. Ukraine Children’s Project is currently working to import toolboxes and sewing equipment so that orphanage staff can teach boys and girls a marketable trade.
‘They are like sponges. They’re waiting to be challenged,’ said Clark. ‘And if you are going to be able to effectively help children, you have to build a relationship with the people who take care of them every day of the week, every day of the month, year after year. And, that is not a job in this society that is held in great esteem. There is a need for someone to come alongside them and be their cheerleader, … and in my estimation there was no other alternative than to answer the need.’
Given Clark’s previous career as a Cold Warrior, his newfound attachment to a people he was rigorously taught to view as enemies is, to use his word, ironic. The Montana native joined the U.S. Air Force in 1963, eventually becoming a member of an elite special operations branch. Clark spent 19 years on secret missions to over 100 countries that involved everything from piloting reconnaissance flights over Soviet territory to testing the enemy’s MIGs and Antonovs.
As for the details, he could tell you, but then he’d have to kill you.
‘I worked specifically against Soviet action and activities in virtually every region of the world where the United States was directly opposed,’ said Clark. ‘There are people here that I’ve met that wore uniforms for the Soviet Union and it turns out that we were directly opposed to each other in some of the combats or actions that we were involved in.’
Seeking transportation for some of his organization’s humanitarian shipments, Clark met Yura, a former Soviet intelligence officer who now owns a trucking company in Kyiv. The two were shocked to learn that their paths had crossed years earlier, in a Soviet-controlled European country where Yura’s unit operated surveillance equipment that one day went missing, courtesy of Clark’s team. Yura was nearly court-martialed as a result.
‘Yura is a very pleasant, very hard-working man. Over dinner one night we figured out we were in the same place … and his eyes got big. He said ‘I really didn’t think it could be done and all of a sudden it was gone.’ And I was part of the team that caused it to leave,’ Clark said. Clark’s first visit to Ukraine was in the late 70s, when he flew senior U.S. officials for a meeting with their Soviet counterparts. He remembers being stuck into a van with closed curtains and driven to a hotel monitored by Soviet guards, which he was only permitted to leave with a military chaperone.
‘[That was] a time gone by and it isn’t the people that I’ve met here in the last three years. I have confirmed what I have known for a long time – that Ukrainians are very warm,’ he says.
When not out stealing military secrets from the Soviet Union, Clark also served as an Air Force One pilot during the administrations of presidents Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter.
Of the three, Clark most enjoyed his relationship with Nixon, who had pinned him as an Eagle Scout back in 1956. ‘He was not the person to me that was described in movies and books,’ Clark said. ‘He was far more personable and self-assured, and not this worm that messed things up on a regular basis.’
Clark’s last foray into battle was against Iraq during the 1991 Gulf War. Then, in 1994, he decided to hang up his goggles and parachute for a more peaceful life as a civilian.
‘I was travelling around the world and saving the world for peace. It was an interesting experience … but you begin to think you’re fairly important. I got trapped up with the awe of being a jet jockey,’ said Clark, an evangelical Christian. ‘As my career drew to an end, all the things I took as standard material were wiped out from under me.’ A lifetime of soldiering at an end, Clark has dedicated himself to helping the young who cannot help themselves. In addition to the humanitarian aid, his organization is trying to bring Ukrainian orphans with severe birth defects to the United States for medical treatment. Plans to transport a young girl with congenital heart defects to Knoxville, Tennessee are nearly complete, and the organization is arranging the paperwork for two other children who need reconstructive surgery.
‘The children that are in the orphanages today represent a significant percentage of the young people in this country, and they don’t have all the educational opportunities and all the public support that a child [with a family] has,’ he said. ‘I really do believe that unless they achieve their full capabilities, the nation won’t achieve its full potential.’
