Who Is Wesley Clark?

Jan. 7, 2004 — -- Wesley Clark was born in Chicago to a family with very little money. He was not yet 4 when his father died.

His mother moved to Little Rock, Ark., to live with her family. Clark remembers being competitive from a very young age.

"I discovered when I went down to Arkansas as a kid that when you don't have a father, you sort of got to make your own way in life. It's really up to you," Clark said.

"There's really nobody there. You've got to do it. I didn't have a big brother or anybody to sort of take care of me," he said. "I took care of myself."

When he was almost 10, his mother remarried. Clark says of his stepfather: "The problem was that he'd gone through a very difficult divorce, he'd had too much to drink during the process, he had lost his reputation in the banking community.

"It was stressful on all of us. My mother loved him. My mother loved me. He tried to take care of us. She was the breadwinner, he was struggling. It was painful."

Today Clark has a son of his own and over Christmas, he became a grandfather.

Clark says his life as a schoolboy was like the movie October Sky "where, with the rocket society and stuff, well, a lot of kids my age were very motivated, and very worried about the Soviet ICBM threat, and what it might mean to America."

"We thought, well, we're going to study real hard in science and mathematics, and we're going to fix this."

Clark remembers when, as a child, he first thought about the Army. "Somehow I had a nickel. And I don't know how I got it — it was my first money. So, I walked a mile to a variety store.

"And the only thing I bought with the nickel was a toy soldier. And he was a — like, a plastic, rubber soldier like they had in 1950. He was a machine gunner," he said.

"And I walked home with that in my fist," he said. "That's the first time I ever thought about the Army."