Mark Clawson, president, Diamond Rental/Diamond Event & Tent, Salt Lake City, is an admitted World War II history buff and a lover of old jeeps. Those two passions recently came together in a way that has ended up serving an even greater purpose — honoring an uncle for his combat service.
For Clawson, his love of jeeps and anything WWll-related started when he was young.
“I’ve always liked them. My dad had some when we were young. My first car I ever bought with my own money was a Jeep CJ5. It has kind of been a family thing. My dad had a few military jeeps through the years. I thought they were pretty neat as I grew up during the ‘M*A*S*H’ television show era where you saw the main characters driving around in jeeps. I also watched a lot of WWII army shows. We never restored any of these military jeeps, but we always talked about doing that,” he says.
That idea started to gain traction when, in the early 2000s, Clawson and his father bought what looked like a WWII jeep from a person his father knew. “This guy’s dad was a collector of old vehicles. We
found this jeep sitting under sheet metal in a farm field, where it had been maybe 10 to 20 years. This guy’s dad had used it to drive to his county job, cutting roads in the mountains. It was his commuter vehicle in the 1950s and 1960s. We bought it and put it in a metal building on my dad’s farm. Around 2013, I brought the vehicle down and started digging into it. I realized how degraded and rusted out it was, which was pretty depressing. As I dug deeper into it, removing decades of paint layers, I found that it was an authentic WWII jeep. It was a Ford GPW, made in Dearborn, Mich., and delivered Jan. 23, 1945,” he says.
Clawson took the jeep down to its frame and then started building it back. It was a rather overwhelming project and wasn’t going as quickly as he hoped. “Last summer I realized I had to get this done. We were coming up on so many anniversaries of significant battles, not to mention the fact that my dad is now 93 and I wanted him to be able to enjoy it,” he says.
As he was restoring the jeep, he kept thinking about his uncle, Robert Morrow, who served in WWII.
“I didn’t know him super-well because he lived in Tennessee and I grew up in the West. I knew him as a lonely man living far away from everyone out in the country, but I always felt a little bit of connection and kinship with him. I knew he had a rough war experience. He came home and suffered what we now know as PTSD. He had a really hard time adjusting back to normal life,” Clawson says.
While going to law school out East, Clawson stopped in and spent some time with his uncle. After his uncle and then his mother died, Clawson discovered a book his mother had, which was a collection of oral history interviews of World War II veterans from Maury County, Tenn.
“There was a three-page write-up about my uncle. It was amazing. He went to North Africa, was then sent to Italy as a replacement and landed at Anzio, where a famous battle took place. He was part of it. He was in a barn, ironically like what this jeep was in all these years. The Germans shelled it and killed a bunch of people. He kept guys alive while he fought off a counterattack. His commanding officer ordered him to leave, but he wouldn’t leave. He bandaged up soldiers’ wounds, put a tourniquet on a guy whose arm was blown off and things like that. He kept them alive and kept the Germans from overtaking it. He received a Silver Star for that,” Clawson says.
Clawson discovered so much more — including that his uncle had been wounded three times. “I learned that some of his best friends were machine-gunned down and he had to lie with their bodies during the night before he could get away. He went through these horrible things that you can’t even understand. He also was in a company that rode on the tank that Gen. Patton drove through part of southern France. He shook Patton’s hand. He was loaned to a few different regiments during the dash across France, the Battle of the Bulge and the surrender of Germany. Many groups claim their unit liberated Dauchau, one of the concentration camps. It is hard to say which unit he was with at that point, but he was in the assault squad and remembered the German guards showing them the crematorium. There were still bodies there that hadn’t been burned yet. He concluded his service in the war at Adolf Hitler’s ‘Eagle’s Nest' at Berchtesgaden. What is amazing is that he shared all of this in the book so matter-of-factly,” Clawson says.
Realizing all that his uncle went through — along with the grit he displayed at such a young age — and that he had not been fully recognized when he came home, Clawson decided he wanted to honor him, a true military hero, by painting his unit numbers on the jeep.
“I looked him up and found out that he was in Company L of the 30th Infantry Regiment, 3rd Division when he earned the Silver Star. I received the templates and painted them on the jeep. I thought it was kind of a fun way to honor Uncle Robert. He never had a chance at a normal life. He had seen so much. By the time he was in his 20s, he had lived a few lifetimes and was just burned when he returned. I felt like this was a cool way to honor him and a neat way for my four sons to know more about my uncle,” Clawson says.
Clawson doesn’t have any specific plans for the jeep. “The town where my dad’s farm is has a Fourth of July parade. Maybe we can drive it in the parade,” he says. “But’s it’s definitely capable of going off-road, climbing some trails and doing what it was meant to do.”
No matter what, Clawson will take it out for a spin every now and then. “For me, it is fun to drive around. It’s a little piece of history that honors my uncle, and I want to make sure we don’t forget what he did for us,” he says.