About Edie Clark and her Uncle, Lincoln R. Clark, Jr.

A lifelong Midwesterner, Edie lives in SW Michigan. She spent many years as a writer and editor in the corporate, academic, political, and government sectors, and is also an award-winning short story writer. Edie’s uncle, First Lieutenant Lincoln Romeiser Clark, Jr., was among the many Americans taken prisoner by the Japanese in the Philippines. While stationed there, he sent for his fiancée, Deborah Port, and was married in April, 1941. Five weeks later Deborah was evacuated, never to see her husband again. She gave birth to Lincoln’s daughter on January 16th, 1942, while Lincoln was fighting on the Abucay Line on the Bataan Peninsula. On December 15th, 1944, he perished while being held captive, having never set eyes on his daughter. 

Lincoln’s widow eventually remarried her late husband’s brother, Philip Clark, and had two more daughters. One of these three sisters lives in the Pacific Northwest and the others live in Michigan. In about 2007, Edith (Edie) Clark – the middle sister – began researching the history of American POWs in the Philippines. During the course of her studies she stumbled across some remarkable and almost unknown information about the Philippine underground. After years of research, writing, museum visits, conversations, and correspondence, she produced a manuscript. “The Silent Soldier” is the story of Miguel, a young boy left mute following a series of family traumas. This story takes the reader on Miguel’s hair-raising flight through the central plains of Luzon, where he’s shot twice; his fortuitous rescue of a doomed cart horse; the beautiful spies who posed as slinky nightclub performers; his months as a sniper and tracker high in the Zambales Mountains; his love for his smuggling partner, Naomi, who goes by the code name Looter; the prison break that liberated 500 American soldiers; and the shaman’s dark spell that nearly undid him.