You would have liked Clarissa Collins
EAlbany arly in 1991, Clarissa Collins was a long way from home. “Sometimes I just sit on the deck,” Collins wrote in a letter to her family in Albany, “and look at the ocean and the stars and wonder how the hell did I get here, in this strange country of Saudi Arabia.”
Collins was an Army medic at the time, waiting with thousands of troops to move into Kuwait as part of a ground invasion that would be a defining moment of the Gulf War. Within a few days, Collins wrote, they would be traveling to an area not far from the border with Iraq.
“I sure do hate to leave my oceanfront breeze to go to the desert,” Collins wrote. “All sand, sun and no shade ... oh, and don’t forget the snakes and spiders.”
Veterans Day was Wednesday, of course, and I didn’t want to
let the holiday get too far past without writing about Collins — a woman who died last month and who, like so many veterans, quietly but proudly served her country.
I’m sorry to say that I didn’t know Collins, although many in Albany did. It was a reader who suggested I write about her, describing her as an “example of those who have persevered and served.” He thought she deserved a tribute, and he was right. Like all veterans, Collins earned our gratitude.
Collins was the daughter of Morris and Marguerite Collins and a relative of folks who had joined the Black migration northward, trading the fields of Mississippi for a new life along Albany’s Rapp Road.
Morris and Marguerite were not wealthy. But they each worked two or three jobs to ensure that Clarissa and her sisters went to private school
and got the best education available. “It was hard,” remembers Marguerite, 81, who worked as a nurse’s aide at the county nursing home during the day and cleaned state offices at night. “But I made it.”
Collins made perhaps a surprising move when she enlisted after graduating from Bishop Maginn High School in 1979. At that time, joining the Army was still an uncommon thing for a woman to do. It took courage.
But Fufu, as Collins was nicknamed, had always been strong and determined.
“Clarissa was just tough,” said Lenise Harris-darden, who became friends with Collins in grade school and lives now on Long Island. “She would always fight off the girls who would pick on me.”
Collins joined the military in part because she wanted to travel, said a sister, Sabrina Collins. But she also joined because she didn’t want to burden her parents with college tuition. She wanted to ensure that her siblings went to college instead.
The Army felt like the best option. Collins received nursing training there in a military career that eventually brought her to the Persian Gulf for the war against Iraq and Saddam Hussain.
In the letters her family provided, Collins wrote often of her love for family. “I’m going to end my letter now but never my love for you all,” she said in one. “Give each other a hug for me.”
She also wrote about the unbearable heat of the desert and the annoyances of the wind and sand, almost making war sound like a particularly miserable camping trip. “When it rains, it rains like mad,” she said. “It always floods us out our tents.”
Collins provided only occasional glimpses of harder moments. “Right now I’m sitting on guard duty with six other people making sure that terrorists don’t enter our area,” she wrote in one letter. “This is the first time most of us have carried real ammunition and ( been) given orders to shoot.”
Later in the letter, she added: “All of this has even more made me appreciate the small things in life.”
Collins left the Army in 1992 and worked afterward as a nurse in Connecticut, Virginia and elsewhere. When her father died in 2003, Collins returned to Albany and eventually returned to a house on Third Street first purchased by her grandparents. There, in the West Hill neighborhood near Henry Johnson Boulevard, she lived with her mother, Marguerite.
She never spoke of the difficulties of her service or the horrors she may have seen, her sister said, but it was clear that her years in the military changed her. In fact, she was ultimately found to have posttraumatic stress disorder.
She paid a price for her service, as so many veterans do.
Her sacrifice was real, and significant.
Still, Collins never lost her love of travel and was happiest when headed for some exotic destination or another, her sister said. She found joy in playing blackjack at casinos. She loved Aretha Franklin, Angela Davis and watching westerns like “Bonanza” and “Ponderosa” on TV.
Doesn’t Clarissa sound like a person you’d want to know? A woman you would have liked?
“She always thought everybody was a friend,” Sabrina Collins said. “She was just so uplifting, a person you could never forget,” said Harris-darden.
Recently, Collins’ health began to decline. She had a kidney removed last year. In May, she was diagnosed with leukemia and had a stroke shortly after. She was hospitalized for a time but eventually returned to her mother and family in the home on Third Street.
There, she died peacefully on Oct. 7. Clarissa Collins was 6o years old.