"It was just a living," he says of growing up on a farm. Clifton was born in rural Stanley, Arkansas. He soon began service to his state and the nation. He enlisted in the Arkansas National Guard in 1937. He also served in the Civilian Conservation Corps. Clifton entered the U.S. Army in June of 1942. Assigned to the Twenty-Ninth Division at Camp Blanding, Florida, he sailed to England on the Queen Elizabeth. As an armor artificer in Headquarters Company, of the 116^th Infantry Regiment, he drove a jeep ashore at Omaha Beach "a day or two later" after D-Day, he recalls. Clifton saw action around Saint Lo, Brest, and Aachen. He sailed home on the Queen Mary and was discharged at Jefferson Barracks in St. Louis, Missouri. He spent most of his working career in Shreveport as a mechanic with East Texas Motor Freight.