War hero’s statue gets flak for gun

Everyone agrees that Danny Dietz died a hero.

The Navy SEAL perished in the mountains of Afghanistan two years ago, holding off militia fighters for 45 minutes during an ambush. The helicopter coming to rescue his four-man squad was shot down, and Dietz, though wounded, resisted so ferociously that one of his comrades was able to escape.

Petty Officer 2nd Class Dietz, 25, was posthumously awarded the Navy Cross, the service’s second-highest honor, for his valor.

The disagreement is over how -- and where -- he should be memorialized here in his hometown. A statue based on the last photo of Dietz will be unveiled in a park across the street from a playground and elementary school, down the block from a middle school. A small group of parents in this suburb of 41,000 object because they believe it emphasizes his service weapon. The statue is of a larger-than-life Dietz crouching, holding his rifle pointed downward.

“That’s an inappropriate thing for children to see walking back and forth to school,” said Emily Cassidy, one of the parents who opposes the location. “Imagine you’re a 3- or 4-year-old at the playground and you’re looking at a 9-foot-tall statue with the focal point of a [rifle].”

The objections have drawn outrage from across the country, particularly after a flier from parents and a local gun control advocate cited the 1999 massacre at nearby Columbine High School as a reason children should not see such an image outside school.

Dietz’s parents, who live in Littleton, were horrified that the memorial be linked in any way with the massacre.

“Our son attended those schools,” Cindy Dietz said at a news conference this month.

Parents need to teach children “what our heroes are doing for us,” she said, adding: “You can’t shelter them from that.”

The city says the statue’s unveiling will proceed July 4 as planned. Spokeswoman Kelli Narde said city officials had received about 600 calls backing the statue and nine objecting. “That’s a pretty strong show of support,” she said.

The Columbine reference apparently sparked a lot of the anger, Narde said.

Cassidy said her group was not comparing Dietz to the teenage gunmen who killed 12 classmates and a teacher at the high school.

Still, talk radio hosts seized on the issue, and Cassidy said the other parents in her group had become wary of talking more because of angry calls and e-mails bombarding them. But they said they believed they had no choice but to take a stand.

“We never had any issue with his bravery,” Cassidy said.

Of the many war memorials across the country, some, such as the National World War II Memorial on the National Mall, do not depict individual troops or weapons. Others, such as the Korean War Veterans Memorial, also on the Mall, do show soldiers bearing arms.

Cassidy acknowledges that many monuments depict firearms, but she says children do not have to encounter them daily as they would the Dietz memorial.

Soon after the Dietzes were notified of Danny’s death -- his body was found July 4, 2005 -- they began thinking of a statue as a way to honor his memory.

They spoke with their congressman, Republican Tom Tancredo, who helped raise $42,000 in private money for the display. The city offered to place it on a vacant lot near Danny’s childhood elementary and middle schools.

Danny Dietz is the only Littleton resident known to have died in the recent wars, Narde said. “A lot of us wanted to do something to reach out to the family” when he died, she said. The statue seemed the perfect way to contribute.

Cassidy, who sits on the city’s Fine Arts Committee and is otherwise active in civic affairs, said she first saw an image of the statue in February. Upset about it, she began networking and alerting other parents to the issue.

This suburb, which has a reputation for conservatism, is a neighborly place, and the complaints and subsequent backlash have surprised many.

“Two of the three ladies leading this fight are friends of mine,” said Mayor Jim Taylor, who backs the statue. “We’ve not had this type of controversy before.”

Republican state Sen. Steve Ward, a colonel in the Marine Reserve who served in Afghanistan, was surprised at the objections in a place like Littleton. But he thinks they’ve gained no traction.

“Taking the gun out of the statue of a soldier is like taking the mouth off a statue of a lawyer,” he said. “Our freedoms have been won through strength of arms ... including the freedom to make stupid arguments.”

nicholas.riccardi@latimes.com