Quiet Battle Goes On for Vietnam Memorial : With Action Toward State Monument Stalled, One Veteran Makes It His Personal Objective

B. T. Collins observes a series of private anniversaries that never fail to stir his Irish tears through an afternoon of VO and soda. With a twist.

“ La guerre, la guerre ,” goes his whispered toast that explains a military preoccupation. “ Toujours la guerre .”

The war, the war. Always the war. So Collins commemorated last Monday as the day he almost died leading 88 GIs up some nameless ridge near An Khe. In three days, 55 of his men stopped living before they had stopped growing. A bloody awful way, he noted, to celebrate Ho Chi Minh’s birthday.

Jan. 27. On this day in 1966, his company commander was wounded; he died a quadriplegic many years later.

May 19. Sgt. Eugene Pickett, the old sweat, the classic noncom who called his soldiers “chillun,” was shot through the eye.

June 20, 1967. That’s when the Vietnam War cost Green Beret B. T. Collins an arm and a leg.

Dec. 22. Here’s to the blue-eyed black Irishman’s first step on his artificial leg.

Another Anniversary

Now he has a fresher, more local anniversary to mark.

Today, despite Collins’ work and dedication, another Memorial Day will pass without a state memorial to Californians killed or missing in the Vietnam War.

A bill creating such a memorial was signed into law . . . but that was more than two years ago. A design was accepted and a $2-million budget established . . . a year ago. Funds have been raised . . . but of $200,000 collected, expenses have eaten all but $20,000. A temporary redwood marker shows where the memorial will stand on the Capitol grounds . . . but vandals have twice knocked it over.

Vietnam memorials have been raised by eight states from New York to Arizona. A dozen more are in motion. Yet California--a state that sent more men (334,000), lost more men (5,814) and had more men (28) awarded Medals of Honor--is without its place of homage.

Collins, 45, a member of the nine-person California Vietnam Veterans Memorial Commission and former chief of staff to Gov. Edmund G. Brown Jr., chooses to take it personally.

“Because it is my fault,” he said. “Because I was the one (member) who was most vocal. The most famous is Leo (Thorsness), who was a prisoner for six years, but I’m the most vocal. But I haven’t done enough publicity. I haven’t done the job because I haven’t had the time.

“The problem, and this is what scares me, is that the (current) good feeling about Vietnam veterans is going to evaporate. Look at me. I’m 45. The war was over 13 years ago. Soon, everybody’s going to forget it.

“What we (commission members) have got to do is get off our butts with every newspaper, get the word out, do it over and over. . . .”

Collins, those close to the issue say, is too hard on himself. For as an investment banker with Kidder, Peabody & Co. and a former director of the California Conservation Corps, he never fails to include the memorial in the two dozen speeches he makes each month. There was his cocktail dance for the Friends and Enemies of B. T. Collins at the Capitol Plaza Hall. It raised $26,000.

Self-deprecation, they add, is a trademark of Brien Thomas Collins.

In truth, members of the commission say, any blame for delays can be shared. For one thing, when the memorial bill was signed, there was no allowance for staff. It was ruled that California’s memorial, unlike those in some other states, would not be built by public funds.

Then came a problem created by the design phase of the memorial, explained commission vice chairman Thorsness, a former POW in Hanoi and a Medal of Honor winner.

“When we established the design competition, we did not limit in any way what the cost would be,” Thorsness said. “I don’t know what it cost for the New York or New Mexico or Arizona memorials, but I get the impression that the cost of ours is significantly more.

“To crank up a $2-million fund-raising effort takes a lot of time and work.” Linda McClenahan, who served in Vietnam with the 1st Signal Brigade, chairs the commission. She is a telecommunications analyst with Bechtel Power Corp. in San Francisco. She knows that members’ full-time jobs, no matter how generous their employers, have long restricted their availability for commission work.

Even when there was time, most members were inexperienced in writing, submitting and overseeing approval for the state contracts required to plan and raise the memorial.

“There was a point when I took a week’s leave of absence and it took all that time to simply get an initial contract and all attachments through the approval process,” she said. “It was incredibly time-consuming and very frustrating.”

Despite contributions totaling $30,000 from Coors, TRW, Lockheed and Litton Industries, corporations have been slow in responding.

“We’re not doing too well on corporate donations,” McClenahan acknowledged, “but my comment from the beginning was that I hope the citizens of California build this memorial, not its corporations.”

And it didn’t help when the commission was subjected to three address changes before it was permanently assigned P.O. Box 3040, Sacramento 95812, by its support agency, the Department of Veterans Affairs.

Despite such hang-ups, McClenahan said, 1986 could well become the memorial commission’s busiest and most effective year.

In November, Jerri Ewan, 34, former director of communications for Republican Assembly Leader Pat Nolan, was named executive officer of the commission, a $30,000-a-year job. Three months ago, James Glass & Co. of Los Angeles became the memorial’s official fund-raiser.

Moving in Some Areas

“We are definitely in second gear, maybe even third when it comes to the design of the memorial, the processing of money, the ordering of granite and talking to the foundry,” Ewan said.

“But in the fund-raising aspect I think we’re in first gear. I know they (Glass & Co.) are making a lot of effort in contacting veterans’ organizations and the foundations. But there’s a lag in the response and part of that is based on corporations and their giving cycles.”

Ahead are concerts, 5.8K runs (a quiet acknowledgment of 5,814 Californians killed or missing), the possible selection of honorary and celebrity chairpersons, and a second mailing to a group of California veterans in hopes of duplicating a surprising response to the first.

It was Ewan’s idea. She included a pitch for memorial funds in monthly VA mortgage billings to 100,000 veterans. More than $67,000 came back with donations ranging from single dollar bills from a fixed-income widow to a check for $988. It just happened to match this particular veteran’s mortgage payment.

“I called the man thinking that he’d put the checks in the wrong envelopes and that we had received his mortgage payment,” Ewan said. “He said: ‘No mistake. I was making my house payment and while I was writing out one check for $988 I decided to write another one for you.’ ”

McClenahan hopes the California memorial will be ready for dedication on Memorial Day next year. Ewan isn’t quite as hopeful.

“We are holding to that . . . but I think we’re looking at November, 1987, and a Veterans Day dedication,” Ewan said.

Whether Memorial Day, Veterans Day, or even the anniversary of the day B. T. Collins graduated from Officer Candidate School, there is no question that there will, one day, be a California Vietnam Veterans Memorial.

Similarly, there is no doubt that it will be unique among such structures.

It will be the first to acknowledge specifically the service and sacrifice of military women in Vietnam. This plaza of broken concentric circles will make no political statement. Yet as a gesture of thoughtfulness, the name of each casualty chiseled into its granite markers will also carry his age.

One wall will be dedicated to prisoners of the Vietnam War. Another will be a place for nurses and corpsmen. There will be a life-size bronze of a soldier writing home, a walkway set with a polished granite map of South Vietnam, tableaux of battle scenes taken directly from classic combat photographs, and collages of personal effects: dog tags, a headline from Stars & Stripes, a letter, a pressed rose, a folded Old Glory.

“It will be honoring those who served and survived as well as those who died,” said Bert Snow, project director for James Glass & Co. “I think this broad appeal of a tribute rather than a memorial is going to make it succeed.”

But when?

“I wish I could answer that question definitely,” he said. “We think the mood is such that we can raise the money over a period of time. But that’s the key phrase. We don’t know how long it will take.

“It’s simply a matter of selling, and as we’ve said ourselves, this memorial has been one of the best kept secrets in California. Now we’re trying to change all that.”

B. T. Collins holds one thought that never clouds. He misses the war.

“Oh, hell I do,” he says.

Vietnam was his time and place. Even among the death and fear, there was the exhilaration of survival. Here a man learned all of himself and who he could be. The brotherhood of combat where rifle companies become families, the emotional abstractions in days that promised nothing but life or death . . . absolutes for a lifetime, believes bachelor Collins.

Yet a grenade, he is reminded, took his arm and leg. The handicap, Collins says, gave him a solemn challenge and a mighty perspective on life. And, yes, he’s a better man for his steel hook and his wooden leg.

He’s gentle, profane, gregarious, tender, funny, boorish, sad, artful, irreverent, romantic, intelligent, manipulative, Brendan Behan and George Patton--and flicking among these extremes is his main mischief.

He also knows exactly what he wants the California Vietnam Veterans Memorial to be.

“None of this ‘Never Again’ stuff or the impression that this was a horrible war,” he said. “And none of this stuff about Our (Vietnam veterans’) Memorial.

“I want the parents to have this place, the mothers and fathers, the brothers and sisters, the wives and the girlfriends, the sons and the daughters.

“It’s more for them than the men. I’m very concerned and scared that they might not get it. They’ve just got to have it.”