Ample Funds Raised for War Memorial Care

About $35,000 has been raised to repair vandalism damage to the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, but the funds may not be needed for that, said Jan Scruggs, who led the drive to build the V-shaped black wall.

The money will go toward other expenses of the memorial, including measures to cope with vandalism in the future, Scruggs said Monday.

Scruggs, of Columbia, Md., and who is the founder and president of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund, was in Los Angeles to present an award to Jeff Pollack, president of the Pollack Media Group of Pacific Palisades, for raising the funds.

Pollack, a programming consultant to radio and television stations, was responsible for encouraging stations across the country to collect money from listeners to repair the damage, Scruggs said.

Appalling Report

At an award lunch in Santa Monica, Pollack said he heard news reports in May that the wall had been defaced.

Although he was an anti-war activist who took part in marches and campus building occupations at the University of Denver in the late 1960s, Pollack said, the report left him “appalled--like hearing someone had thrown black paint on the Lincoln Memorial.”

A vandal using “a knife or screwdriver or something like that” scratched out two of the 58,156 names on the granite wall and cut a swastika about 6 inches high into the stone, Scruggs said.

At first it was believed that the damaged panels would have to be removed from the monument and trucked to a stonemason’s shop for repairs, which would have cost thousands of dollars, Scruggs said.

“Fortunately, now it looks like that’s not the case,” he said. “We’ve discovered that the cuts extend only through the layer of wax and polish coatings that turn the gray marble to black on the surface,” he said. “Now we have hope they can be polished out at the scene,” which he said will cost “very little, or perhaps nothing.”

The names of military men and women who died due to combat in Vietnam were inscribed on the granite by sandblasting letters only .011 of an inch deep.

However, Scruggs said, “hairline cracks about 8 inches long” were found in some of the panels when they were inspected for vandalism.

“This woke us up” to the problem of damage as the monument ages, Scruggs said.

Matching Granite

Consequently, the money will be used to purchase matching granite slabs from the quarry that supplied the original stone. The new stone will be polished and left outdoors in Washington so that it will weather at the same pace as the monument. If the monument needs repairs in the future, matching panels will be immediately available, he said.

Some of the funds will be used to pay for adding names to the wall as veterans die of old wounds, or as administrators and historians re-classify some deaths. About 220 names have been added since the wall was unveiled in 1982, he said.

Scruggs founded the organization that raised the money to build the memorial and that now maintains it.