Honors Those Who Died, Lived : Somber Ceremony Opens State’s Vietnam Memorial

“All gave some. Some gave all.” --Inscription on memorial stone.

Thousands of fatigue-clad veterans and their families, many weeping openly as a brace of howitzers boomed out a 21-gun salute, dedicated the state Vietnam Veterans Memorial on Saturday to Californians who fought and died and to those who lived.

“The Vietnam War may have torn our nation apart, but thankfully the Vietnam Memorial has brought us together,” Gov. George Deukmejian told the sun-splashed crowd. “The Vietnam veterans have had to endure two wars. One was in the jungles and rivers of Vietnam. The other was for recognition at home.”

A State Police spokesman estimated the sometimes festive, sometimes somber shirt-sleeve gathering at between 6,000 and 7,000 people, most of them veterans wearing remnants of camouflaged combat uniforms and caps proclaiming “Vietnam Veteran and Proud of It.” There were no reports of unruly incidents, the spokesman said.

Organizers of the event, who had expected up to 50,000 participants, voiced hope that the concrete and granite memorial would serve as further evidence that the political and emotional trauma the country suffered over the war is healing.

The ceremony marked the near-completion of the privately financed $2.1-million memorial and another chapter in the uphill five-year effort to erect a monument of “remembrance and honor” to the 5,822 Californians killed or missing in the Vietnam War, the 35,000 who were wounded and the 330,000 others who participated in the war that deeply divided the nation.

It also is tribute to the fathers and mothers of those who died, said master of ceremonies B. T. Collins, a former Green Beret captain who has been a driving force behind the movement to build the memorial.

California, the 34th state to establish a monument to its Vietnam servicemen and women, contributed more troops to the war than any other state and suffered more casualties, an estimated 10% of the nation’s total.

“We did not lose a war in Vietnam,” retired Army Brig. Gen. George Price, himself a Vietnam veteran, told the applauding crowd in peaceful Capitol Park. “The service members of this country have never, ever lost a war.”

Price observed that a “period of reconciliation is now upon us.” In an apparent reference to those who avoided the draft, whom he described as “non-veterans,” Price called on the Vietnam veterans to “extend the hand of healing to those who elected to serve this country in a different manner. . . . Let us reach out and be men and women enough to welcome them home and into our fold where they rightfully belong.”

Preceding the ceremony, thousands of veterans, some in wheelchairs, others in three-piece suits pushing baby strollers and still others marching smartly, paraded 13 blocks with their families through downtown Sacramento to the memorial.

Parallels Protest Route

Part of their route paralleled the boulevard used by chanting protesters 20 years ago when they staged massive anti-war demonstrations at the Capitol. None were to be seen Saturday, although some veterans wore faded peace buttons next to their service ribbons.

One marcher carried a hand-written placard that said: “Dan Quayle. Right stuff?,” a reference to the vice president-elect’s service in the Indiana National Guard during the war. Another sign bitterly declared, “POWs, Abandoned and Betrayed.”

Throughout the day, the 244 Californians still listed as missing in action 13 years after the United States left Vietnam, received special attention.

“Let us close no books, write no last chapters, reach no final conclusions until we have the fullest possible accounting for every serviceman and woman still missing in Southeast Asia,” Deukmejian declared at the dedication to rousing applause.

The most emotional moment occurred at the end of the ceremony, when the howitzers fired the 21-gun salute and a bugler played Taps. Vets, who up to that point had been stoical, broke out in tears and hugged each other for comfort.

Leave Mementos

By sunrise Saturday, scores of veterans, many of them with teen-age children in tow, already had gathered in the morning haze to visit the memorial and leave flowers, war mementos such as a pair of well-worn paratrooper boots, snapshots of young men in uniform and handfuls of war medals.

The gathering included an eclectic mixture of parents--men and women in their 60s and 70s, carefully dressed as if they were going to a funeral--to once-lean GIs, now afflicted with middle-age paunches and wearing moth-balled combat fatigues they could barely button, bell bottom denims of the 1960s era, and a vast array of service patches.

Some laughed as they greeted old buddies by their military nicknames, “Hey, Big T, whattaya doin’ now?” and “Sgt. Specs, man, heard you are living in Long Beach.” Others clustered in small groups, quietly emersed in private conversation as still others touched the names of California casualties etched in white on black granite panels.

One veteran, wearing sergeant’s stripes, boasted of how he rousted his buddies out of bed after a long, boozy reunion the night before, “Even Randy. Remember how hard it was to get Randy awake?”

Tears, however, flowed down the cheeks of many visitors as they searched and found a special name, and then reached out to caress it. Emotion overcame some men and they would suddenly break into unabashed crying, blow their noses into handkerchiefs, swiftly leave the memorial and disappear into Capitol Park.

‘Politically Neutral’

At a serene spot near the Capitol Park rose garden, about two blocks east of the Capitol, the monument betrays none of the political strife that the war spawned at home. The 1983 bill by Assemblyman Richard Floyd (D-Hawthorne) authorizing the project stipulated that the design of the memorial “shall be as politically neutral as possible with respect to the Vietnam conflict.”

Among the 60 co-authors was Assemblyman Tom Hayden (D-Santa Monica), one of the nation’s most outspoken Vietnam War protesters.

The monument itself consists of four circular walls of concrete, on which are fastened 22 heavy black granite panels containing the names of the dead and missing. In contrast to the national monument in Washington, where the dead and missing are listed in chronological order of casualty, the California names are listed by hometown, and include their rank, age and branch of service.

Inside the walls, the central feature is a bronze sculpture of a lone soldier, about 19 years old, sitting on his helmet and reading a letter from home, his rifle resting on his leg.

He will be surrounded by large bronze panels in bas relief depicting Vietnam War scenes ranging from American prisoners of war and exhausted nurses to men in combat and buddies displaying camaraderie. Smaller panels will recreate other scenes in minute detail, all based on photographs.

Still Unfinished

Not all the panels, however, were completed by the Nordhammer Foundry in Oakland in time for the dedication.

“It would have been wonderful to have the whole thing up and completed,” said Linda McClenahan, chairwoman of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Commission, who noted that the painstaking work could not be rushed. “From the vets I’ve talked with, the overwhelming comment is that the names are up and that’s the important part.”

Even as construction workers started hanging the polished granite panels of names, bits of memorabilia and other items began appearing anonymously at the site, presumably left by friends and loved ones of the war dead. The mementos are collected and turned over to the State Archives.

Among other remembrances, workers found a photograph of a boy about 14 years old, a wreath of olive branches, an old American Flag, various military insignia, a bullet casing, flight wings and a note to a fallen fighting man from an apparent comrade saying, “I’m still around and you are gone. I miss you.”

The struggle to build the memorial was handicapped at the outset by a severe shortage of funds. Caught in a major budget crunch, the Legislature and Deukmejian agreed to donate a choice 3,800-square-foot site in Capitol Park for the monument but declined to provide a taxpayers’ cash grant to build it.

Volunteer Donations

Instead, they loaned the memorial commission $25,000 at prevailing interest rates to start the project, but the sum was quickly consumed as a national contest to design the memorial got under way. The commission found itself virtually broke and relying on handfuls of volunteer donations.

For a time, a professional fund-raising firm was brought aboard but that effort fizzled, McClenahan said, when it was learned that “we were paying out as much as we were getting back.”

Consequently, the commission returned to volunteer fund-raising as the only reasonable means of keeping the project alive. Suddenly, it clicked. Veterans’ organizations, especially individual Vietnam vets, held such community-based fund-raising events as dinner dances, pancake breakfasts, plays, art shows and even a poetry reading.

“It just seemed that all of a sudden people decided, ‘Doggone, this is the right thing to do and we better not wait,’ ” she recalled.

“At one grammar school in a rather poor neighborhood of San Jose, the kids collected pennies, nickels and dimes and turned over $600 to us,” said McClenahan, a former Army communications specialist in Vietnam. “That’s the kind of thing that makes the difference. Slowly it started to really bloom.”

Bank Aids Collection

One San Francisco mother, Louise Samson, whose son Frankie was killed in the war, persuaded the management of the bank where she worked to create a special account for the veterans’ memorial and to advertise it at all its branches. Together with a dinner dance, the account provided $30,000, McClenahan said.

Last Fourth of July, Pat and Gina Lough of Alameda walked along a parade route with a big box of American flags and handed them out in exchange for donations. They secured $1,800 for the memorial, McClenahan said.

Another $500,000 worth of materials, computer time, landscaping, public service announcements and other in-kind contributions were donated. About 75% of all donations came from contributors in Northern California, from Bakersfield to Eureka, commission members reported.

Commission members are puzzled that a memorial for California veterans of the Vietnam War did not catch on in Southern California. “I think part of it may simply be the fact of the unconscious division of Northern California and Southern California,” McClenahan speculated. “The Capitol is in Sacramento, and that is why the memorial is here.”

Dedication of the memorial will not end fund-raising. Gregory Green, commission treasurer, said another $200,000 must be raised to correct mistakes in the granite panels, install a closed-circuit television security system and tie up other loose ends.

Brace for Complaints

And, the commission is bracing for what members believe is certain to come: Complaints from disappointed fathers and mothers who discover that the names of their California-reared sons do not appear in the polished black granite.

The reasons why omissions have occurred may be complex and varied but the commission intends to examine each case on an individual basis to decide whether the name should be added.

In selecting the names and hometowns of California casualties, the commission operated from lists supplied by the Department of Defense.

Collins, the former Green Beret captain and a member of the memorial commission, explained, for example, that if a serviceman raised in California attended a college in Oregon and enlisted in the armed forces from an Oregon city, his name would not appear. Likewise, a Nevada man may have enlisted at San Diego and his name would appear as a San Diegan.

The winning design for the memorial was submitted by the firm of Chytrowski/Larson of San Francisco from among 127 entries. In picking the winner three years ago, Collins recalled, the commission “wanted something that would honor their deaths” and not express a “never-again or what-a-waste” point of view.

‘Flying Helicopter’

He said one entry envisioned a monument that featured a “model helicopter with lights flying around” while another proposed a graceful arch that would enable sunlight to strike the letters of each casualty’s name once a year. The latter was rejected because it was uncertain whether it would work, Collins said.

The Vietnam veterans’ memorial is the second war monument in Capitol Park. The first honors veterans of the Spanish-American War. According to the state Department of Veterans Affairs, World War I claimed 1,566 soldiers from California, World War II took the lives of 31,040 Californians and another 2,495 perished in the Korean War.