Up the Tranquil Mountain

It wasn’t a very high hill the veterans were trying to take, not at all comparable to the steep mountains they fought over at Chosen Reservoir 40 years ago.

This was instead a sun-drenched knoll overlooking the Pacific in an area of San Pedro whose serenity blends with a view of sky and ocean to form an almost perfect landscape of peace.

The veterans took the knoll on a day filled with joy and vowed to erect on its slopes a monument to those who won the high ground in Korea under far less tranquil conditions.

But what a communist enemy couldn’t do to these aging warriors without blood flowing like ribbons in the snow was accomplished last week by a civic committee in a meeting room.

The veterans were swept off the knoll without a shot being fired, and we all ought to be a little disturbed by the offhanded manner of their dismissal.

They had been attempting to win approval for a war memorial down the hill from the Korean Friendship Bell at Angel’s Gate Park on land offered by Mayor Tom Bradley.

Opposition emerged from those who didn’t want a memorial to war near a friendship bell or who didn’t want a monument bristling with guns, and this one does.

The city’s Cultural Affairs Commission agreed with the dissidents and in effect told the veterans to get another site, get another statue or just get lost. The tone of rejection bordered on humiliation.

What appeared certain had suddenly become uncertain, and the monument went down with a bullet in the stomach.

“It was supposed to be a routine appearance,” Jack Stites said later. He’s executive director of the International Korean War Memorial Committee.

“We went into that meeting thinking it involved only a preliminary review of monument design and location. But the minute I walked in I smelled an ambush, and I was right.”

I fought in the Korean War and have strong feelings about friends who died there, their lives ended in a twinkling of the time it took to be born. The Cultural Commission’s dismissal of the veterans defiles their memory and rankles me to the bone.

But, even so, I am uneasy about another monument to men at arms.

The dichotomy derives from the fact that statues pay homage to war’s grandeur, not its horror, and the ethos of violence has already damaged us enough.

Richard Karl is another Korean War veteran who objects not to a monument but to a monument that glorifies guns. He resigned as president of the community’s Friendship Bell Committee because its members wanted no memorial at all.

“I believe what we did in Korea was right,” Karl said, “but that statue is an abomination. Why not an eternal flame or a tile walkway bearing all the names of those who died? There has to be something else, something without guns.”

“Unrealistic,” snapped Lawrence Fitzgerald. “How in the hell can you raise a memorial to war without showing guns?”

He stood on cane-like half-crutches in the middle of his San Pedro home, a warrior crippled by time and history.

“How can we let down the 5,000 people who have supported us so far?” he demanded. “How can we abandon 42,000 Americans who died in battle for their country?”

Fitzgerald is chairman of a citizens committee supporting the memorial. He’s also a veteran of America’s last three wars, a holder of two Purple Hearts and a man who lives night and day with a legacy of war’s explosions that have left a ringing in his ears so intense that he sleeps little and hears less.

“I’m no war lover,” he said to me. “You think I like hopping around on these damned pogo sticks? Half my life has been wasted. But, by God, we’ve got to remind people of the agony those men suffered.”

“We won’t stop trying,” Stites said. “You’ve heard the phrase, ‘Retreat, hell’? This isn’t over.”

Men like Fitzgerald and Stites don’t give up easily. They’ll go up that sunny hill again if the devil himself waits at the top.

I won’t be with them.

A long time ago we abandoned the practice of carrying the heads of enemies around on sticks to glorify the exploits of battle. The day has come to stop glorifying those exploits in bronze.

I resent the manner in which the Cultural Affairs Commission trod on the sensitivities of those who want a memorial, but Richard Karl was right. An eternal flame is better than eternal guns.

The days of drums and bugles belong to the past.