‘Taps’ for a Hero : Military: Highly decorated war veteran had lain in unmarked grave in Vietnam for 25 years. He is laid to rest with honors in Westwood.

Twenty-five years after he was cut down by machine gun fire in a muddy ditch in Vietnam, Sgt. Larry Collazo finally came home.

Home to the daughter and grandson he never got to see. Home to family members who have waited for him for a quarter of a century. Home to the nation that was almost torn apart by the war in which he died.

As his family members and onlookers wept, and the crack of a rifle salute and the mournful notes of “Taps” echoed across the rows of white marble headstones, Callazo was buried in Los Angeles National Cemetery in Westwood on Tuesday.

His recently identified remains, which had lain in an unmarked grave in Vietnam from 1968 until they were exhumed and returned to the U.S. government earlier this year, finally were put to rest.

“My prayer has been answered,” his mother, Gloria Collazo of Gardena, said, choking back tears. “I said, ‘Please, God, let him rest in peace, God, give him a place to come back to.’ And he has.”

“The nightmare is finally over,” Collazo’s brother, Al Collazo, 38, of Mesa, Ariz., said. “It’s been a long wait.”

“Welcome home, brother!” a voice from the crowd of dozens of Vietnam veterans at the burial service called out to the gray casket.

The veterans, middle-aged now and getting paunchy--bearing only slight resemblance to the lanky, shirtless young men in “boonie” hats who stare out from their photo albums--had come to honor one of their own. Dressed in business suits and old fatigues--some of them leaning on crutches--they gave Collazo ragged salutes as his casket was borne past them by an honor guard from Ft. Ord.

“This is our brother, this is family,” said one of them, Chuck Bass, 50, a former Special Forces sergeant in Vietnam. “We’re just sorry it took him so long to come home.”

Raphael Lorenzo (Larry) Collazo was a 20-year-old Army private first class when he was killed on March 17, 1968. Family members describe him as an “all-American boy” who had been a football player and student body president at Los Angeles’ Washington High School in the mid-1960s.

Collazo, according to his brother, volunteered for the draft in July, 1967, because “he wanted to serve his country. He bled red, white and blue.” He had thought about going into law enforcement when his hitch was over, Al Collazo said, and had dreams of someday becoming a lawyer.

When he left for Vietnam in December, 1967, he left behind a wife, Renee, who was pregnant with their child.

Collazo had been in Vietnam only three months when his unit, a rifle platoon of C Troop, 3rd Squadron, 17th Cavalry, engaged in a fierce firefight in Tien Giang province, in the southern portion of what was then South Vietnam. After he had single-handedly knocked out an enemy bunker with grenades and rifle fire, Collazo was hit in the torso by automatic weapons fire and fell into a canal. His fellow soldiers assumed he had been killed.

Forced back by heavy fire, his unit returned the next day to recover Collazo’s body but couldn’t find it. He was officially listed as missing in action. Later, he was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross, the second-highest award for valor, for his actions on the day he died. He was posthumously promoted to sergeant.

In 1971, Collazo was officially declared killed in action by the Army. Earlier this year, Vietnam reported that Collazo’s body, which had been buried by Vietnamese farmers shortly after the firefight, had been exhumed. The skeletal remains were among those of 14 U.S. servicemen turned over to the U.S. government in February and taken to Hawaii for examination. About 2,200 U.S. servicemen remain unaccounted for from the Vietnam War, an Army spokesman said.

Al Collazo said he has reviewed the identification file and is convinced that the remains are those of his brother. They were flown to California last week for burial at the 114-acre National Cemetery. Because of space limitations, the cemetery usually is limited to cremated remains, but an exception was made in Collazo’s case. He was buried near a stand of eucalyptus trees, in a section of the cemetery occupied by veterans who died in the 1930s.

For Collazo’s family, the burial finally put an end to a quarter century of anguish. But it has not healed all the wounds.

“As soon as I read the reports from over there, I knew he was dead,” said Rafael Collazo, 72, Larry’s father, a retired airline employee and World War II Merchant Marine veteran. “I told my wife, ‘He’s gone,’ but she wouldn’t believe it. She kept praying that he’d come back alive.”

“If there’s even a glimmer of hope, you hold onto it,” Al Collazo said.

That Larry Collazo died in that particular war, a war denounced by many Americans, was especially difficult for the Collazo family.

“That was the dirtiest war we ever had,” Rafael Collazo said. “It was a no-win war. And you know how (Vietnam veterans) were treated when they come back. Nobody cared. Now they do, but back then they didn’t. . . . He died for nothing. All those boys died for nothing.”

“He wanted to go,” Collazo’s wife, Renee Anderson, 46, who remarried after his death, said after the burial service. “And I accepted it. I didn’t approve of all that anti-war stuff, but I was bitter that he died.”

Collazo’s daughter, Michelle Olson, 25, who was born after his death, was too young to remember the bitterness of the Vietnam era.

“We studied (the Vietnam War) in school,” she said, before the burial service as she tended to Collazo’s grandson, 1-year-old Timothy. “I think the way a lot of people disrespected the vets was a crime. I just hope that people have learned something.”