Reaching Out to a Forgotten Past : Profile: A scarred veteran of the streets might have been a Marine who served his country in three wars, but a friend who is trying to help says the proof is hard to find.

Wearing an orange construction helmet and reduced to sweeping gutters for spare change, David Palmer looks every inch the shell-shocked U.S. veteran he claims to be.

Scars and tattoos crisscross his wiry frame. He rambles incoherently, occasionally shouting to make points only he seems to grasp. A racking cough suggests what doctors have recently diagnosed: Palmer is suffering from lung and brain cancer and has only months to live.

It’s a sad story--but one whose full tragedy has yet to be revealed, according to a man who has befriended Palmer. The friend, Charles Keefe, a self-described starving artist who lives in Palms, contends that Palmer is a former Marine who saw combat in three wars only to lose his true identity after a mysterious robbery 21 years ago.

As a result, Keefe says, Palmer has been deprived not only of official recognition of his service, but of tens of thousands of dollars in veterans benefits--as well as access to a Veterans Administration hospital.

“If he was a Marine for 30 years--if he was a Marine for one day in Vietnam--he deserves proper treatment,” Keefe said. “I don’t want to see him dying in the street as a psychotic.”

With Palmer unable to remember key dates or places that might help to verify any service record, Keefe’s claims rest on conjecture and anecdotal evidence. He has pieced together what he thinks is Palmer’s chronology based on hours of conversations with a man who is clearly sick and confused.

At this point, however, the only physical evidence is a less-than-conclusive still photograph gleaned from a television documentary on the Vietnam War.

Keefe says he was watching the 1987 documentary, “Dear America: Letters Home From Vietnam” on KCET last April when he spotted a soldier who resembled Palmer. Up until that time, Keefe says, he had known Palmer only casually and had largely ignored his periodic references to military service.

Emboldened by the face in the documentary, Keefe has doggedly set about trying to prove that Palmer is who he says he is: a veteran of World War II, Korea and Vietnam, whose past was wiped out when his original name, David Robert Palmer, was somehow switched to David Louis Palmer.

A key element of Keefe’s inquiry is a 1972 robbery in Los Angeles, in which Palmer claims he was robbed of all of his personal papers, including his birth certificate, Social Security card and military discharge papers.

Before the robbery, Keefe contends, Palmer was receiving state disability and welfare benefits made out to “David Palmer.” After the robbery, however, Palmer began receiving government checks made out to a “David Louis Palmer,” with a new Social Security number and birth date.

Any attempts to get officials to rectify the alleged errors--and Keefe says Palmer made many--have failed. Palmer, who maintains he was born Jan. 25, 1925, still receives state Medi-Cal stickers that identify him as being born on Jan. 25, 1937. For years, he has stubbornly “fixed” offending documents by hand, writing in what he believes is his true birthday.

The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, meanwhile, says it has no record of Palmer under any name. In August, Keefe took Palmer to the VA Hospital in Westwood only to see him released after 10 days. “Pt (patient) is not a veteran,” the discharge form states.

A letter to Keefe from Dennis Kuewa, who works in the Department of Veterans Affairs regional office in Los Angeles, states, “We have been unable to identify Mr. Plamer (sic) in our computer system.”

But Keefe is not giving up. Working off Palmer’s claim that he was born in Hemsburn, W. Va., Keefe is trying to obtain his friend’s birth certificate. He also has persuaded Robert Clayton, the acting chief of services for the Los Angeles County Department of Military and Veterans Affairs, to send Palmer’s fingerprints to the FBI to see if they match those of some former serviceman.

Clayton, who has yet to hear back from the FBI, said there’s a chance Keefe’s claims are true.

“It’s quite possible, but until I can get something concrete I really can’t comment,” Clayton said. He cautioned, “We have a lot of guys running around saying they were Green Berets and it turns out they weren’t even in the service.”

Another glimmer of hope is provided by James Lorenz, a retired serviceman who lives in a camper in the Venice area. Lorenz, 55, came forward after he saw an item in a Culver City weekly detailing Palmer’s identity problems.

Lorenz contends that a former friend from the mid-1950s, a woman he can identify only as Eunice, spoke often of a Lt. David Palmer, whom she described as an ex-boyfriend. Eunice, Lorenz recalls, showed him documents that stated Palmer had been discharged from the Navy in 1956 as the result of a head injury.

“I believe he’s the David Palmer she was talking about,” Lorenz said, although he acknowledged that he has no way to know for sure.

Palmer himself can do little to solve the mystery. His condition diagnosed in at least one medical report as psychotic, he jabbers nonsensically, has trouble sitting still and cannot remember key details such as unit numbers or the locations of battles. He is homeless and has taken to sweeping the sidewalks and gutters along Venice Boulevard to earn money from passersby.

Keefe attributes the behavior at least partly to post-traumatic stress--the result of a life of combat. He says he believes, based on his conversations with Palmer, that Palmer was taken prisoner in Korea in 1953 and brainwashed and tortured for two years before being rescued. He also contends that Palmer served in Vietnam from 1965 to 1970, during which time his nose and tailbone were shattered in an ambush.

Why all that would be erased from official memory, if indeed it was, is a matter of guesswork. Keefe strongly suggests that if Palmer worked in covert operations, as he claims he did, then perhaps the government might have a reason to make him “disappear.”

Another possibility is that Palmer, who has endured bouts of alcoholism and homelessness, is the victim of a benefits fraud of some sort.

For sure, he is the victim of something. Vicious scars mar Palmer’s head and body--scars that Keefe insist match up anatomically with Palmer’s hazy recollections of being wounded in combat.

“He’s got 15 wounds on him,” Keefe says. “His feet are horribly scarred. His wrists show signs of being tied up for years. He has three separate creases in his head.”

Keefe says he needs the public’s help to find out how it all happened. He is asking anyone who recognizes Palmer’s photos--or who can otherwise shed light on Palmer’s murky past--to call him at (310) 202-0853.

Says Keefe: “I want to find out his name.”