BREA : Vietnam Wall Model Moves Many to Tears

Gary Powell ran his fingers across the names on a scaled-down model of the Vietnam War Memorial on Monday until he reached George Ficklin and Frederick Chesbrough.

Powell, 46, then stared at the names, his eyes filling with tears.

Ficklin and Chesbrough, both Army second lieutenants and Powell’s fighting partners, were killed in the war.

“I’ve wanted for so long to confront these memories of the war,” said Powell, of Huntington Beach. “The death and the suffering, the sights and the sounds, the screams and the crying. All that profound loss brought on a feeling of fear that you never felt before.”

Powell was 19 when he was drafted into a war he knew little about.

“I didn’t want to go to die,” he said. “I spent my 21st birthday against a rice paddy waist-deep in water, not knowing if I would live. Through it all, I got to know (Ficklin and Chesbrough) and depended on them for my own existence and then I had to load them into the helicopter to haul their bodies away.”

After seeing the wall, a traveling display now on view at the Memory Garden Memorial Park and Mortuary, Powell said he felt some comfort.

The 252-foot-long wall contains 58,175 names of U.S. armed forces members who died serving in Vietnam or are classified as missing in action.

The model was created in 1983 by Vietnam veteran John Devitt of San Jose, who had been to Washington, D.C., and seen the full-sized wall. He made the smaller version so that people who cannot travel to Washington may see the model on its tour of the country.

“This is the first time the wall is in Brea,” said Jon Wines, general Manager of Memory Garden Memorial Park and Mortuary. “We wanted to provide a location for our community to have the opportunity to see the wall and show support for Vietnam veterans.”

Joe and Jean Du Puy of Brea visited the wall to photograph it. They said they didn’t know any of the names but took pictures to give to their son who served in the war.

“Our son got home with three purple hearts and he got home alive,” said Joe Puy, a World War II veteran. “I think any American would want to see this wall.”

“This kind of thing always gets to me,” Jean Puy said, crying.

Tyrone Jackson also wept as he searched for the names of his cousin, Charles Briscoe, and two friends, Mike K. Hastings and George Fish.

“I have been trying to see this wall for about 10 years,” said Jackson, a Brea business owner and retired Marine. “It brings back a lot of sad memories but it brought back a lot of good ones, too, and this wall is like sacred grounds.”

The wall will be on view 24 hours a day until Sunday, when it will be taken to Knott’s Berry Farm.