Days of Fire and Thunder

Someone once said that war consists of days of heavy boredom followed by moments of sheer terror, and anyone who has been at war knows that is so. But there’s another factor almost as consuming as terror: memory.

What remains years after the terror are flashes of fire and thunder that fill the mind at inappropriate times, freezing a man in the grip of mental images that will not release him until they are done.

Each instant of recall must run its course until every small piece of that moment is in its proper place, and then at some unexpected time later it begins again. War in the head never ends.

Having said that, I must add that not all of the memories that link us to distant combat contain elements of terror. Some involve a lingering sadness formed in the disquieting context of duty, far from the fire and thunder.

Such are the memories of Dale Sampson, who never left the U.S. during the war in Vietnam but whose job it was to notify others that they must go.

Stationed at the now-defunct George Air Force Base near Victorville, the only combat-ready base on the West Coast, it was Sampson who had to inform the pilots who manned the F-104s and 105s: “The call’s in; you’re up and going!”

And he would watch them streak into the sky and wonder who would return and who wouldn’t. At least two that he knows of didn’t. And it is partially in their honor that years later found him in pursuit of fire.

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Sampson, 58, is a member of the Pico Rivera Veterans Council, which is seeking an eternal flame to honor those who, like the pilots he watched fly off to war, never returned.

It is already in place atop a 13-foot-high, pyramid-shaped brick monument across the street from the Pico Rivera City Hall and will be officially lighted on Memorial Day. But whether or not it will be eternal or occasional remains to be seen.

Maintaining the flame on a permanent basis will cost about $350 a month for the natural gas that will fuel it, not an astronomical sum but one that at the moment appears beyond reach. Private donors have pledged about half of that. The remainder seems hardest to get.

A member of Pico Rivera’s American Legion post, Sampson came up with the idea for an eternal flame in November and campaigned successfully for its installation.

The basic brick monument honoring the city’s war dead has been in place for 25 years on a strip of land next to a carefully tended rose garden, amid pine trees and lavender-flowering jacarandas.

I watched two city workers test the flame on a recent cloudless afternoon. It glowed a faint orange against a pale blue sky, almost invisible in the bright sunlight.

By its pallid appearance the fire became a metaphor for yesterday’s conflicts, unseen by day but awake in the mind’s eye when darkness prevails.

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Sampson stood with me as the test flame flickered and danced atop the brick monument, stirred to movement by the slightest of breezes.

“The city is willing to pay to have it lit seven days a year,” he said, staring at it, “but the men we honor didn’t just fight on certain days, and we don’t just remember them on certain days. They’re always on our minds.”

Although directly across from the Pico Rivera Civic Center, the memorial is on a sliver of land that belongs to L.A. County. Sampson has lobbied both the city and the county to come up with a contribution of about $2,000 a year, but so far neither has been forthcoming.

Pico Rivera, I know, isn’t a wealthy city. Eighty-three percent Latino, it has a median household income of $34,383, below the county median. But it would seem that within its general budget of $27.7 million there ought to be $166 a month available to keep a small flame going.

Sampson has also asked Supervisor Gloria Molina to find a way to free that amount in the county’s bulging $13.2-billion annual budget, but no answer has been received.

The reluctance to participate is in some ways understandable.

Wars, when they’re over, aren’t paramount in the public mind, and that’s as it should be. But one must respect the quest to honor those who died in battle . . . and those in whom memories of war will continue as eternally as the flame they seek in Pico Rivera. The fire of remembrance should also honor them.

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Al Martinez’s column appears Tuesday and Fridays. He can be reached online at al.martinez@latimes.com