SPECIAL REPORT * A dispute between neighbors, VA officials over 45 acres in West L.A. has helped create a . . . : New Battlefield for Veterans

The aging warriors have long since left the foreign battlefields on which their valor was tested and their medals won.

But for the last 10 years, they have been locked in another war right in their backyard.

This battleground is a 45-acre expanse of land at the federal Department of Veterans Affairs complex in West Los Angeles that is considered to be among the most valuable undeveloped properties in all of Southern California.

The veterans, most of them from the Vietnam War era, want to build shelter beds and affordable housing units on the patch of long-neglected grass and asphalt bounded by Wilshire Boulevard and the San Diego Freeway. They are also campaigning for an “old soldiers home,” where their aging comrades in arms can live out their days in peace and with dignity.

But a group calling itself Veterans Park has other plans for the land, which lies next to the VA’s National Cemetery.

The nonprofit organization started by a pair of Brentwood housewives has quietly been trying for the past decade to turn it into a memorial park for veterans and the community to enjoy some quiet reflection and solitude.

Over the years, the group has also pushed for tennis courts, a rose garden, jogging track and other amenities.

Those plans, some veterans say, seem to be more for the local neighbors’ enjoyment than for theirs.

Many veterans contend that Veterans Park is nothing more than a tax-exempt front for homeowners who live near the VA and who don’t want to see their neighborhood sullied by crippled, mentally ill, elderly or homeless veterans that development might bring.

“What this is is an attempt by rich, politically well-connected homeowners to deceive veterans groups, the VA and the public at large into thinking they are doing an honorable thing by creating this park, when their true intention was to gain control of this property and use it for their own use and increase their property values,” said John Keaveney, a decorated Vietnam veteran who runs a 165-bed homeless shelter and outreach program for veterans on the VA property.

Veterans Park leaders disagree vehemently, and say that they are just trying to find the best use for a property that has long been neglected and underutilized.

But some veterans insist that the group and its executive director, Susan Young, who helped found it as president of the Brentwood Homeowners Assn., have even more ambitious plans in mind.

Keaveney and other veterans--and even the VA’s regional director--say that they suspect that Veterans Park wants the 45-acre “toehold” on the sprawling VA property so that if the VA goes through with proposals to downsize the complex and consolidate its operations south of Wilshire Boulevard, the group will be in a position to control an additional 250 acres of the prime Westside property.

The veterans complex on the Westside is among the largest support and services centers in the United States, offering medical care, mental health counseling, job training and a host of other services to the nation’s largest local population of veterans--including about 25,000 who are homeless. The property was deeded in perpetuity to veterans in 1888.

Critics say that as Washington has cut funding and services for veterans, the West Los Angeles VA Center is not being put to good use. The VA says it is planning a thorough study of the property to see how it can best be used to help veterans in the coming decades.

But one thing that is clear is that turning the 45 acres into a park, as Veterans Park wants to do, is “certainly not one of the better” uses of the property to help veterans, said Jule D. Moravec, chief executive officer of the local Veterans Affairs Department complex.

So the VA has told Veterans Park to put its efforts to build the park on hold.

In response, the group has over the past several years gone on a massive fund-raising campaign and lobbying offensive in Washington in an effort to overturn the decision of the local VA officials, whom Young describes in letters to the group’s supporters as “nonelected bureaucrats.”

Moravec describes such tactics as sneaky and counterproductive. “I believe they have a hidden agenda,” he said. “I want to deal with those folks on a level playing field. But it’s very difficult with their behind-the-scenes activity.”

Young insists that the group has dropped its plans to build the park, and instead has decided to raise several million dollars to landscape a 1.1-mile stretch of roadway outside the National Cemetery and create a “Veterans Memorial Parkway.”

But Veterans Park’s internal documents, and interviews with more than a dozen people, including the current president of the board, indicate that the park project is alive and well.

They also show that Veterans Park has raised and spent more than $400,000--and as much as $1 million--to gain control of the 45 acres and build the park. Much of that funding comes from affluent neighbors of the VA center, whom the group targets with fund-raising letters that urge them to help “save our community from illegal commercial development [and] preserve the last open space in” West Los Angeles.”

And although Veterans Park and Young have publicly cut their ties with the Brentwood Homeowners Assn., the group still contributes about $10,000 a year to the effort.

William M. Belding, president of Veterans Park’s board of directors and a decorated veteran, grudgingly acknowledged that Veterans Park does still have designs on the VA property, but he insists it has veterans’ interests at heart.

By preventing the land from being developed, he said, it could one day be used to expand the National Cemetery next to the VA, which has been full and closed for more than a decade. Besides, Belding added, “I don’t think what’s good for the neighborhood is necessarily bad for the veterans. But the two sides are so badly polarized that it seems like there is no room for compromise.”

Early on, Veterans Park earned the loyalty of local homeowners when it scuttled proposals to build a hotel and even a football stadium on the VA property at a time when the federal government was thinking of selling it to chip away at the national debt.

Since then, it has supported other projects that it says would directly help veterans, including an old soldiers home, expansion of the now-closed National Cemetery next door and the veterans parkway.

But veterans grew suspicious when the group’s internal “strategic planning” memos surfaced. One, from 1990, said: “We must remember that all political decisions are trades. We must be seen to offer something that [veterans] need, not only as a group interested in protecting our own backyard.”

Both sides claim to have the support of veterans organizations.

Most, including the American Legion and the Veterans of Foreign Wars, have expressed support at times and opposition at others, based on recommendations of local, state and national chapters that often disagree. Some, however, such as the Vietnam Veterans of America, have opposed Veterans Park and its efforts since 1991.

VA officials in Los Angeles and Washington are particularly concerned about the precedent that would be set by giving control of federal property to a nonprofit organization. They also say that it could cost as much as $19 million to level some buildings on the site and move some engineering and maintenance functions.

And they say that they need to use part of the site for a huge central laundry facility being built as part of the VA’s long-range plan.

Veterans Park has refused to participate in that process, Moravec said. Instead, it has turned to Washington, where Young and other group members began what she described as a campaign of “constant contact” with top VA officials.

Over the last two years it has also appealed to powerful politicians in Washington not only to approve the park, but to kill the laundry facility, according to the group’s fund-raising letters.

To that end, it has spent tens of thousands of dollars on lobbyists, consultants, letter writing campaigns and a flurry of trips to Washington. By early last year, the campaign began paying off.

In one letter to supporters, Young wrote that when “a few Washington bureaucrats attempted to kill our bill” that would have approved the park, Sen. Dianne Feinstein and other politicians “personally marched our bill through Congress.”

The special legislation died at the end of the session. But the group then got Sen. Barbara Boxer to help shepherd it through Congress last year.

When Keaveney and other veterans found out, they mobilized. Soon, hundreds of irate veterans flooded her office with letters and calls.

Carl Jensen, California president of Vietnam Veterans of America Council, happens to be Boxer’s personal landscaper, and went right to her house in Marin County.

“I told her there’s something stinky about this whole thing,” Jensen recalled.

Within weeks, Boxer quietly withdrew her support. “It wasn’t me,” Jensen said. “It was the uproar from Southern California.”

Belding says that the group is now focusing on the Veterans Parkway effort. But he and Young have made it clear to supporters that they will continue to fight for the park.

Keaveney and other opponents say they will continue to oppose it.