Memorial Warrior

On a grassy median in the middle of a busy San Fernando Valley intersection stands a concrete wall bearing the names of 24 fallen Vietnam War soldiers.

In New York, Oswego County’s first World War II casualty is remembered with a Navy anchor propped on a bed of rocks beyond a Little League field.

Along Highway 146 near Anna, Ill., a cracked, brass placard marks the grave of “King Neptune,” a 250-pound pig whose repeated sale at auctions raised $19 million in war bonds during World War II.

Vietnam War veteran Brian Rooney knows them all.

In the last year, he has discovered about 7,000 rocks, plaques, memorial bridges, doughboy sculptures and flagpoles honoring veterans from the Revolutionary War to the Gulf War.

After spending “gazillions” of hours and around $20,000 in stamps, faxes and copies, the Chatsworth High School science teacher has created a giant database, believed to be the first national registry of war memorials in the United States.

“I’m pretty sure there’s nothing like it that has existed previously,” says DeAnne Blanton, a military archivist with the National Archives and Records Administration in Washington, D.C.

“This is an incredible feat,” said Steve Thomas, a spokesman for the American Legion’s national headquarters in Washington. Today, Rooney will tour memorials in the Southland with state and federal lawmakers who are developing legislation that would recognize his list as an official registry of war memorials and encourage the National Park Service to work with a nonprofit Rooney has created to maintain the sites. Another bill would post California’s memorials on the state Department of Veterans Affairs Web site at https://www.ns.net/cadva.

“I am the reigning universe authority on war memorials,” he said, “because no one else cares.”

Rooney’s crusade began in late 1998 when he was unable to find a listing of Southern California memorials. About 30 phone calls to various government agencies and veteran’s organizations turned up nothing. Visits to nearly two dozen libraries and numerous Web sites were dead ends.

“I just couldn’t believe it,” said Rooney, 51. “It felt like a national shame. If the memorial’s forgotten, then what about the poor old slob like me who paid the price?”

His interest piqued, Rooney randomly queried other states. He heard back from Nevada, Arizona, Pennsylvania and New Hampshire. Their responses were all the same: They had no such listing.

Now, Rooney knows California has at least 275 such memorials, Massachusetts more than 600, Texas 810 and Nevada, Wyoming and Idaho 17 each.

“These are the numbers right now, but I am convinced there are more,” he said. “I am hoping to get some nasty letters from people that I’ve forgotten some.”

Rooney is nearly finished compiling the list--having just licked, sealed and sent off his last 600 letters requesting memorial information from 15,000 townships, villages, boroughs and cities large and small.

Nearly three-quarters of his requests have been returned by city clerks, mayors, police chiefs and local historians. That amounts to roughly 50 to 100 faxes a day, seven days a week--including one received on Christmas.

Some of the faxed responses are handwritten scribble. Others are neatly typed. Each tells its own story of memorials to hometown heroes:

* A one-ton rock in Hicksville, Ohio, honors three soldiers--all from the same street--who died in World War I.

* A memorial in Oswego, N.Y., honors Mary Edwards Walker, the first female Army surgeon during the Civil War.

* An American Legion post in Seacliff, N.Y., is named for a World War I veteran killed in France in 1918 and his namesake, an only child who was killed in France 26 years later during World War II.

And then there are those that have been lost or neglected, including two in California: a 12-by-4-foot honor roll with the names of veterans from both world wars that disappeared from Ione, near Sacramento, in the 1950s, and a World War I doughboy in Ontario that sits on a graffiti-scarred stone and whose rifle was stolen long ago.

Rooney’s work has given hope to the families of dead soldiers, worried that their sons’ and daughters’ memorials may be forgotten, lost or tarnished by years of neglect.

“I’d like to give him a hug,” said Malcolm Douglas Whiting Jr., 75, choking back tears.

The name of his son, Malcolm D. Whiting III, is among those on a Granada Hills memorial at Chatsworth Street and Zelzah Avenue. Until a few years ago, the honor roll erected Memorial Day 1972 on the back of the city’s welcome sign was surrounded by discarded fast-food wrappers, dead grass and a bare flagpole. A local veterans group and the area’s chamber of commerce cleaned up the site two years ago.

“We just woke up one day,” said Duncan Wilmore, commander of Veterans of Foreign Wars, Post 2323, in Granada Hills. “The place is actually quite nice now.”

Rooney’s search for sometimes obscure and distant war memorials has been therapeutic, said the soft-spoken father of six, who served as an Army medic outside Saigon.

“It’s kind of a way of resurrecting those people,” he said of the soldiers he treated in triage at an evacuation hospital.

Rooney’s service began in March 1969, a year after the Tet offensive had greatly intensified the war. He still carries guilt from not being able to save fellow soldiers, even the most badly wounded. He said he remains haunted by the experience and has not slept through the night since returning home to Van Nuys on Jan. 16, 1971, his 21st birthday.

During those long nights, he often works on the registry from his home in Northridge. His family became swept up in the effort. His wife, Charisse, quit her job with an insurance company to work full time fielding incoming faxes. His youngest children, Noah, 14, and Talee, 12, stuffed and licked envelopes.

Simi Valley resident Kathleen Houska, 68, is using Rooney’s research as a road map to find her brother’s unidentified World War II memorial, somewhere in Hawaii. Her brother Stephen William O’Brien Jr. died at 20, just six weeks before the end of the war. She was 14.

She saw his memorial only once, about 30 years ago in a now-misplaced family photograph.

She began her search about a decade ago, calling Hawaiian officials, querying friends who live there and scouring the Internet. Her two sons even looked for it on their honeymoons.

“I thought it would be easy,” Houska said. “But then I found out there was all this confusion about memorials. There was no central listing. Nothing.”

Rooney has given Houska several leads on where her brother’s memorial might be. Next spring she will take her children and grandchildren to Hawaii to find it. And then what?

“What are you going to do? Tell stories. Reminisce. Remember how he used to torment me to death,” she said. “It’ll be so wonderful.”

Brian Rooney can be reached at RVETS: Remembering Veterans Who Earned Their Stripes, 12061 Shadow Glen Lane, Northridge, CA 91326, or by e-mail at brooney@earthlink.net.