Memorial to Vietnam War Soldiers Is Approved

After four years of redesign, fund-raising and political bickering, the Westminster City Council has unanimously approved a Vietnam War memorial for the city’s Civic Center.

“It’s been a long time coming, longer than it should have been, but it will be special,” said Councilman Frank Fry Jr., a World War II veteran who first proposed the memorial.

A bronze statue--12 feet tall on a 5-foot-high concrete base--will show two soldiers, American and Vietnamese, standing side by side and surrounded by flags. It will be the centerpiece of a plaza that will include a fountain, an eternal flame and electronic kiosks where visitors can learn more about the war and look up the names of U.S. and Vietnamese casualties. The sculptor is Tuan Nguyen, 38, who came to the U.S. from Vietnam in 1988, after numerous failed attempts at escape.

The plaza will be in a new 1.4-acre park at the Westminster Civic Center, in what is now a lot. Completion of the park and memorial project is expected by the end of 2002, said Don Anderson, community development director. Next to the park, a new cultural arts center is planned.

City officials are convinced that the memorial will become a focal point for visitors to Little Saigon, the largest expatriate Vietnamese community in the world.

“Nothing can replace [the Washington, D.C., Vietnam Veterans Memorial], but for the West Coast, this will be an important stop for visitors to the county,” said Craig Mandeville, a Vietnam veteran and a member of the memorial committee Fry put together.

That committee has raised more than $550,000, most of it in small contributions from the Vietnamese community. Some officials say an additional $300,000 is needed before architectural plans can be completed.

The approval Wednesday night culminated a sometimes rocky effort to erect a memorial. Early designs--two soldiers shaking hands, a flag between two soldiers--never panned out.

The project drew criticism when it was revealed that it could not be done for its original $500,000 estimate.

The City Council initially balked at placing the memorial at the Civic Center, which upset some in the community, while others considered a private memorial inappropriate for city property.

But when the final vote came, only one resident showed up in opposition.

Fry accepted congratulations afterward.

“At first, my thought was a memorial for Americans who had returned from that war,” Fry said. “They were coming back unappreciated. But as I began to talk more and more to my Vietnamese friends, I realized that we weren’t the only side that suffered losses; many Vietnamese lost loved ones too.”

Minhduc Ngoc Ho, another member of the memorial committee, predicted that the project will become important to Vietnamese Americans in part because other memorials to the military dead have been torn down in their homeland.

“The Communist government in Vietnam wiped out everything, even the graves,” he said. “We have nothing left in Vietnam to even show that our people died in battle there.”

Committee members said that completing the statue at the park site is only part of their job.

They are researching names of South Vietnamese casualties for the kiosks. More than 58,000 Americans and 220,000 South Vietnamese military personnel died in the war.

“Records for the Vietnamese military were not always kept in one central location,” said committee member Jo Porter.

“Finding all those names is important to us, but it’s going to be a long process.”