On the Mall, Souvenirs of Another War

He sits in a bunker at the feet of Lincoln, across the Potomac from the battle-scarred Pentagon. An Israeli-made gas mask hangs from a hook in the corner, because no one knows when, how or where the enemy will hit next.

“I don’t think we have to fear nuclear, but chemical or biological? Something the size of a pill bottle would be enough to kill 20,000 people.”

Ron Stout, wearing a “River Rats” hat of black and gold, reaches through the window of his little hut to lock hands with a visitor at his souvenir stand near the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.

“Welcome home, brother. Navy River Assault,” Stout says to the fellow vet, using his standard greeting.

“First Marine Division, 7th Engineers,” comes the response, an exchange without names. A war without end.

Nearby, the president plots a new one. At the other end of the Mall, a Senate committee struggles to define the look and scope of what’s to come.

“It could be a little like Vietnam, ratting around after them in the tunnels of Afghanistan,” says Stout, and the point may be even more poignant, and more frightening, than he intended it to be.

We don’t know exactly who Charley is this time, either, or how to take him out, for that matter. We don’t even know what country he’s in.

All we know, after Sept. 11, is that he’s not waiting for us overseas.

“Where do you put the memorial for this war?” Stout, 54, asks from a location between the Vietnam and Korean war memorials. “And what do you call it? The Infinite Justice Memorial?”

The Vietnam War took Stout’s best friend, and it took two of the fellow Boy Scouts he grew up with in Long Beach. It took his marriage, and it took his trust in his own government. It took everything but a belief in the uniform, and left him here with glassy eyes and bum legs, a River Rat looking up at the Lincoln Memorial from a window he cut into the back of the hut.

“War is a human sickness,” he says. “Nobody who’s been at war wishes it on anyone else. But the world can’t live in fear, so we have no choice.”

On the face of the shack, Stout has posted “An Open Letter to the People of the United States,” urging one and all to support the military effort and to treat those who make it home as heroes.

“I wish them the best,” he says of the men and women who have shipped out for the Persian Gulf. “The first time you pull a trigger, it changes your life forever.”

There is no need to ask how.

This bunker, a stone’s throw from the names of 50,000 brothers who didn’t make it home, is the only place in the world this man can be without getting angry or jittery.

His dress beret is in the drawer. The photos of his gunboat are on the wall.

He takes an unfiltered Pall Mall, taps it, then lights the wrong end.

Thirty years, the wrong end.

That little tick was his rabbit’s foot in Nam. Some soldiers carried photos of a girlfriend or a lucky key chain. Ron Stout lit his cigarettes butt-first, a superstition that got him through three tours, and he is not about to defy the gods.

He takes a deep drag, his chest thunders, and the cough is the sound of death.

“If the day comes when I want to tell my children what war is like, I’ll show them this,” he says, reaching for a book and thumbing to Page 208.

It’s a photo of eight bloodied Viet Cong who lay dead in the jungle Stout sees in his dreams.

“They were brothers,” he says. “That’s the enemy, but they were fighting for their cause, just like we were.”

Stout sells a handful of flag pins. He sells Army and Navy bumper stickers. He gives a red, white and blue bracelet to a little girl, no charge.

“My problem is I give away half of this stuff,” he says, sitting in the comfort of the world he’s constructed for himself. Mr. Lincoln watches through the back window. The gas mask hangs in the corner.

“Welcome home, brother. Navy River Assault.”

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Steve Lopez can be reached at steve.lopez@latimes.com