Vietnam vet sees what others miss

He was a young man who went to Vietnam near the end of ’69 and paid the price. Not the ultimate price, because Richard Stekol didn’t come home in a body bag.

He’s sitting in his living room a few feet away and in fine spirits. At 58, he’s got a lyrical, elliptical way with language that’s highly entertaining, even as he eventually plows into conversation about the 13 months in Vietnam and Cambodia that eventually took their toll on his psyche.

But I didn’t come to his Capistrano Beach home to probe. I didn’t even come to talk necessarily about young men going to war -- even as another one drags on -- but about songwriting and a tune Stekol wrote in 1990 that a colleague of mine told me about.

It was an easy rocker called “America Walking By,” and Mike Boehm, who once covered the music scene for The Times, named it in late 1999 the best song by any Orange County artist in the 1990s.

Although well-known in local circles and to other “name” artists with whom he’s worked, Stekol (rhymes with freckle) remained, as Boehm once described him, “one of Orange County’s best but, alas, least-spotlighted songwriters.”

The song never emerged into wide public consciousness, but with its references to a young man’s death, his parents’ aching grief and oblique references to “America walking by” as the finality of it all sinks in, the song has a timeless quality.

When Stekol sings of a mother who “gave her only to this one-horse town/and today they’re gonna lay him down,” it’s hard not to overlay a dead soldier’s story onto the music.

Nor is it much of a stretch these days to contemplate the Iraq war and to picture America walking by. It’s all in the eye of the beholder, but it seems there’s been a disconnect between a nation at war and how the country has reacted to it.

Even though the war was portrayed as needed to keep us safer, has the country, as a whole, felt threatened or personally engaged in the effort? The sense of peril that World War II presented or the outrage that Vietnam produced have seemed -- until very recently, in the latter case -- lacking during much of the last 3 1/2 years.

While soldiers have been dying or being maimed, we have been walking by. So, I pose that to the songwriter and ask how the song came to be.

“I was baby-sitting for this kid here,” Stekol says, pointing to his daughter Kellie, 19. “She was around 3, so I guess it was 1990, and it was one of those songs that came out really fast. It just came out, one-verse-writes-the-other kind of thing.”

Stekol knows it would make for tidy history if he represented the song as an anti-war anthem, but he refuses. He even rejected a record producer’s request to do just that when the Gulf War broke out in the second half of 1990.

“I don’t remember thinking about any of that stuff, because I hadn’t really begun going to the VA or any of that stuff,” he says about writing the song. “But it’s funny, now that we’re talking about it, I guess it was about that time that I started. So, maybe things were loosening up.”

He talks about his six-man Marine recon team that went into Cambodia but doesn’t want to spill details. He makes it clear they weren’t picking flowers, and he later came to understand that it took him 20 years to start purging himself of war’s hangover. He began visiting the VA in the ‘90s, at a time when counselors were seeing guys home from the Gulf War. He continued seeing counselors -- both in and out of the VA -- and not long ago talked to an Iraq war soldier who reminded him of himself 35 years ago.

“He was shook up, and I realized I was still kind of shook up,” Stekol says. “I realized I felt the same way he did, and nothing had changed. It was like I was back there again. I sounded like I did as a 20-year-old.”

Everything sounded the same. Young people being sent to kill other people and to risk being killed.

Because the songwriting world isn’t replete with combat veterans, Stekol could bring credibility to war through his music. But he has never wanted to tailor his songs to fit a niche. “I could have, but I didn’t want to be that guy,” he says.

Then, what does “America Walking By” mean to him? “That song is about a moment, all right, but not about one moment in time,” he says. “It’s a moment you could have at any time, a feeling you have about something.”

Even if someone didn’t know what war is, he says, the song can stand as an ode to coming to grips with devastating personal loss. “It seems dramatic to link it to my personal experience,” he says, “but it would be stupid to say it’s not. I did write it, of course, and [stuff] that happens to you is in there and it comes out in your actions or your writing.”

If listeners want to interpret the words “America walking by” as reflecting national indifference, they’re free to do so, he says. He won’t dispute the possible disconnection between a family’s grief and the rest of the nation going about its business, but the song wasn’t written as a lament or a condemnation.

There’s no need for me to read into the song what Stekol will not.

But the mystery of songwriting is that a song that combines evocative lyrics and a melody and a plaintive voice can move people in different ways.

“When I listen to that song,” Stekol says, “it seems to me it would be too narrow to talk about it in terms of something about being in a war .... You could say that you hear in it a guy who misses his kid. Because to me, that’s very profound. I have kids. Even if the song is successful on that level, I’d say, ‘Yeah, that’s valid.’ ”

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Dana Parsons’ column appears Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. He can be reached at (714) 966-7821 or at dana.parsons@latimes.com.