Lighting The Way

In the early morning hours of Saturday, January 13, volunteers from two International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) unions gathered at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington to replace the lights on the cobbled path in front of The Wall.

The 14 volunteers were recruited by longtime VVA member Will Schwartz, a member of IBEW Local 24 in Baltimore, and included members of IBEW Local 26 in Washington, D.C.

Joining Schwartz, a former Maryland State Council president, were fellow Baltimore Local 24 members Jack Sowers, Donald Peters, Robert Kulp, Jim McDermott, Will Richardson, and Ivan S. Anderson.

D.C. Local 26 members who took part were: Jerry Lozupone, Joe Dabbs, Norm Strickland, Richard Wylie, Chuck Graham, Butch Ramos, Lany R. Greenhill, and International Representative Bud Satterfield.

Although many of the volunteers were not veterans, they willingly donated their time and effort to help with this project. The veterans in the group said they were honored to volunteer their time to help.

The 72 lights were replaced with 10-watt quartz lamps, each with a life expectancy of 4,000 hours. The lamps were donated by PBM Lembach Group, Marlin Electric in Fairfax, Virginia.

In the past, bulb replacement has been erratic. The IBEW volunteers plan to change that. Early one morning this spring, they will return once again to replace all the bulbs along the walkway.

John Devitt: Travels With The Wall

In 1982, Vietnam Veterans Memorial surprised John Devitt. He’d gone to Washington from his San Jose, California, home mainly for the reunion aspect of The Wall’s dedication. He was certain he wasn’t going to like the memorial itself. He’d read about it, followed its controversial beginnings. He couldn’t imagine being moved by a block of stone. The last thing he expected to feel was pride.

He’d been a First Calvary door gunner. In the twelve years that passed since his return from Vietnam, he’d known bitterness and anger. After that day at The Wall in 1982, it occurred to him that he’d hardly noticed how angry he was. Anger and bitterness had become part of him, second nature.

He hadn’t known anything else until that day, when pride washed over him and he remembered all the reasons he had been proud so many years before.

"I walked up to The Wall and I felt this intense pride," he said. "I hadn’t felt that since the day I left Vietnam. It was one thing nobody had mentioned in the twelve years I’d been home. Everybody talked about guilt. I had tried guilt and it didn’t work. I was very proud of the guys I was with and especially the ones who were killed. You can’t give more than that. I was so glad to see their names out there in the public."

In the week of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial dedication, it seemed to him that he couldn’t turn on the TV or read a newspaper story without seeing the word "finally" -- Vietnam veterans can "finally lay to rest ..." or "finally put behind them ..."

The word grated.

"It was like, wait a minute, I just got here and I know all kinds of guys who aren’t here yet and I was afraid the media was going to put a spin on it that it wasn’t that a big a deal going to The Wall. And it was a big deal. You could look at The Wall and see what a big deal it was. It rekindled that pride. It made me remember."

Back home in San Jose, he was "jazzed" to do something, Devitt said.

Eighteen years later, he’s still doing it.

He is on the road 10 months a year. He drives a truck and hauls a trailer. In the trailer are panels with more than 58,000 names. He crisscrosses the country, setting up The Moving Wall, watching the 1982 scene repeat itself over and over again.

"Over the years I’ve seen it do the same thing The Wall did to me in 1982," he said. "It generates pride. It's awesome."

Shortly after returning home, he talked with friends, looking for a way to channel the energy and motivation that comes with being "jazzed" to do something. Someone suggested a replica of The Wall. The idea didn’t go far. Most people wanted to shelve it immediately.

"But in my mind, it seemed pretty simple", Devitt said. "Of course, in my mind, I was pretty simple, too. I thought. Well, how hard can it be to put 58,000 names on a wall?"

He kept talking it up. One day a friend pulled $2,000 out of his savings and said, "Let’s go for it." Devitt pooled what little money he had. They knew nothing about fund-raising. All they had in the way of a plan was to start the project, get it off the ground, and then when they had something to show for the effort, people might be more willing to donate money to support it.

They returned to Washington and took photographs of The Wall, thinking that they would create a photographic mural. But when they enlarged the photos of the two center panels, thenames at the top were obscured.

"Our commitment was to make it a respectful memorial, not just a picture of The Wall," Devitt said. "We wanted to let people walk up and see the names."

A friend in Silicon Valley suggested that they silkscreen the names, an idea that sent them back to where they started--they needed good artwork.

Devitt called the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund and asked if he could borrow the negatives the fund had used to make stencils. To his surprise, the answer was yes.

"I called the architects, they asked for a name and address, and the next day Federal Express dropped off three big boxes of negatives," Devitt said. "It was amazing. To have those boxes of negatives was like having some sacred relic or something. It was spiritual."

Next, they needed to reverse the negatives to positives and then have them enlarged. Devitt went to a company in Sunnyvale, explained the need, and said he had little money but that he thought the idea was good enough that people would support it.

The company owner extended an $8,000 credit. When Devitt finally got the money to pay off the debt, the owner sent back $1,500.

"He was very supportive of veterans," Devitt said. "He said the $1,500 was his contribution."

The project began to attract local media attention. Each time an article appeared, donations spiked a little, but soon dwindled. Devitt thought it might help if he got some kind of government support.

He took a panel to a San Jose City Council meeting, hoping to explain the project well enough to leave with a letter of endorsement from the city. The council agreed to the letter, then quickly discussed the issue further and committed $16,000to the project.

In June 1984, Devitt received a telephone call from an AmVets group in Tyler, Texas. They’d heard about his replica of The Wall. Could he bring it to Tyler in October?

"It was June," Devitt said. "We didn’t have to go until October. I thought we had plenty of time."

The last panel was silkscreened the night before he left for Tyler. He had never set up the structure before and didn't know how he was going to brace it to keep it from toppling over, but he figured he had more than two days of driving time to find a solution.

In Tyler, it took eight hours to assemble the panels. It was the first time Devitt had seen his wall standing.

"It was powerful right from the start," he said. "To see the panels stacked up against a wall is one thing, but to see it all up is something else again. It was awesome. It’s why I’m still doing it today. We saw the results every time we lifted a panel. It was impossible to walk away from it. Its effect on people was the same thing you see in Washington. The structure was different because it’s smaller, but I don’t think people pay attention to the size. They pay attention to the magnitude of it."

There are three Moving Walls now, each traveling the country, each in demand every year. Devitt says the requests never diminish. Many localities want it back again and again.

"My attitude has changed so much since I began doing this," he said. "I used to think maybe ten percent of the people had a handle on The Wall, they understood the ethics and morals on which it was founded. And the other 90 percent were just mindless. But after doing this, I found the exact opposite. The mindless ten percent just happen to get in the news all the time. There are a lot of caring people out there who understand the sacrifice and who are grateful to have the opportunity to come out as a community to give honor and recognition to those who lost their lives."

Destination: Vermont

Twenty-five years after the war ended--and often longer than that since a loved one died in it--they still come to The Wall. Eighteen years after The Vietnam Veterans Memorial was dedicated in Washington, 16 years after the first moving walls were built and began touring the country, they still come, oblivious to the differences in size or scope of the structure.

They don’t come for its size and scope. They come for the names.

"There’s nothing abstract about somebody’s name," said John Devitt, one of The Moving Wall’s builders. "You look at a name and you think of a person who had hopes and dreams and family and friends."

Fred Frappiea Jr., had such hopes and dreams. They ended on ending on March 22, 1968, in Thua Thien, South Vietnam. He was 20 years old, a PFC in the 101st Airborne, Division when he was killed in action.

His name appears on Panel 45E, Line 55. His mother, Lona Frappiea, 78, has never seen it.

She went to The Moving Wall when it came to Bennington, Vermont., near her home in Saxtons River. But she could not bring herself to look at his name. To look at his name would mean that she had to give him up.

"I'll go where The Wall is, but I won’t go where his name is," she said. "I've never gone."

When The Moving Wall came to Vermont, she went on a day set aside to honor Gold Star parents. She wrote a letter to her son.

A volunteer placed it at the foot of the portable wall under his name.

"I had just become acquainted with VVA and the more I saw of them, the better I liked them," she said. "You can't get any better friend than a Vietnam veteran. They’re just wonderful people. They’re my families. I have never met a Vietnam veteran I didn’t love. I wish I could get more Gold Star Mothers active because they don't know the love they’e missing. A lot of people ask me how can I get up and do it, and I tell them, "it’s not how can I get up and do it. I do it for my son."

When The Wall comes to a community, the community invariably responds. When The Wall That Heals, sponsored by the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund, came to Delaware County, Pa., George Brown spoke of an "outpouring" of support.

"You really don’t know what to expect," he said. "The things people left at The Wall showed how it impacted them. Mementoes, the kind of thing you find down at Washington. But knowing The Wall was temporary, you wouldn’t expect the effort to make up the little things they left."

A friend had gotten involved in the effort to bring The Wall That Heals to Delaware County. Brown advised on the protocols that needed to be followed and helped in the research.

"There’s more awareness today of how people were treated," he said. "There are still a lot of family members around and we have quite a few Gold Star Mothers in the county. But I talked to three or four guys who had never been to The Wall."

In Vermont in 1991, John Miner was one of them. The Moving Wall had come to Rutland for two weeks. He couldn’t bring himself to go until the last day. Then friends said they were going and asked him along.

"I got up there and one of those weird things happened," he said. "A guy came up with a book and asked if he could help me. I said, "No, I was just walking."

Eventually, Miner came back to the volunteer with the book. There was a FAC, he said, a Capt. Miller from Massachusetts. He was shot down and killed.

"The guy looked it up and he looked at me and said, `It’s right behind you,’ ‘‘ Miner said.

When Miner became president of Chapter 601 in Bennington, he vowed to bring The Moving Wall back. He formed a committee, contacted organizations around the town, and got commitments for money needed to cover the expenses.

"The level of community support was mind boggling, unbelievable," he said.

The local newspaper did a story a day, business owners gave employees time off work to read names from The Wall, food was donated, and the National Guard provided tents.

"It was remarkable," Miner said. "I think a lot of it came from people needing to know. They came from all over the state and from Massachusetts and New York, too. Every time I turned around, there was a story happening."

Like the accident of his standing in front of the name he sought, coincidences and connections came from surprising places.

A veteran seeks a Gold Star Mother to talk about her son, his buddy from Vietnam. Two days later, a retired couple from New York ask about a name, a boy the man taught in grammar school.

It’s the same name.

A motorcycle rider comes alone. For three days, he speaks to no one. Finally, Miner and others approach and offer him coffee. He declines, saying he wants only to hear one name read.

They ask if he would like to read the name himself.

"He read it," Miner said. "As soon as he did, he rode off and we never saw him again."

Charlene Moffitt, another Vermonter and the sister of Clifton Bacon, who died in Vietnam in 1966, is the only member of her family who has touched his name. It’s high on The Wall in Washington and when she went there in 1982 for its dedication, someone showed her the ladder she could use.

"When we buried him, it was never settled," she said. "They sent him home in a sealed coffin. I didn’t really believe it was true. But when I saw his name on The Wall, I thought, that’s him."

Her sister, Christine Bacon, said The Wall "brought him home."

"It was painful to see, but it confirmed it," she said. "I was only sixteen when he died. Charlene was eighteen, and it was like you couldn’t believe it. It brought him home. A lot of people in the 60s said a lot of negative things. When The Wall came to Bennington, it was like saying he's a good person and he’s home again. We can be proud now. He's got his own place now. We don’t need to protect him anymore."

They grew up in a small town in a small state. There were 14 children in their hometown and five of them came from the Bacon family. Eight years separated the five. Clifton Bacon was 21 when he was drafted, 22 when he died.

"The Moving Wall, the real Wall, it’s hard, all those people, all those guys and women, what they went through," Charlene said. "I'll always go. If I could go tomorrow, I’d go."

The Moving Wall

The Moving Wall is a half-size replica of the Washington, D.C., Vietnam Veterans Memorial. It has been touring the country for the past 16 years.

The Wall was built by John Devitt, Norris Shears, Gerry Haver and other California veterans. It first went on display in October 1984 in Tyler, Texas.

Sponsors frequently are civic groups, schools or veterans organizations. Sponsoring usually requires months of planning by many local volunteers.

There are three Moving Walls that typically travel the country 10 months a year.

Scheduling may be arranged by sending e-mail to Vietnam Combat Veterans, Ltd. at JohnDV8@aol.com. , telephone: 408-288-6305 or write to Vietnam Combat Veterans, Ltd., 1267 Alma Court, San Jose CA 95112-5943.

More information may be found on the Internet at www.themovingwall.org.

The Wall That Heals

On Veterans Day 1996, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund unveiled a half-scale replica of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, designed to travel to communities throughout the country.

The replica is constructed of powder-coated aluminum and is made up of 24 individual panels, each containing six columns of names.

Since its dedication, The Wall That Heals has visited more than 100 cities and towns. It made its first-ever international journey in April 1999 to the Four Provinces to honor the Irish-born casualties of the Vietnam and the Irish-Americans who served.

The Wall That Heals includes a Traveling Museum and Information Center designed to provide a comprehensive education component to the exhibit.

For more information, write to: The Wall That Heals -- The Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund's Traveling Wall, 1023 15th Street NW, Second Floor, Washington, DC 20005; telephone 202-393-0090. (Fax -- 202-393-0029); e-mail: vvmf@vvmf.org .

Detailed information may be found on the Internet at www.vvmg.org .



The Wall on the Web

Two Web pages go by the name "The Virtual Wall." They are separate entities with no connection to one another except for subject matter. One is produced by the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund and the second affiliated with The Moving Wall.

Web surfers should take note of the small but critical differences in Web addresses.

The Virtual Wall (The Moving Wall) -- www.virtualwall.org

Begun in March 1997, the Web site provides a place for memorials to the men and women named on The Wall. Visitors may leave tributes, letters, poems, photos and other memorials.

The Webmasters wish to provide an environment like The Wall itself -- one marked by dignity and respect. The Web site contains no flashy distractions, commercials and does not ask for monetary donations.

The Virtual Wall was founded by a Vietnam veteran who then enlisted an advisory board that went on to establish The Virtual Wall Association.

As a public service, Integration, Inc., of Batavia, N.Y., provides the server, disk space and bandwidth at no cost. The Webmaster is Jim Schueckler (192nd Assault Helicopter Company, Vietnam, 1969). He may be contacted at: FlewHuey@iinc.com

The Virtual Wall (Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund) -- www.thevirtualwall.org This Web site offers visitors veteran profiles, remembrances, reunion postings, name rubbings, custom reports and more.

Originally launched on November 10, 1998, by Vice President Al Gore, the site lists more than 30 million hits and 18,000 remembrances.

Features include a monthly guest column and regular monthly chat with an expert on Vietnam, more than 1,300 prepared reports and special sections for new remembrances.

The Web page is a partnership between the Vietnam Veterans Memorial fund and Winstar Communications.

"My Life Is Complete": Virginia Warren's Visit to The Wall

Thirty-three years after her son died rushing to the aid of a fallen Marine, Virginia Warren touched him and felt him reaching back, touching her. She knows it in her soul. She had heard that this kind of thing happened to the loved ones of others who touched the names. Now it had happened to her.

She walked past the names of others who had died, the thousands who had been caressed by so many fingertips over the years, and then she reached up and touched his name--Galen E. Warren, Panel 20E, Line 70.

"It felt like something I had to do in my lifetime and I'm glad I did it," she said. "I feel like my life is complete because I went there. I honored my son by going to The Wall and touching his name. And you know, they say when you touch The Wall, those men there touch you back, and I believe it. They touch you back. I felt it."

She is 85. Until the first week of August, she had never been to The Wall. She had never seen her son’s name on it, chiseled into the granite with the 58,000 others.

Galen Warren was a Navy corpsman. He died on May 20, 1967, in Quang Tri Province near the DMZ. He was 21 years old. His mother said when he left for Vietnam, he didn't talk about dying. "When he went to Vietnam he didn't say, `I hope I don't get killed.’ He said, `They need me and I hope I do a good job.’ "

Shortly after he died, Virginia Warren volunteered to be a hostess at a Seattle YMCA. She says now that her motives were selfish, that benevolence may have grown out of it but in the beginning, selflessness didn't motivate her. She had her own reasons for offering her time.

"I wondered who these fellows were my son was willing to die for," she said. "I found out who they were. They were wonderful and I loved them, and my son loved them and I found out why."

She still has boxes of letters from those young soldiers. She still hears from some of them. She took the soldiers to the mountains and the beaches, and she took them to her church. When they came back from Vietnam with shattered bodies, she went to see them in the hospitals. She found out that not only did she need them, but they needed her, too. She is taking a creative writing course and intends to write about those young men.

It was another writer, Erik Lacitis, a Seattle Times columnist, who started her on her journey to The Wall. He first wrote about her around Memorial Day, then again when she went to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.

"Virginia is here because, although it doesn't happen often, sometimes one sentence, deep in a newspaper article, makes a difference," Lacitis wrote from the Nation’s Capital when he accompanied her there.

A Southwest Airlines customer service representative saw the sentence when it appeared in May. The airline provided free airfare for Virginia and her surviving son, Terry, 56. The Marriott Wardman Park Hotel in Washington gave the Warrens a suite and $100 in food vouchers.

Then the Sno-King VVA Chapter 423 learned of that sentence deep in a newspaper article.

"The Sno-King [Snohomish-King Counties] chapter is an active and effective community service organization," chapter president Bob Weslander said. "The chapter offered to receive donations to cover expenses and we gave Virginia checks for $300. More money came in after they left that wasn't needed. There is a lot of community support here. The relationship we've enjoyed in the community has made possible things we could never do by ourselves. One line in a newspaper column is picked up and some exciting things can happen."

Washington State Council President Jimmy Grissom talked to AVVA President Nancy Switzer.

"I called [VVA executive director] Ed Croucher, and he got in contact with a chapter member in Washington [Jim Beckette, Chapter 461 president, Montgomery County, Maryland]," Switzer said. "I called Gold Star Mothers to see if they could greet her and they were ecstatic that we called. I wanted someone to be there who could relate to her. We couldn't be there physically to put our arms around her, but we wanted to do something for her."

Croucher drove to Baltimore to meet Virginia Warren's 10:30 p.m. Southwest flight and drove her and Terry to Washington. The next day, Croucher's wife, Chris, and Jim Beckette took the Warrens to The Wall.

"A lot of tears came to her eyes as she walked toward The Wall," Beckette said. "Terry just broke down. When they were putting their hands on The Wall up on his name, Terry said the spirit of Galen would be a part of her just from touching it. I think their being at The Wall meant so much to them. I saw a lot of relief in them, even in the way they carried themselves. I felt a comfort in doing it. I wanted them to know that we really cared and that we're all one large group, no matter where we're at. We're all one family."

As Virginia Warren walked with other Gold Star Mothers past the thousands of names, she thought of the loss associated with only one, then tried to multiply it in her mind, tried to see how far out the ripples of such a loss might be felt.

Galen was going to be a doctor. How many lives would he have touched? How many lives would the others on The Wall have touched?

"I thought about how much we lost with just one name, how much our country lost with 58,000," she said. "We lost so much, and all of those men lost so much, too. My son addressed his last letter to us, `The Warren Family, Minus One.' I'm so glad he knew we loved him and he loved us. Everyone has been so good to us. I tell veterans I lost a son, but God gave me all of you to love. I know veterans all over town because I'm not afraid to ask if they're a veteran, and if they are, I hug them. I always hug a veteran."

President's Message - The Veteran

With this special issue of The VVA Veteran, we commemorate the twentieth anniversary of the dedication of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. Since 1982, The Wall has been the focal point for healing from the Vietnam War. This monument to those killed and missing from the Vietnam War has served as the center of the community of Vietnam veterans to which we turn to remember the sacrifice and camaraderie of those with whom we served.

While the value and the outcome of the Vietnam War will forever be debated, those who fought will forever revere the service and the sacrifice of those who served. The Wall is where we turn to pay our respects, to honor our comrades, to seek a space where our service is remembered, and to find a place where our comrades' sacrifice of blood and life is forever etched in gleaming granite.

While the early and heated debates about the construction and design of the Wall are well documented, what has happened since 1982 attests to the success of the design. From the beginning, The VVA Veteran has chronicled the history of The Wall through the ways the veterans, their families, and their loved ones have paid their respects. In this issue of The VVA Veteran we offer articles that honor The Wall and reflect the service and the unity of veterans and non-veterans.

The Wall resonates for all who served. It is our memorial. It honors our service through the sacrifice of loved ones. It resonates for the many selfless volunteers who help those who come to The Wall in search of loved ones, for the thousands of sons and daughters whose fathers never came home, for the veterans who faithfully wash The Wall and replace light bulbs and rewire sockets, for the mothers and fathers and brothers and sisters and others who come from all over the country to touch a name, and for Robert Plato, the three-tour Vietnam veteran, whose dying wish was granted when he made his first and final trip to The Wall. "When I leave here today," he said, "I will leave a piece of my heart."

The spirit of The Wall lives in the heart of every Vietnam veteran, family member, and friend. That is why, on this Veterans Day, Vietnam Veterans of America will lead a March to Remember down Constitution Avenue toward The Wall Where we can reflect on service and sacrifice. Vietnam veterans and friends had to build that Wall and we remember.

Peace.

Victor Westphall: "He Was A Father To All of Us"

On Veterans Day 2002 four helicopters lifted off in a swirl of snow from the small airport at Angel Fire, high in the mountains of northern New Mexico. Three National Guard Black Hawks formed up behind a smaller helicopter, a Huey - itself a veteran of the Vietnam War, shot down, recovered, refurbished - and on the last leg of a nationwide flight honoring Vietnam veterans.

Inside the Huey, a small, elderly man peeked out at the familiar landscape below him. The trip would take only minutes. From the moment they lifted off, Dr. Victor Westphall could see the monument he built in the memory of his son, David, a Marine Corps officer killed in Vietnam. In the years to come after Westphall completed what would become the Angel Fire Vietnam Veterans National Memorial, thousands of veterans came to the Moreno Valley, finding a sense of peace in a place Native Americans long ago called holy. When the Huey landed, hands reached out and gently lifted him into a wheelchair. He often said they were his sons, all of them.

On July 23, 2003, Victor Westphall died of natural causes. He was 89 years old.

He was found in the small apartment on the grounds of the monument that became his life's work after his son was killed in an ambush on May 22, 1968, in Quang Tri Province. Using the $30,000 life insurance payment from David's death, Westphall started building the chapel within months of learning he had lost his son.

In 1983, he turned over the memorial, with a visitors center added on, to the Disabled American Veterans. In 1993, Westphall and the DAV clashed over his salary, living arrangements, and management of the memorial. In 1998, the DAV returned the memorial to Westphall.

Thousands of veterans have come through its doors. He remembered faces, he remembered names, he spoke to every Vietnam veteran with genuine compassion and caring.

Upon hearing of his death, John Garcia, director of the New Mexico Veterans Services Department, called him "this little old man who could move mountains." Lanny Tonning, a member of the memorial's board of directors, said Westphall was "the core of what this country is all about."

"He didn't wait for anything," Tonning said. "He just did what he wanted to do to recognize his son, and in doing that he recognized everyone who was wearing a uniform at the time and everyone who wore it afterwards and everyone who wears it now and everyone who will ever wear it. That's how one individual parent respected all the soldiers. I can't measure his importance to us. He's been a de facto father to Vietnam veterans."

John Garcia, who worked with Jan Scruggs in bringing The Wall to fruition, introduced Scruggs to Westphall ten years before The Wall was built. Garcia believes that in Victor Westphall's memorial to his son Scruggs found the seed that would grow into the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington.

"The Wall was created as a result of the chapel," Garcia said. "The Vietnam Veterans Chapel in Angel Fire was the first memorial in the country paying tribute to the men who fought and died in Vietnam. Dr. Westphall was ahead of everyone in the country. He was the first person to step out and say, "I care about what you guys did. I care about who you all are.' He was like a father to all of us. He set the bar for recognizing Vietnam veterans, of separating the war from the warrior. He was like the godfather of all of that."

Vietnam veterans came to Westphall's chapel to find peace. Families left photos of dead sons. Alongside a photo of Westphall's son in the chapel, twelve photos of others killed in the war are displayed on a rotating basis. As the years passed, the chapel grew well beyond New Mexico to embrace veterans from all over the country.

Invariably, those who come to Angel Fire find themselves talking about its sense of the spiritual. Bill Duker, who met Westphall shortly after the monument was built, said it was not only the place that brought a sense of peace.

"He was probably the most spiritual man I have ever known," Duker said. "He took this horrible pain of losing his son and turned it into a memorial that is such a beautiful experience, and not just for veterans, but for anyone who goes there."

In a 1995 newspaper interview, John Rossie, a Navy veteran from Denver said, "There's something pervasive in the atmosphere here that makes it so personal. When I walked into the chapel the first time I came here, it was like being washed over by a loving energy. It's a holy place and it reaches deep into my soul."

That same year, Victor Westphall spoke of Angel Fire's "mysticism."

"This aura of mysticism is something I don't talk about unless the subject comes up," he said. "No particular reason. I just don't. But it is there. It surrounds this whole place, this whole situation. The aboriginal peoples of this area sensed it and the people who come to visit it today have indicated these same feelings to me. They sense something in the place they do not fully understand."

VVA New Mexico State Council President Peter Weber remembers Westphall's equilibrium and calm throughout the upheaval when he fought with the DAV for control of the memorial. Weber said he had no recollection of Westphall succumbing to bitterness or acrimony.

"Through all the ups and downs with the DAV, I never heard him say a bad word about anybody," Weber said. "And through it all, he kept the chapel going. He did all this by himself and there was never any self-aggrandizement about it. I went up there a lot and he was always glad to see you. His door was always open. You could put a panel together and tell it to build a memorial to Vietnam veterans and that panel would not have the same intuition and foresight that he did. He somehow knew this was the place and he knew exactly what to build on it And no matter when you went up there, and I went up there a lot, he was in his office, and he was glad to see you and he remembered your name. He remembered everybody's name."

The chapel never closes, a policy evolving from a note Westphall found one morning on the chapel door - "Why did you lock me out?" the note said.

It was the last time anyone was locked out.

The cross in the chapel is 13 feet high; the pictures of men killed in Vietnam always number 13; he flew an American flag with 13 stars.

"He said he had recurring dreams in which the number 13 always appeared," Duker said.

"Many years later, some of the men who served with his son in Vietnam came to visit. He found out that on the day his son died, twelve others died with him."

Duker said an overheard conversation between Westphall and a Vietnam veteran was a life-changing moment for him.

"It was kind of controversial at the time," Duker said. "Dr. Westphall said if the Vietnamese soldier who killed his son later died in the war and his family sent a photo to him, he would put that photo in the chapel as well. Here's a man who lost a son he loved dearly and yet he could forgive the soldier who took his life. That's an extraordinary human being. I don't know if there's anyone I've met in my life I admire more - his drive, his dream, all the obstacles he had to overcome to honor his son, and not just his son, but every soldier who died in the war. He was an extraordinary man."

In an interview, Westphall said of the monument: "I knew it was destined for something. I didn't know what, but from the beginning it was destined for something important. For the veterans, many of whom come here with great trepidation, who found peace after being here. They sense this place might tell them something about themselves, something in the background, a mystery, an unknown quantity they didn't know they'd find. But it's not confined to veterans. It's pretty much general among the entire population of visitors. Totally on their own, with no prompting whatsoever, they will say sense something, and they can't quite put their finger on it."

Now it is up to others to carry on.

"He was there before any of us," John Garcia said. "He fought the battle single-handedly until the rest of us could catch up to him. He started the fire in all of us and he kept it burning until his last day. His legacy is etched in stone and he's handed it to us now."



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For Those Who Lived: The Vietnam Women's Memorial

The last thing I said to anyone I served with when I left Vietnam was that this place will never be anywhere but just over my shoulder for the rest of my life. That's been the case with a lot of people I've talked to since. We don't always want to look over our shoulder and see it, but it's right there. --Marsha Four, U.S. Army, Vietnam, 1969-70

Some 265,000 women served in the military in the Vietnam era; about 11,000 served in Vietnam. Eight women died there. Close to 90 percent of the women who served in-country were nurses. Others were physicians, physical therapists, personnel in the Medical Service Corps, air traffic controllers, communications specialists, intelligence officers, and clerks. Nearly all who served in-country volunteered.

On November 11, 1993, after 10 years of effort, the Vietnam Women's Memorial was dedicated as part of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. Created by renowned sculptor Glenna Goodacre, the memorial, depicting three nurses caring for a wounded soldier, stands 6 feet 8 inches high and weighs one ton.

The tenth anniversary of the memorial will be celebrated November 10-11 in Washington with many events, including an appearance at the memorial by Goodacre.

"I'm often asked what is my favorite piece and I always say the Vietnam Women's Memorial because of how much it means to so many people,'' Goodacre said.

Long before the memorial began to be shaped in Goodacre's Santa Fe, N.M., studio, it caused Marsha Four to look back at her Vietnam War experience. In 1987, she ran into a frienD who was a local newspaper reporter. The reporter told Four she was going to a meeting of a Vietnam Veterans of America chapter to hear a woman speak about the effort under way to build a memorial dedicated to the women who served in Vietnam. Four tagged along.

"I listened to the presentation and I found myself almost to the point where I couldn't talk,'' she said. "Some of it was upsetting, some of it was a sense of pride listening to someone say that what I did was important. It was an important meeting for me.''

The members of Delaware County, Pennsylvania, Chapter 67 encouraged her to join. She did and has been a member ever since, going on to serve on the VVA Board of Directors three times and as current chair of the Women Veterans Committee.

Four believes that evening was the first time she considered the significance of her year in Vietnam.

"I began to realize that what I did was important to people and their lives, people I will never know,'' she said. "The memorial is a place I go where I can just sit. Sometimes it takes you back and sometimes it's painful. We all want to believe that we keep those experiences in the right box in the closet. Sometimes sitting there at the memorial, when you close your eyes, you can't help but see those things that were difficult.''

She said that for many women, coming home meant little or no conversation about where they had been. Like so many of their male counterparts, they tucked Vietnam away in a private space.

"We came home, went to school, got married, had kids,'' she said. "There wasn't a lot of talk about our being in the military. We didn't have a GI haircut when we came home. Nobody looked at us and said, 'Ah, military.' Unless we decided to say it, no one knew it.''

Ten years ago, Vietnam veteran David Chung, then an employee of Federal Express, drove a specially outfitted FedEx truck from Santa Fe to Washington, D.C. He carried a cargo that touched the hearts of those who came to see it along the way. Ten years later, it has touched the hearts of hundreds of thousands more.

Chung vividly remembers a woman in Dallas. She was upset. She stared at the statue of three women and a wounded soldier for a long time, saying nothing. Chung and others went to see if she was all right. They asked if she had lost a loved one in Vietnam. Chung will never forget the woman's reply.

"She said she lost herself,'' he said. "She lost herself in Vietnam.''

She had been a Navy X-ray technician. When she came home, she flew on a plane loaded with critically wounded men. In the years after the war, she tried to put the war behind her, choosing to tell no one of her service. She went to college, married, raised a family, became a grandmother.

No one knew she served in Vietnam.

"When we were leaving, she said she was going home to do something she didn't think she would ever do,'' Chung said. "She was going to tell her husband and her family that she was a Vietnam veteran.''

Sculptor Glenna Goodacre, who knew no one involved in the Vietnam War before taking on the memorial project, said she had no idea how widespread the impact of the work would be, including the impact on her own career.

"To be on the Washington Mall and to represent those young women who worked so hard to take care of soldiers is something that can't be duplicated in any other way,'' Goodacre said. "I've heard from all kinds of people over the past 10 years--veterans and parents, husbands and mothers, all those whose loved ones were saved by those women. They want to give me a hug and that always leads to tears. It has so much meaning. I truly had no idea of what it would mean to other people and me.''

She draws a distinction between the Women's Memorial and nearby Wall.

"I like to say The Wall is for those who died. This Women's Memorial is for those who
lived. Something like 350,000 were wounded and lived. I covered his face [the memorial's wounded soldier] so he would be anonymous. She's holding a pressure bandage on him. He's terribly wounded, but he's going to live. It's uplifting in my mind.''

Sandra Spatz-Wiszneauckas, a former Marine, was scheduled for discharge in the late 1960s. She had not been to Vietnam. She was not a nurse, but had been working with wounded Marines at Bethesda Naval Hospital. As the time neared for her to leave the Marine Corps, an inquiry was made.

"I was asked to extend for another year to serve in Vietnam,'' she said. "That's how I ended up over there. I was inspired by the Marines who were coming back to Bethesda. I felt compelled to serve in Vietnam after seeing them.''

In Vietnam, she worked in the Naval Forces office under the command of Adm. Elmo Zumwalt.

A founding member of VVA Chapter 641, Spatz-Wiszneauckas also is the vice president of Vietnam Women Veterans, a group of non-nurse women veterans formed five years ago. Having located 350 women who served in various capacities in Vietnam, the group is holding a reunion November 10-11 in Washington.

"What came from these women speaking to one another about Vietnam was a valuing of themselves and their service,'' she said. "I think people came away feeling an appreciation for the service they provided. They validated each other.''

Spatz-Wiszneauckas said she frequently visits The Wall and the Women's Memorial, her chapter having worked for several years with the Park Service.

"Of the three women depicted in the memorial, it's the woman in the back, kneeling, her head down, almost prayerfully, that strikes me the most,'' she said. "The memorial does a good job of symbolizing the service of women. It captures that feeling of service and a reliance on something beyond them.''

David Chung, now working in minority affairs with the VA, said of his experience transporting the statue 10 years ago: "The statue took on a life of its own and in turn gave me back my life. It's the only way I can describe it.''

Chung, who brought the statue to the attention of Fred Smith, FedEx's founder and CEO, a Vietnam veteran, was apprehensive about making the trip with the statue. He had not been involved with veterans groups at all until 1986, when he participated in the Welcome Home parade in Chicago. At the urging of his wife, who served in Vietnam as a nurse, he became involved in the memorial project.

"The journey changed me'' he said. "The nurses said how great it was for something like this to happen because they finally were being recognized. Families of veterans who were wounded or didn't make it home came out to see the statue everywhere we stopped because they wanted somehow to find a way to thank the nurses who tried to save their sons or comforted their sons before they died.''

In Junction City, Kansas, Chung arrived late at night in a driving rainstorm that had slowed him for hours. More than three thousand people waited for the statue's arrival. State troopers who had escorted the truck shined their spotlights on the statue. A buddy working with Chung told him to look into the crowd.

"It was amazing," Chung said. "If you looked into the individual faces, even in the rain and the dim light, you could see tears running down faces of the people. The statue still carries that kind of power. Look at the people who come today. They stare, they leave notes. Veterans almost always touch it. You can see why in their faces: 'You took care of me, you took care of my son.' It's very powerful. They want to touch it. They want to connect. They want to come full circle."

Marsha Four underscores the point.

"It's a great vehicle for women to open up to one another,'' she said. "It identified who we were. It brought women together in groups and that fostered interaction. For some, it was the first time they vocalized to others what happened to them. It was a great catharsis for many women. We could be painfully blunt with each other and know that we weren't going to judged.''



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From Vision To Reality: The Evolution of the In Memory Plaque

Eleven years after it began, Ruth Coder Fitzgerald sounds surprised to be talking about it in the present tense. To speak of its completion is to acknowledge the reality of the struggle’s success, an outcome she always hoped for but whose likelihood she often described as “miraculous.”

“It’s surreal now that it’s over,” she said.

An in-ground plaque has been installed near The Wall, its inscription marking more than a decade of determination by Coder and others who argued in its favor: “In Memory of the men and women who served in The Vietnam War and later died as a result of their service. We honor and remember their sacrifice.”

Unveiled in July, the In Memory plaque will be dedicated on Veterans Day with VVA, a strong supporter of the effort from its earliest days, conducting the ceremony.

In 1992, Coder Fitzgerald’s brother, John Coder, a Jolly Green Giant pilot in Vietnam, died from complications arising from non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. He was 49. His cancer had been attributed to Agent Orange exposure during the war.

Coder Fitzgerald requested that his name be added to The Wall. The request was denied.

In 1993, she became active with the now-defunct Friends of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. The group conducted an In Memory service to honor those who died as a result of the war but whose deaths came long after the war ended. John Coder was among the first ten to be honored.

In 1995, still dissatisfied that her brother and others had not been properly recognized for their service and sacrifice, Coder Fitzgerald wrote to family members of those who had died or who had Agent Orange-related diseases. The response encouraged her to move forward with an effort to establish a permanent marker.

In 1996, she incorporated The Vietnam War In Memory, Inc. She organized a board of directors and began work on getting a permanent marker near The Wall. She thought it would be “miraculous” if she succeeded by 2001 or 2002. The miracle, borne of long years of work, came about in 2004.

“I never imagined it would happen,” she said. “I thought, 'God bless people for trying.' I thought we’d get to the point when someone would say, ‘Nope, not gonna happen’, and we could at least look each other in the eye and say that we tried. So the fact that this was successful is, well, give me a wordincredible?”

VVA Public Affairs Chair Jim Doyle underscored the importance of recognition that those who died had done so serving their country.

“At the end of the day, it’s a simple desire to have that service and the fact that their service eventually caused their deaths to be recognized and acknowledged,” Doyle said. “People like Ruth and the others wanted that recognition. They didn’t ask for anything special. They didn’t want people to bow down and kiss their feet or throw garlands at them. They wanted only for people who served to be recognized. The war has been over for 30 years and it’s still claiming casualties. I hope the In Memory plaque will remind people that once the parades are over, people still suffer the trauma of war, whether it’s emotional or physical. It affects families, it affects the workplace, and it affects communities.”

VVA President Tom Corey, speaking of the tenacity and determination shown by Coder Fitzgerald and other family members who toiled for so long to bring about the In Memory plaque, underscored Doyle’s words on the importance of recognizing the sacrifice of those who served.

“It shows what we can do when we focus on something like this,” Corey said. “What drives people like Ruth are family members and friends whose lives ended prematurely because of their service to the country. She took on these challenges to keep the memory of these people alive. She has such great determination.”

Coder Fitzgerald’s first endorsements from VVA came from Virginia Piedmont Area Chapter 752 in Culpeper, Virginia, and from the Battlefield Chapter 617 of Woodbridge, Virginia. The Virginia State Council added its support and national VVA representatives testified in support at Senate and House hearings.

Endorsements from across the veterans’ community followed VVA’s own: the National Congress of American Indians, Vietnam Women’s Memorial Foundation, Gold Star Mothers, Blue Star Mothers, Agent Orange Widows Awareness Coalition, Order of the Silver Rose, The Quilt of Tears, Vietnam Veteran Ministers, and others.

“A lot of things have touched me, but back in 1999 people would e-mail and say they were thankful that we were going to have this plaque,” Coder Fitzgerald said. “I would write back and say, ' Well, we don’t have it yet.’ But they were so thankful and appreciative that we were even trying. That response surprised me in that it was so sad because we as a nation haven’t been good to these people and they’ve been ignored. It was like they were saying, ‘Hey my husband or father or son died because of Vietnam and nobody cares.’ It really touched me that they were so happy we were even trying.”

In the summer of 1999, she mentioned to a neighbor that she was working on the project. The neighbor sent out brochures to her Christmas card list. One of the recipients brought the project to the attention of Rep. Elton Gallegly (R-Calif.). In November of that year, Gallegly introduced a bill asking for an addition to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. A similar bill was introduced in the Senate by Colorado Sen. Ben Nighthorse Campbell (R-Colo.).

The bills were signed into law in 2000.

“We’ve been at this for a long time,” Coder Fitzgerald said. “It’s a memorial to those who died, but it’s also a recognition that they were Vietnam veterans and an acknowledgment of their service. In preparation of the official VVA-sponsored dedication this Veterans Day, we sent out word and a man in a PTSD group in Michigan said he was so excited. I thought, wait a minute, this plaque is for the dead, but then I thought, this must have meaning for many people who are alive, too. It means they’re remembered.”

A Winning Tribute: The Nevada Vietnam Memorial

The quiet and powerful Nevada Vietnam Memorial is nestled inside Mills Park in the state capital named for the legendary frontiersman and scout Kit Carson. The memorial, which was dedicated on Veterans Day 2002 to honor 151 Nevada men killed or missing in the Vietnam War, serves as Nevada’s state Vietnam veterans memorial today due to the dedication of members of three VVA chapters: Carson Area Chapter 388 and Incarcerated Chapters 545 at the Nevada State Prison and 719 at the Northern Nevada Correctional Center, both in Carson City.

The memorial’s origins date to the early 1990s with the dedication of a small plaque and flag pole in Mills Park honoring Nevada’s Vietnam War POWs and MIAs. That modest memorial was the work of Chapter 388 with help from Chapter 719 members who were part of the low-security Stewart Conservation Camp. The effort was spearheaded by the late Harold Brown, a Chapter 388 member who was a senior corrections officer at Stewart.

In the late nineties, Mills Park underwent design changes-changes that meant that the small Vietnam Veterans Memorial would have to be moved. “The Parks Department suggested a larger memorial,” said Chapter 388 president Terry Hubert, “and that’s when I got involved.”

Hubert had joined VVA in 1995 when he was assistant warden of Nevada’s Lovelock Correctional Center, where he helped found Chapter 834. “They’re now the largest VVA chapter in Nevada,” Hubert told us in an interview, “and spend most of their time working on yard beautification projects and drug-treatment programs.” Hubert, who later transferred to the Nevada State Prison, got together with then Chapter 388 president Jim Weller, whose day job was Carson City’s Director of Public Safety, to work out the details for the new and expanded memorial. “We’re both former Marines,” Hubert said, “and we hit it off.”

Weller and Hubert met with Carson City Parks and Recreation Department architects and planners, who suggested putting up a new concrete-cast memorial. “I said, ‘Wait a minute, we have rocks. My guys would be enthused to use native sandstone to do it,’” Hubert said. City officials agreed. “So I met with inmate sculptors, and we dug up huge hunks of flag rock behind the prison,” Hubert said. That same area had provided brown sandstone rock for the prison itself, as well as for many other state buildings, including the Nevada State Capitol.

“We used old, rejected rock, several tons of it,” Hubert said. “We were thrilled to do it, and the new memorial was the result of the combined efforts of three VVA chapters, including two incarcerated.”

The Nevada Vietnam Memorial today consists of five sculpted boulders, each containing a bronze plaque engraved with the names of Nevada’s Vietnam War dead and missing. The plaques are set in stone, and the memorial is surrounded by high-desert landscaping. A flag pole and the plaque from the first Mills Park memorial stand at the center. A sandstone bench, also made by Nevada State Prison inmates affiliated with Chapter 545, was dedicated on Veterans Day 2004 honoring women who served in the Vietnam War.

The memorial “is a good thing,” Ricky Waters, a Nevada State Prison inmate who helped sculpt the rocks, told the Reno Gazette-Journal in 2002. “It’s just beneficial for everyone. Everyone wins on this kind of project.”

America's Bulletin Board

"This collection will burn you out--and burn you up--if you do not handle it correctly."

-Duery Felton, Jr., Curator, Vietnam Veterans Memorial Collection.

At the National Park Service Museum Resource Center in Landover, Maryland, Duery Felton and a handful of volunteers, all Vietnam veterans, opened envelopes, cataloged artifacts, and examined items left at The Wall. One picked up a Ziploc bag. It held a neckerchief and a photograph of the man wearing the neckerchief in Vietnam. The volunteer pulled back on the bag's plastic zipper and opened it.

"Everyone got deathly quiet," Felton said. "When the bag was opened, the smell of Vietnam permeated the room. I mean, it got quiet. You have to understand these were all combat veterans. And I mean, it got quiet."

Felton has a standing rule about the artifacts with which he works: "Read but don't read."

When he helped the Smithsonian Institution with an exhibition on loan, Felton told the conservators that the letters left at The Wall must be placed in clear, plastic sleeves. He gave them the warning, too: "Read but don't read." He told them the standing rule was one of the things you learned when you spend fourteen years of your life with the history people leave at The Wall.

You look at the letters, and you read them, too, but you don't let them get too deep inside of you. You learn to keep your distance. Felton said someone at the Smithsonian made the mistake of taking them in--a reader who went too far and could read no more. The work continued, the letters were placed into plastic sleeves, but they were no longer read.

"There are things in here such as the `We regret to inform you' telegrams,’" Felton said. "There are lost-in-action reports, unedited and raw. If you were to read all this and take it inside yourself, you would lose your mind. I'll be honest with you, you would."

He has a long-established agreement with his National Park Service supervisor. If he needs to leave the room, he can. No questions asked.

"Sometimes I will just get up and walk away," he said. "Sometimes something will come in from my [Army] unit. That's happened here. They understand it. They don't ask questions or anything. I just go out the door. If I didn't have that kind of leeway, I would probably lose my mind. I could not deal with this collection. It will burn you out, it will burn you up -- it's that intense. Early on, we had these manila envelopes. One had this guy's combat diary in it. I had to walk out the door that day."

Duery Felton

Duery Felton nearly died in Vietnam, an experience he refuses to describe to this day other than to say he almost became a name on The Wall. He was an RTO with the First Infantry. He has been the collection's curator since 1986.

In the early 1980s, after the Vietnam Veterans Memorial was dedicated, visitors started leaving mementos and messages. The site manager invited Felton to examine the items. On the day of his visit, the Voice of America happened to be doing a program

There were items no one could identify. Felton recognized them immediately--pajamas given out in hospital wards, messages scribbled on a helmet--"Don't shoot. I'm short."

In 1986, when the National Park Service (NPS) commissioned a consultant to determine how to handle the growing collection, it became clear that someone with knowledge of the time period and the Vietnam experience would be vital to the proper cataloging and preserving of the artifacts.

Felton came in as a volunteer and soon became an NPS employee, he says, "seduced" by the collection. He speaks of Odysseus by way of explanation.

"When Odysseus came upon the Sirens, he had his crew stuff their ears with wax," he said. "But he had himself tied to the mast because he wanted to hear the Sirens' song. This collection is like the Sirens. It will seduce you, and if you're not careful, it will crash you upon the rocks."

He says Providence brought him to the collection--that of the nine million Vietnam-era veterans and three million who served in-country, for some reason he has been chosen to see over the memories left at The Wall. Pointing out that a visitor to any museum sees only ten percent of the collection on display, he uses the same percentage to measure his contribution to The Wall collection. He calls himself nothing more than a "conduit," a vehicle to disseminate history.

"I'm not going to take credit for all this," Felton said. "There are a lot of people behind the scenes you don't see. You're just seeing me. There are a lot of people interested in this collection. The collection needed structure and a lot of other things when NPS took it over. It was just a baby then. It needed time to grow and become strong. It has now."

Felton gives frequent presentations on The Wall collection. He recently did so as a VVA-sponsored lecturer at Bennington College in Vermont. He said he uses these opportunities to launch a "preemptive strike to defuse rumors that circulate about what happens to these things."

The first artifact was a Purple Heart, thrown into the wet foundation concrete of The Wall in early 1981 by the brother of a dead veteran. Two years later, when The Wall was dedicated, a tradition had taken hold. In 1984, when the memorial was turned over to the NPS, the Park Service began examining ways in which it could deal with the things being left there.

The first group of memorabilia numbered 554. Today's collection exceeds 64,000 and grows daily.

Objects are collected twice a day by NPS rangers--more frequently during inclement weather. The objects are tagged, given an identification number and kept in museum storage bags for transportation to the Museum and Resource Center (MRC). At the MRC, the artifacts are identified, researched, and cataloged with detailed descriptions.

The artifacts are stored in 50,000-square foot, state-of-the art facility that Felton said is too-often described as a "warehouse."

"This is a storage preservation facility," he said. "We are part of about forty historical collections that are housed here. When you say `storage preservation,' it doesn't register with the public. So it's not unusual for the news media to come in and use the term `warehouse.' That word has a connotation of a rodent-infested, leaking roof, dank building. We try to stay away from it."

Felon said another common rumor he must defuse is that the NPS is throwing away items left at The Wall. With the exception of live plant matter and unaltered U.S. flags, everything is saved. If flags--one of the most common items left at The Wall--have not been personalized in any way, they are recycled, often given to park rangers to hand out at The Wall or sent to exhibitions or delivered to VA hospitals. Live plant matter is not kept to prevent pest infestations that jeopardize every collection in the Maryland facility.

"We had a necklace made of corn come in," Felton said. "It had been painted. It had worms. It slipped past everyone. We had to use a freezing technique to solve the problem."

He points to the constant evolution of the collection, calling it "alive" and "vibrant." It is a social history reflecting America's past and a present that goes beyond its involvement in Vietnam.

Felton calls The Wall and its artifacts "America's bulletin board."

"People leave statements, and they're not just about Vietnam," he said. "Over the years, people have used it as a protest site. When America went to the Gulf War, we had placards that said 'No Oil For Blood' left here. Between 1,200 and 1,500 informal gatherings are held at the memorial each year. The public decides its memorials, and the public has decided that the Vietnam Veterans Memorial is their memorial. It has become a symbolic memorial. When the Vietnam generation dies off, I believe it will continue to be a symbolic memorial because the public interacts with it--the children and grandchildren of Vietnam veterans."

Pointing out that only the Vietnam War has produced more books written by enlisted personnel than officers, Felton says the tradition of the common man and woman writing history continues at The Wall. He describes it as history written from "the ground up instead of from the top down."

It is an evolving history that Felton says has made him re-think his relationship to the Vietnam War. Through the artifacts, he has found himself seeing the war through the eyes of people he had not before considered, including his parents.

A few years ago, his mother gave him tapes that he sent from Vietnam. They had found exchanging tapes was more reliable than written letters and made a habit of it during his time in the war. When his mother gave him the tapes recently, she told him something he had not known.

"She said she had mixed feelings about receiving the tapes," he said. "She said if she received a tape, she knew I was OK. But in the background, she'd hear explosions and guns going off. I realized that I had become immune to these sounds. Vietnam was crazy. You could have these things going on around you, people literally fighting for their lives, and if it wasn't happening to you, it was `quiet' where you sat. I had become immune to the sounds of war. My mother had kept quiet all these years."

In the artifacts at his workplace, he read comment books from the public. "My father is a Vietnam veteran," one said, ‘‘and he's never talked about it and now I understand why."

A woman approached him one day and said she wanted to apologize for being an antiwar protester. She'd just seen the collection and Felton had given the introductory speech. She was crying when she spoke to him.

He read notes of gratitude written to corpsman and notes of anguish written by corpsman. One note thanked a medic for saving a life; the next note, written by a medic, wondered if he'd done enough to save a life.

"So I'm reading one person saying, ‘Doc, you saved my life,’ and Doc is wondering if he did enough. I'm reading this and I'm thinking that I'd love to tell Doc, ‘Yeah, you saved his life,’" Felton said.

He has seen "hard-ass" journalists come to the collection thinking they were immune to its Siren song and always leaving changed, having found they are not immune at all.

"This collection is reflective of one of the most precipitous moments in American history," Felton said. "It is uncensored and unedited. It is vibrant and alive and always changing. It is history written by the everyday person. It is unique. The Vietnam War grabbed this nation by its throat and it has yet to let go. This collection reflects that."

An Image Crystallized Lee Teter's Gift to Veterans

Describing Lee Teter's painting Reflections carries two risks. The first is inadequacy. No words can capture it. The second is redundancy. It is possible there is a Vietnam veteran somewhere who has not seen it and been moved by it, but the likelihood is low, given the large number of prints in circulation. Nothing in the art world, save The Wall the painting depicts, has had the broad impact of Teter's 1988 work.

Nonetheless, a brief description: A man places his hand against the black granite wall. He doesn't see names on The Wall. He sees faces. He sees a past that never leaves him.

``It was the strangest thing,'' Teter said of the moment the image crystallized in his mind, well before the first brush had been dipped into paint. "When I thought of the picture, the hair raised on the back of my neck. I felt it then, and I felt it the whole time I painted it. I knew it would be powerful.''

Teter licensed the rights to VVA Chapter 172 in Cumberland, Maryland. It has been a continuing success and print sales have benefited veterans, their families, and their communities.

In 1988, shortly after the painting was completed, Teter took it with his historical artwork to a black powder shoot in Virginia. He remembered the Virginia event being a "e-enactment kind of thing" at which nothing modern was supposed to be seen, but he wanted to show the painting to some friends who were Vietnam veterans.

At a slow moment during the event, he left his tent to get something to eat. When he returned, there was a long line of people standing in front of the tent. Other people were coming out of the tent. They were crying. He could see the tears running down their faces.

"I knew what happened," he said. "Someone had put out Reflections [the original, not a print]. These people coming out of the tent would immediately go and get one or two other people to stand in line, and then they'd wait again so they could see the picture with them. Back then, the black powder field had a lot of Vietnam veterans in it and they loved the painting."

The veterans asked Teter what he intended to do with the painting. He told them VVA was going to sell prints as a fund-raising tool.

"A guy said he wanted one," Teter said. "Then another guy and another guy. Somebody got a pen and started writing down names and addresses, and before it was done, we'd sold enough prints to pay for the first printing."

He painted Reflections early in a long, prolific career. It was only the third oil he had painted. He looks at it now, and his eye goes to technical flaws, things he would have done differently with a more experienced eye. Teter said he has trained himself to look for such flaws in his work and in others. Each flaw corrected, he said, brings him a step closer to perfection.

"Oh, it looks worse from a technical standpoint," he said. "I should have spent another week and a half on it, rounded it more, got a little more depth. I should have used a few glazes that I didn't do back then."

The idea for Reflections came to Teter quickly. He settled on the concept right away and began work.

"The impact was immediate, and in fact, I felt the same impact when I was painting it," he said.

He understood its potential, too. He knew exactly what he had on his hands. In St. Louis last year, when VVA presented him with the prestigious President's Award for Excellence in the Arts, he was asked a pointed question.

"Well, the real question was this: 'Did you know what you were giving away?' " he said. "The answer is 'yes,' I knew exactly. But some things shouldn't be done for money. I thought enough of the concept and the emotions that American veterans and families had invested in the Vietnam War to make my money somewhere else. I didn't want to pollute the purity of it by making a lot of money off people's misery, people's sorrow, people's painand that's what this picture's about."

He marvels that the painting is as popular as it is.

"Let's face it, it's a wonder," he said. "It brings back painful memories for people, and I didn't want to pollute those memories. I knew what I had. I knew it was worth a million bucks. I didn't care."

He said Reflections was unique in his body of work because he paints historical works, and the past is what he calls a "foreign land, " not easily accessible to the viewer today. But, Teter said, this is not so with the people who lived Reflections. Vietnam is not a foreign place in the memories of the millions of men and woman who served there and their families and loved ones.

Teter said that much of the impact of Reflections can be attributed to the powerful memories the image evokes.

"The picture is light reflecting off pieces of paint and the canvas," he said. "That's the painting. The picture itself is in the mind of the viewer. The art becomes every person. It triggers memories that are very, very personal. While we all see the same image on the canvas, we don't all see the same picture. The people it truly affects are people who have deeply buried memories, sometimes not so deeply buried. The faces they see are the faces they are familiar with, not the ones in the painting. People aren't seeing the painting. They're seeing reflections of their own past. That's why they cry. It's not my art. It's their memories."

Lee Teter lives modestly in Wyoming. The Owl Creek Mountains and Wind River Mountains are his neighbors. He finds peace there. He paints there. Then sends his work into the world.

"When Reflections was done and I took it over to the VVA meeting room, we put a cover on it and then unveiled it and I was surprised," he said. "I didn't see it anymore. I'd painted it away. It was gone. I'd given it to the world, and the world is a good place for it."

Prints of Lee Teter's Reflections can be ordered from VVA Chapter 172 at www.vietnamreflections.com

A Long Time Coming

In 1987, at a fish fry near Toledo, Ohio, a World War II veteran named Roger Durbin asked Rep. Marcy Kaptur (D-Ohio) a question about a memorial dedicated to those who served in the war. The question: Why wasn't there one?

Seventeen years later, on May 29, 2004, the answer will be formally unveiled on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., with the dedication of the National World War II Memorial.

"A fish fry, that's where it started," Maj. Gen. (Ret.) John Herrling said.

Herrling, who was appointed secretary of the American Battle Monuments Commission by President Bill Clinton in 1995, has overseen the long effort to build the memorial.

"Marcy Kaptur went back and drew up legislation for a World War II memorial, but it took her six years to get it passed," Herrling said.

Upon taking the job, Herrling saw two clearly defined tasks: Building the monument and raising the money to do so.

"I put together a fundraising team and that team raised more than $190 million,'' he said. "I don't think a federal agency has ever been asked to raise that kind of money before. I didn't know from time to time if we'd finish the design first or the fundraising. As it turned out, we raised the money before final approval was given for the design.''

Herrling asked Sen. Robert Dole (R-Kansas) to serve as fundraising chairman. Dole, a World War II veteran, agreed, but only after exacting a promise of a co-chairFred Smith, a Vietnam veteran who is the founder, chairman, and CEO of Federal Express.

"The two of them were very effective in talking to corporate America,'' Herrling said.

Still lacking a nationally known public spokesman, Herrling contacted Walter Cronkite and then David Brinkley, neither of whom could take on the job because of previous commitments.

Herrling then wrote to Tom Hanks, asking if he would be interested. In 1997, Steven Spielberg had written to Herrling's commission asking permission to film in the Normandy American Cemetery while working on the movie Saving Private Ryan. Hanks wrote back and enthusiastically acceded to Herrling's request. The fundraising effort then went into high gear.

Herrling said the serendipitous confluence of a bookTom Brokaw's The Greatest Generation and a movieSaving Private Ryanbrought World War II to a new generation.

"The book and movie played a big role,'' he said. Saving Private Ryan focused a new generation on World War II. Then Tom Brokaw's book came out and all of a sudden children and grandchildren of veterans started asking the older generation about the war. There was a whole lot of interest in the subject and the fundraising really started to roll.''

The memorial honors the 16 million American men and women who served during World War II, the more than 400,000 who died, the hundreds of thousands who were wounded, and the millions who supported the war effort at home.

"When World War II ended, it was the most horrific war in human history,'' Herrling said.

"When the men and women in the armed forces came home, they were very much appreciated by the American public. These guys came back, had their parties and celebrations, and decided it was time to get on with their lives. There was no great emphasis or need to build a World War II memorial then. It never got a lot of attention because of that.''

The eleven years of hearings held on the memorial often were marked by vocal opposition to building it on the National Mall. Spearheaded by the National Coalition to Save Our Mall, opponents argued not against a memorial in principle but against the site eventually chosenthe Rainbow Pool, between the Washington Monument and Lincoln Memorial in the center line of the Mall.

In 2000, after 30 public hearings and many approvals required in the memorial process were granted to the Battle Monuments Commission, the Coalition to Save Our Mall took its case to federal court. Failing there, it went to the U.S. Court of Appeals, and after losing there, attempted to have the case put on the Supreme Court docket. The high court refused to hear it.

"There were people who didn't want the memorial between the two great icons of American history--Washington and Lincoln,'' Herrling said. "They would have been very happy if it had been at another site off the center line of the Mall.''

With the formal dedication set for Memorial Day weekend, a "soft'' opening took place on the day after Easter.

"As people walk down the Mall, they'll be able to come in and visit the memorial,'' Herrling said.

The official dedication will include a World War II-themed reunion exhibition on the Mall staged by the Smithsonian Institution's Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, a service at the Washington National Cathedral, and an entertainment salute to World War II veterans from military performing units.

April 30: Reflection and Reaffirmation

VVA held two significant events in Washington on Saturday, April 30, to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War. The first was a spirited three o’clock rally at Upper Senate Park on Capitol Hill attended by several hundred spectators, a rally that focused on Congress’s inadequate and unreliable funding of VA medical programs. “We believe that the 30th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War is the right time to call attention to the fact that three decades after the end of that war, veterans of all eras are still battling to preserve the benefits they have and assure adequate funding for veterans health care,” said VVA President Thomas H. Corey.

That message was forcefully reiterated by the rally’s other speakers, including Retired Army Gen. George Price, Vietnam War Medal of Honor recipient Paul “Buddy” Bucha, VVA Board member Sandie Wilson, VVA New York State Council President John Rowan, and Charles Sheehan-Miles, a Gulf War veteran who was a founder of the Gulf War Resource Center. Sheehan-Miles said that in its unwavering support for the nation’s newest war veterans, VVA is living up to its founding principle: “Never Again Will One Generation of Americans Abandon Another.”

Soon after the rally ended, VVA hosted a solemn ceremony at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in tribute to those who gave their lives in the Vietnam War. Those in attendance ended the event by leaving roses at the base of The Wall.

Diary of a Weatherman

May 2 Mostly clear. Towering cumulus clouds at sunrise and about two hours after sunset.
May 3 Mostly clear. Cumulonimbus east of us at sunrise and in the early afternoon. A massive influx of stratocumulus clouds at sunset with very light rain showers over sections of the base about an hour after sunset.


Diaries bring back the days, and with the days come memories. Small moments jotted down blossom into reflections. Faces, names, laughter, anger, frustration, good people, and not-so-good people—people you’d just as soon never have to deal with again. A diary entry is like a code; a few encrypted sentences hold histories and lifetimes.

VVA member Joel Rosenbaum didn’t think his diary would contain any earthshaking secrets or grand history that researchers would pore over in the future. He thought only that it would be interesting to him when he came home from Vietnam. He thought the diary would be instructive. As for historians, perhaps they would find something of value in it. But like most diaries, this one was personal.

He was an Air Force lieutenant in 1968, a weather forecaster at Cam Ranh Bay. His diary recorded the Vietnam experience with a unique perspective. He wrote it every day for a year.
May 4 Mostly clear. Towering cumulus clouds at sunset. Sky condition almost went scattered to broken about two hours after sunset. Towering cumulus appeared as rain showers on radar at 2100 local. (Cam Ranh had a relatively simple FPS-103 weather radar.) The rain showers dissipated. It appears that very light winds during the day contribute to stratocumulus formation after sunset.
May 5 Mostly clear.
May 6 Mostly clear.
May 7 First thunderstorm of this year occurred at 0530 local. No precipitation, only thunder and lightning. Rest of day mostly clear.

Like many Vietnam veterans, Rosenbaum had difficulty confronting the memories of his year in-country. Back home, the weather diary sat in a drawer, unread for 15 or 20 years. It was difficult for him to read. Then one day Rosenbaum decided he was getting older and nobody lives forever. So he took it from the drawer.

“I didn’t think it was a terribly historic document, but I thought it was an interesting account that most people probably wouldn’t bother to keep,” he said. “There are weather records that are kept, but not quite like this. I had explanations for why things happened. It had more emotional impact than dry columns of data.”

Joel Rosenbaum wanted to be a weather forecaster even when he was a little kid. He was motivated. At Rutgers University, where he earned a degree in agriculture, he joined ROTC, arguing with friends that he’d rather spend four years in the Air Force doing something he loved than spend two years as an Army draftee doing something he hated.

After Rutgers, he studied weather science at Texas A&M and then at the tropical weather school at Chanute Air Force Base in Illinois. Only about half of the weather forecasters sent to Vietnam were trained at the tropical weather school.

“I was probably one of the better forecasters because of my study at Texas A&M and the tropical weather school,” he said.

He volunteered for Vietnam “because it was what I was trained to do.”

At Cam Ranh Bay, Rosenbaum found an enormous base always busy with flight operations—a wing of F-4 tactical fighters, Freedom Birds, C-130s, Caribous, commercial carriers ferrying equipment, medevac flights taking wounded to hospitals around the world.

The weather forecasters briefed pilots on what to expect over the Ho Chi Minh Trail and southern portions of North Vietnam; they briefed on close-in air support for ground operations. They briefed locally and for all of Southeast Asia.

Sometimes they played 20 Questions with aircrews setting out on classified missions. “It was kind of funny,” he said. “They’d call in for a weather briefing, and I’d say, ‘Where are you going?’ and the pilots would say, ‘Can’t tell you. It’s a secret.’ So we played 20 Questions, and I’d finally give them a general briefing on all of Southeast Asia, and they’d accept that.”

Sometimes Rosenbaum argued with distant commanders who wanted people flying in weather that no one should go near. Sometimes he argued with pilots.

“You had to be real careful with medevac flights and turbulence,” he said. “You didn’t want wounded patients to be bouncing around in the aircraft. One time a pilot wanted me to change a forecast for moderate turbulence because it meant he’d have to change his flight plan. I said no way. I wasn’t going to get people injured because he didn’t want to change a flight plan. The prime issue was safety and people wanted to cut corners all the time.”
May 8 Rain showers formed about 0100 local. We had .11 inches of rain by 0600 local. Heavier rain occurred at 0900 local. Clearing by noon. Numerous towering cumulus observed over water. I picked up radar echoes as far out as fifty miles east of us over the South China Sea. The cause of the rain was an over-the-water trajectory non-stop from RCTP to Cam Ranh. A typical northeast monsoon rain shower situation plus a major convergence at 700 millibars. Expect rain showers tomorrow.
May 9 Rain showers occurred at about 0500 local and broke up about 0600 local. According to the synoptic discussion these rain showers are due to offshore flow (Sea Breeze Front) and southeast winds along the coast. Rest of day clear. Signs of Southwest Monsoon in western Thailand.

Rosenbaum found it difficult to mark the passage of time in Vietnam. He likened the year to being “abducted by aliens” and being returned a year later. Time seemed to stand still. The best way to mark the time was keeping a weather diary.

“There are two major seasons in Vietnam,” he said. “The northeast monsoon, when it’s dry inland and wet on the coast; and the southwest monsoon, when it’s wet inland and dry on the coast. There are no seasons as I knew them. You lose track of time.”

Rosenbaum lives in New Jersey now, an at-large Garden State member. He was diagnosed with Agent Orange-related non-Hodgkins lymphoma in 1997 and is 100 percent disabled. He is grateful to VVA for its help when he confronted obstacles with the VA during the period of diagnosis.

In 2001, through the efforts of his congressman, Rep. Rush Holt (D-N.J.), he was able to complete the requirements for a degree in meteorology from Texas A&M.

He contacted the Air Force history office and was asked to copy all the pages of the weather diary; the National Archives expressed an interest in it, as well.

“At least it’s going somewhere so if people have any research interest it will be available,” he said.
May 15 Mostly clear. Afternoon cumulonimbus clouds west.
May 16 Mostly clear. Intertropical convergence zone appeared at 5 degrees North. It should be moving up soon and give us a few thunderstorms. Cumulonimbus clouds west of us during the afternoon.
May 17 Mostly clear.

Double Cross At Ngok Tavak

On May 10, 1968, at three o’clock in the morning at Ngok Tavak, a Forward Operating Base near the Vietnam-Laos border, a small force of U.S. Marines, a handful of Australian and U.S. Special Forces, and 122 ethnic Chinese Nungs working under the command of Australian Capt. John White engaged elements of an invading North Vietnamese Army division and Viet Cong guerrillas. Ngok Tavak was not the primary target of the vastly superior NVA force. The FOB stood in the way of NVA’s primary goal—Kham Duc, five kilometers to the north, the last Special Forces camp still standing in the area.

Eleven kilometers east of the Laos border, the old French fort at Ngok Tavak had been chosen by the Australian commander as his base of operations. American military intelligence knew that the NVA division was working toward the elimination of the Kham Duc Special Forces camp and the Special Forces Group in Danang had sent the 11th Mobile Strike Force, commanded by Capt. White, to conduct reconnaissance operations in the area.

After about five weeks in Ngok Tavak, White, who had depended heavily on moving quickly and at a moment’s notice, saw that ability disappear in an instant as he looked overhead and saw a platoon of Marine Corps artillery being helicoptered into his position. The commander in Danang ordered White to dig in and prepare to engage the NVA.

A Civilian Irregular Defense Group platoon also was sent to Ngok Tavak. White’s suspicions that the CIDG platoon had been infiltrated by Viet Cong soon proved to be correct. It would come at great expense to the small force, given the task of defending the old French fort.

At 3:00 a.m., on May 10, a Marine manning a .50 caliber machine gun challenged CIDG troops approaching his position. They identified themselves as friendly. Moments later, two NVA companies rushed in throwing satchel charges into the machine gun position and igniting mortar ammunition with flamethrowers. The attack took the Marines completely by surprise.

Tim Brown, a veteran of the Ngok Tavak battle and the prime driving force behind the long campaign to bring home and identify those Marines killed in the battle but whose bodies were never recovered, suggests that a potential title for any story describing that night’s events might be “Double Cross.”

“Two Navy Crosses were awarded as a result of that battle and when we were interacting with the CIDG and people who were supposed to be friendly South Vietnamese forces, they penetrated the wire by saying ‘Don’t shoot! Friendly! Friendly!’,” Brown said. “So in effect we were double-crossed. That’s how the battle opened.”

The fight lasted ten hours, much of it involving hand-to-hand combat. In 1995, when John White returned to the site, he met the NVA commander who led the invading force. Only then did the two men discover that at some point in the night, they were mere yards from one another and didn’t know it.

Thirteen Americans never returned from Ngok Tavak—12 Marines and a Special Forces medic, who stayed to treat the wounded. Capt. White did not realize that the medic chose to remain with the injured men. It is still not known if the medic was killed or captured. He is still listed as MIA.

Dickie Hites, special assistant to the commander at the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command in Hawaii, said of the medic, Thomas Perry: “We didn’t find him. That’s one of the great tragedies of this. He’s such a heroic figure.”

JPAC continues to investigate the case.

Early on the afternoon of May 10, a napalm strike burned a path through the jungle. Following the still-burning escape route, Ngok Tavak’s survivors went east for about seven kilometers, until they found a location safe enough to call in helicopters that would carry them to the Special Forces camp at Kham Duc.

When they got there, the NVA had just begun to attack. In the next two days, the NVA surrounded Kham Duc, overran the outposts, and began pounding the camp with mortar and recoilless rifle fire. In what would be called “one of the most harrowing evacuation efforts of the Vietnam War,” Air Force, Marine, and Army aviators flew hundreds of missions in support of the embattled camp. Nine aircraft were lost to the intense fire concentrated on the base. Twenty-five U.S. personnel were KIA, 96 WIA, and 23 MIA. Some of the MIA-BNR were recovered in 1970 operations when the camp was retaken.

“Others were recovered in the late 1990s,” Brown said. “But a number [seven] are still missing.”

The Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command in Hawaii is scheduled to conduct excavations in the Kham Duc area this summer.