Vietnam War Memorial Stirs Memories

Having overcome funding shortages that delayed its unveiling five months, the first memorial in the country to honor Vietnam War troops from both the U.S. and South Vietnam received a bittersweet welcome from about 9,000 people in Westminster on Sunday.

The five-year project raised $1.2 million in donations to help pay for the memorial, which features larger-than-life bronze sculptures of a GI and a South Vietnamese soldier, organizers said.

“We still have to raise $25,000 to pay for annual maintenance such as lighting, but I don’t think we’ll have a problem doing that,” said Frank Fry Jr., a Westminster councilman and president of the memorial’s organizing committee.

The three-hour ceremony featured a Marine Corps honor band, the singing of the national anthems of the U.S. and the former Republic of South Vietnam, and participants’ remembrances of the war. Airplanes towed flags of the U.S. and former South Vietnam as war-era Huey helicopters flew over.

Funding problems, which led to a last-ditch campaign to make up a $175,000 shortfall, forced organizers to delay the ceremony from last November to Sunday, three days before the 28th anniversary of the fall of Saigon.

For Mission Viejo artist Tuan Nguyen, 39, the ceremony crowned a project that began with hours of research, much of it spent poring over books and magazines. His work resulted in a GI with his helmet off, carrying an M-16 rifle. The South Vietnamese soldier wears a flak vest and carries a similar rifle and has his helmet on.

“I tried to show that for the American the war is ending and he’s ready to go, but for the South Vietnamese the war is still going on,” Nguyen said. “We lost our country.”

State Appellate Court Judge Eileen C. Moore, an Army nurse in Vietnam in 1966 and 1967, was among the veterans who shared personal experiences.

She said 7,000 nurses in the war helped the injured.

“Every night, you could hear in the nurses’ quarters sobs,” Moore said, her voice cracking at the memory.

“Many are still traumatized by what they saw during the war. I hope that exposure to the war memorial will help everyone finally mend.”

But for veteran Jon Heckendorf, 55, of Westminster, there is still too much anger over the nation’s involvement with “an unjust” war for him to mend easily.

“It may have been a war that happened a long, long time ago,” he said. “But waiting for this day, this memorial, this is too little too late.”

Heckendorf was among the few former GIs in the audience. He wore a Vietnam veterans cap and a black leather vest with a patch that read “In memory of our 58,044 brothers who never returned. Vietnam 1959-75.”

Just as moving as some of the speeches were impromptu recollections by those in the audience.

Duc Tu Nguyen, 66, of Westminster was a Ranger in South Vietnam before his capture after the fall of Saigon in April 1975. He was talking quietly to a fellow Ranger, Trung Van Cai, 65, when Martin Garcia, 54, of Westminster saw the Ranger patches on their uniforms and marched over.

“Hey,” Garcia said. “I want to take a picture with you guys.”

When Garcia mentioned he was a Marine and had been in Vietnam during the 1968 Tet offensive, the two Rangers sprang to life. “You were? I was just outside Saigon then,” Nguyen said.

The three began an animated conversation, with Garcia calling out names of South Vietnamese cities and villages he was in while the two would answer, “No kidding.”

Garcia said he was barely 18 when he enlisted after high school in Alice, Texas. “I went to Camp Pendleton in 1965, and before I knew it we were in Vietnam. I didn’t know a thing about the country,” he said.

Nguyen was imprisoned in Nam Ha by the North Vietnamese for 10 years. He later ran a small grocery store in Hanoi and was able to send his wife and daughter to the United States. His turn came in 1992. But even then the Vietnamese government made it difficult.

“I went to board an airplane and they kept me there at the airport for 24 hours, questioning me all the time,” Nguyen said. “I thought they would keep me. But then they just let me go. I was so happy.”

Nguyen and his wife, Anh, are now grandparents enjoying freedom in the U.S., he said. As he looked out over the ceremony, he turned and said, “This memorial, it symbolizes a lot for us Vietnamese American soldiers. It means so much.”