Veterans and residents will get a chance to visit a three-quarter scale replica of the Vietnam Veteran Memorial Wall in Washington D.C. here in Orange County next week to remember the nearly 60,000 men and women who died fighting for their country.
“For those that lost family members in Vietnam – a lot of them won’t talk about it, it’s a silent thing that they just live with,” said Susan Wood, a veteran and Orange resident helping bring the wall to Orange County.
“They live with their loss every day, and we want them to remember that we haven’t forgotten that.”
Wood served in the Airforce for two and half years after high school during the Vietnam War – at one point helping return the belongings of slain soldiers in Vietnam back to their families and at another working at a missile base.
“Vietnam was a very confusing war,” she said. “The kids I went to school with were being drafted and then you have the protesters out there, they’re saying you’re killers and all that other stuff and then you have the press that was downplaying the losses.”
“As a teenager, I lived history,” Wood added.
The replica dubbed The Wall That Heals will be hosted by the City of Orange at Grijalva Park from Oct. 2 – Oct. 5 along with a mobile education center and museum that exhibits letters written by soldiers and personal artifacts from the Vietnam War.
Inside the mobile museum will be a slide show honoring the Orange County residents who lost their lives in the war including 23 people from the City of Orange.
It’s coming back to OC months after the 50th year anniversary of the Fall of Saigon to the North Vietnamese Communist forces on April 30, 1975 marking the end of the Vietnam War and starting one of the largest refugee crises in history.
[Read: From Exodus to Emergence: Black April 50 Years After the Fall of Saigon]
Nick Berardino, U.S. Marine Corp. veteran and machine gunner in Vietnam, said the wall is an important reminder of the sacrifices made in Vietnam – a war in which its veterans had to go into hiding for 50 years due to public opposition.
“This allows us to come out of hiding,” he said. “And reminds people what the true consequences are of war.”
Berardino spoke at the wall when it came to Downey in August.
He said witnessing the exhibit was a double-edged sword.
“It was a pain of seeing my friends on a wall and knowing that they never had a chance to live a life that the rest of us had,” Berardino said.
“Then a feeling of pride that while we lived for half a century being discounted and disrespected, that we now can stand tall to the entire nation and be proud of our service and our dedication.”
The wall’s return comes on the heels of Gov. Gavin Newsom signing a bill establishing the framework for and advancing the long-awaited Orange County Veterans Cemetery at Gypsum Canyon – something veterans like Berardino have long advocated to have in OC.
Chris Locke, a veteran who is helping bring the wall to OC, said it was important to honor all the people who served in Vietnam.
People like her father, Lewis, who passed away on Labor Day earlier this month.
“I grew up knowing that the veterans who came back from that war were not greeted very nicely, and we owe them a lot,” she said.
“It’s kind of sad, my dad never got a chance to go down to the Vietnam wall in Washington, D.C. and I know there’s a lot of people who can’t. So having this memorial come to a more accessible location in people’s hometowns is a wonderful way to honor our veterans.”
Locke said remembering the past is necessary for a better future.
“Americans have a great ability to let bygones be bygones and move on into the future, but we have to remember what happened in our past in order to do the right thing in the future,” she said.
Locke also said the wall gives veterans a chance to honor the friends they lost during the war while teaching the younger generation an important lesson.
“War is a terrible thing and politics aside, when the military is called into action, they go,” she said.
She hopes they will also learn about the sacrifices many members of the military and their families have to make to keep their fellow Americans and homeland safe.
“Over 58,000 men and women died in Vietnam and these are their names and we need to remember that. When you hear about troops deploying overseas or even on our borders, there’s a chance that some of them are not coming back,” Locke said.
“They agree to that and that takes a lot of guts.”
Locke served in the Airforce between 1986-1988 and then in the reserves until 1991 up to the first Gulf War – at one point helping deploy people overseas and prepare them to parachute out of cargo planes.
“I was one of the first women to be in that type of role in active duty and then, when I was in the reserves, women were still not allowed in a combat position, so they had to make an exception for me to join the squadron because they needed somebody with my skill set,” she said.
Her father served two tours in Vietnam and was in the Airforce for more than two decades.
“My mom was actually pregnant with me during his second tour, and we are pretty sure that my dad suffered from the effects of Agent Orange amongst some other things while he was in Vietnam,” Locke said.
The exhibit is being brought back to Orange County 14 years after its last visit by a group of local veterans including Wood and Locke and community volunteers through a nonprofit called The Wall That Heals Orange – 2025 that formed in March.
Doug Redding, president of the nonprofit and a Orange city traffic commissioner, said it was a community effort to bring back the wall with the local Elks Lodge spearheading the effort and support from the American Legion as well as MSI International – the company that made the granite tiles for the original memorial in D.C.
“Orange is sort of notorious for the community coming together and giving with their time and their money to make events like this happen for a veteran minded community,” Redding said
“Bringing the wall here is really all about honoring the Vietnam War and those who were affected by it. That’s what it’s all about – providing a place for them to be honored.”
He said they expect anywhere from 3,000 to 10,000 visitors, adding its return to the city is a rare occurrence for a wall that travels to over 40 cities a year and is constantly moving.
Redding also said the wall is bringing back an important opportunity for local veterans and their families to heal and grieve from the Vietnam War without having to fly across the country.
“There are panels made of granite that are on the wall with every single name, all 58,281, names from the original exhibit of every single American that was lost during the Vietnam War,” he said in a phone interview.
“It provides a place for Gold Star families, other veterans, and families affected by the Vietnam War, to grieve, to heal. For a lot of people directly impacted by the Vietnam War, this is the first opportunity they’ve had to see the wall.”
The exhibit is being kept open for 24 hours to allow veterans and Gold Star families – immediate family members of military personnel who die on active duty – to come in the middle of the night and have a private moment to grieve.
The wall will be escorted to the park on Tuesday by veteran motorcyclists as well as police officers and be set up on Wednesday.
There will be opening ceremonies with speakers on Thursday and on Oct. 4 there will be a ceremony at sunset when the wall will be turned orange to honor those affected by the Agent Orange chemical during the war.
“We want to recognize that, yes, you survived all these years, and you’ve walked away from the Vietnam War, but you had a lot of chemical exposure and so forth. We want to honor the fact that you know you’ve suffered a long time,” Locke said.
The wall will be open until 2 p.m. on Oct. 5.
Berardino said he hopes the wall would provide healing for the veterans and Gold Star families that visit the wall and those who aren’t veterans will embrace the names on the wall as saviours of democracy.
“People should remember these are real people, real lives, and they were all cut short so the rest of us could have long and prosperous lives,” he said.
Wood said seeing all the names on the wall makes the loss resonate.
She hopes the wall will bring peace to those that lost loved ones – especially for those who never got to bury them.
“A lot of them don’t have anything to really hold on to,” Wood said.
“This is a place for them to go to and actually see their loved one’s name and bond with them.”
Hosam Elattar is a Voice of OC reporter. Contact him at helattar@voiceofoc.org or on Twitter @ElattarHosam.