A Time for Somber Reflection : Memorial Day Crowds Across the Southland Pay Tribute at Cemeteries, Tour Wall Honoring Those Who Fell in Vietnam

Hundreds of flags whipped under darkened Memorial Day skies and grown men cried in one another’s arms at a traveling replica of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, which ended its five-day visit to a Rancho Palos Verdes cemetery Monday.

So notoriously emotional is the half-scale model of the black granite wall that volunteers handing out paper and charcoal for those wanting to trace some of the 58,196 names also supplied Kleenex.

The names on the wall--one of three traveling walls built by Vietnam veterans since 1984--gain personality as viewers are drawn closer by the flowers, letters and photographs placed beneath them.

Ex-Marine Walt Stekkinger of Hacienda Heights came for the first time Monday, and then only because an old photograph nagged at him. The photo shows a group of 14 soldiers stationed in Vietnam, dirty-faced boys who look like they dressed in costumes for a game of war.

Stekkinger ran his finger over the white names in front of him on the wall, listed in the chronological order they died, and told his story. He had gone to Hong Kong on a leave and returned to see his friends’ duffel bags lined up in the commander’s office. Initially furious that they were being sent home before him, he began to complain.

His outburst was greeted only by silence, which told him all he needed to know. His buddies--every face in that photograph except his--were dead, eventually to be memorialized in six vertical inches on the wall.

“It took me 15 years to get over this,” Stekkinger said, wiping a tear from his eye. “People you were with for a year, gone in an instant.”

The three aluminum and polyurethane walls, which already have stopped in more than 400 communities, are each booked through 2000.

“Even people who do not have a connection to the war end up feeling the emotion and sharing the experience,” said Ray Frew, president of Green Hills Memorial Park and a Vietnam veteran who had worked for more than three years to bring one of the “moving walls” to the park.

Three thousand came to Green Hills on Monday alone. There were people who came to honor distant relatives, like Jose Gotera Soriano, who made several tracings of his first cousin’s name to send to family in the Philippines. There were students on an assignment for the Vietnam section of their high school history classes. And there were those who wore POW bracelets through the war, coming to remember a soldier who never came home.

At one spot, a small bouquet was affixed with a card that read: “I wore your bracelet for seven years. The day it broke, I knew you were @ peace. Denise.”

But most of the visitors who still come 21 years after the fall of Saigon are the veterans themselves.

“This is a chance to rekindle the feelings . . . and deal with them, to make new friends and see old friends,” said former U.S. Army Sgt. Willie Wong of Cypress, who has seen all three of the touring walls and has made four pilgrimages to the permanent monument in Washington. His own service, he said, left him weighing only 93 pounds when he was discharged and forced him into years of group therapy.

“I came home from Vietnam in 1969,” said Wong, who was wearing his olive drab fatigues Monday, “but psychologically I didn’t come home until 1986.”

A stranger stopped near Wong and choked on his words as he tried to explain why he had waited so many years to come. Wong turned and hugged him.

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Elsewhere in Los Angeles, Memorial Day observances honored those who fought in other wars, many of them accompanied by the posting of small American flags on every soldier’s grave, a practice begun at Arlington National Cemetery more than 100 years ago. Flowers decorating graves were also in abundance, reflecting the holiday’s origins as a Civil War ceremony known as Decoration Day.

The solemnity of the holiday’s roots are often lost on the crowds that turn out for the now-traditional Memorial Day parades.

Deep in the heart of Topanga Canyon, for instance, about a dozen military veterans kicked off the annual Topanga Days Parade, which featured dozens of nature-themed floats accompanied by runners, roller skaters and horseback riders, all pummeled by water balloons thrown by the audience.

Mark Scully, a Vietnam war veteran, joined other members of a group called “Veterans for Peace” in carrying Old Glory during the parade, singing an antiwar song he had written.

“The reason for us being vets and being here is so that we can stop war,” Scully said. “We want to bring an end to war in this country like there has been an end to slavery.”

Monday’s ceremonies at Long Beach’s Forest Lawn Cemetery featured taps played by a 96-year-old World War I Army veteran named Fred Hummer.

“I’m blowing my brains out,” said Hummer, who lives in Fountain Valley but has lately been taking his act on the road. He has his horn at veterans’ festivities, professional football games and last Flag Day at Arlington National Cemetery, where the Army awarded him three medals.

“I think it was just for still being here,” he said.

To the north, a somber crowd of 1,000 veterans, families and others gathered at the National Cemetery in Westwood to honor the war dead.

Marching in small groups were members of the American Legion, the Jewish War Veterans, Waves, Women Marines, Veterans of Foreign Wars and other groups, many of them frail, in their 60s and 70s and beyond.

“They came, they served, and they gave their all,” said Maj. Gen. John T. Crowe, remembering the veterans of past wars during the keynote speech. “They have earned God’s blessing and the world’s gratitude by giving up their youths, their dreams and their very lives for their country and for the cause of freedom.”

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After the ceremony, former Marine Lt. Paul McKenna, 37, a Los Angeles actor and producer, walked quietly among the grave sites, lined out in perfect rows over 114 acres. McKenna was looking for one date in particular: Oct. 23, 1983, the date of the terrorist truck bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut that left 241 dead.

McKenna said he is still haunted by a change in orders that sent him to Okinawa and Lt. John Boyette to Beirut in his place, where he was killed in his sleep.

“It’s something you live with,” McKenna said. “The best way is to try and keep their memory alive.”

At the eighth annual Memorial Day parade in Canoga Park, 55,000 spectators lined the route. Among them was Lisa LaSarge-Keuper, a small American flag stuck behind her floppy court jester hat. While LaSarge-Keuper was having a good time, she had not forgotten those who gave their lives.

“We’re free today because of them,” she said. “It’s a shame it’s only one day a year to celebrate it. It should be every day.”

Back at the traveling wall in Rancho Palos Verdes, a man dressed in black arrived on a Harley-Davidson motorcycle and strode up and down the memorial for nearly an hour, a carefully folded flag under his arm. He had come to see the wall for the first time, he said, and then only after his children visited during a field trip earlier in the week.

The man, an Army veteran who said he would rather not give his name, recalled protesting the war during a weekend break from basic training in New Jersey. He remembered feeling curiously little emotional connection to the war as he waited for a helicopter ride after his tour of duty. “It was just like a job was over,” he said.

Back in the United States, he waited nine years before telling anyone he had served. Now he sat to look at the spot where he had draped his flag, near the name of a childhood friend.

“You know,” he said, “I think this wall represents the most pain per name of anything in the United States.”

Also contributing to this story were Times staff writers Efrain Hernandez Jr. and Julie Tamaki, and correspondent Laura Accinelli.