Tribute to Vietnam War veterans goes on display in Windsor

As a traveling replica of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial took shape Friday on a broad green soccer field in Windsor, J. Stephania Ryan waited patiently to carry the synthetic granite panel bearing her father’s name.

Dwight M. Durham, an Army Ranger sergeant with the 75th Infantry Regiment, was killed while leading a team of six men on patrol in Tay Nihn Province on April 10, 1969. He was 19 years old and belonged to a long-range reconnaissance patrol making forays deep into enemy territory.

Ryan, who goes by the name Steph, was 5 months old at the time. “So I never met him,” she said.

Dwight Durham, who in the Army went by the nickname “Bull,” is among the 58,318 names engraved on the three-quarter scale replica of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial that arrived Tuesday and will be on display through Sunday afternoon at Wilson Ranch Soccer Park on Cameron Drive at Mitchell Lane.

The memorial includes the names of 58 men officially listed as Sonoma County residents when they were killed or went missing in or near Vietnam between 1956 and 1975.

On Wednesday, two men helped Ryan carry the panel over the wet grass to the black aluminum frame that holds a total of 144 panels in ascending height up to 7.5 feet, arranged in a chevron shape ?375 feet long.

“I’m sorry,” Bill Mikan, a Windsor police community service officer, said to Ryan, helping lift the panel into place.

“Thank you,” said Ryan, a Santa Rosa resident. “I count my blessings every day.”

Moments later, she admitted the emotional impact of handling the tribute to her father.

“The loss is there, every day,” she said.

About 60 volunteers, including Coast Guard members, veterans and first responders, turned out Wednesday morning to assemble the Wall That Heals, a project of the Virginia-based Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund, a nonprofit that raised $8.4 million to establish the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall in Washington, D.C. in 1982.

The replica wall, which debuted in 1996, criss-crosses the nation in a 53-foot trailer that got a CHP escort to Windsor, the fifth of 34 stops on its itinerary this year, said Tim Tetz, outreach director with the memorial fund.

It only takes 30 volunteers to assemble in about six hours, he noted, since the panels can only go up one by one, working from both ends.

“We carry all of these panels with the respect they deserve,” Vic Muschler, memorial fund site manager, told volunteers standing by the trailer.

That means wearing gloves and removing any exposed metal, such as a belt buckle, that might scratch a panel. At least two people must carry each panel, the shorter ones held with the names “facing up to the heavens,” he said.

Longer panels, carried by three or four people, must be held sideways so they don’t flex in the middle.

“We cannot get in a hurry,” Muschler said, calling for a “very slow and methodical process.”

Tim Duke, a Sonoma County sheriff’s lieutenant, said volunteering for the wall detail was “an incredible opportunity.”

“The sacrifices that the people on this wall have made for this county,” he said, have preserved “the freedoms that we have today.”

Duke’s grandfather, father and brother served in the military, and his son, Josh Duke, will join the Army in May.

The Vietnam War is part of history, not personal experience, for people who were born after it ended with the fall of Saigon in 1975. The wall, Duke said, “can bridge the generation gap.”

“It’s important to respect the past,” said Matthew Sagaser, an electronic technician and instructor at the Coast Guard Training Center in Two Rock, which contributed 30 volunteers to the wall raising.

Doug Cash came down from Ukiah with his dog to look for names of soldiers he served with in Alaska for 21 months from 1963 to 1965. Many men in his unit requested transfers to Vietnam only to wind up in a deadly, intractable conflict.

“Only way to get out of 40-below,” he said.

Philip Guerrero of Cloverdale said he volunteered Wednesday partly out of guilt for missing the war “by the hair on my chin.”

Guerrero said he had drawn number 64 in the draft lottery established in 1969 in an effort to address perceived inequities in the conscription system. In practice, the lottery led to massive anti-war protests, while prompting young men to flee to Canada and take bizarre steps to be declared ineligible for military service.

Guerrero said he “lucked out” when the draft was ended the year he turned 17.

His father, a World War II veteran who participated in the deadly assault on Okinawa, was pressing him to join the Marines.

According to a Veterans Administration report in 2016, there are 6.7 million living veterans of the Vietnam era, vastly more than the 624,000 vets from World War II. Gulf War era veterans number ?7.3 million.

David Kahn of Windsor, a member of the Russian River Veterans of Foreign Wars Post 768 of Healdsburg, said he and his late wife, Sherri, came up with the idea of inviting the The Wall That Heals to their town.

Kahn joined the Navy in 1963 and served aboard the USS Oriskany, an aircraft carrier dispatched to Vietnam following the Gulf of Tonkin incident, a reported attack on an American destroyer in 1964 used to justify U.S. engagement in Vietnam but now widely regarded as false.

Volunteers will remain around the clock at the soccer park, with LED lights illuminating the wall, and visitors may come at any time, he said. There is no admission fee but donations are welcome.

Steph Ryan, who wears a silver bracelet commemorating her father, said she will be there all day long.

“This is where I get to spend time with my dad,” she said.

You can reach Staff Writer Guy Kovner at 707-521-5457 or guy.kovner@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @guykovner.