Over Fourth of July weekend, a festooned truck cruised the streets of Little Saigon. But rather than holiday-themed red, white and blue streamers the van displayed grainy photographs of three members of the Westminster City Council – their large, unsmiling images reminiscent of mugshots.
The trio had recently voted to postpone the installation of a war memorial at Westminster’s Sid Goldstein Freedom Park. The monument — the fourth in the park — would pay tribute to the 1972 Battle of Quang Tri, in which South Vietnamese soldiers reclaimed a province taken by North Vietnam a few months prior.
Last December, council members unanimously approved the monument. But what then seemed like an unobjectionable remembrance of a courageous victory by the South Vietnamese is now at the center of acrimony and accusations.
Council members Tai Do, Kimberly Ho and Carlos Manzo say the nonprofit created to oversee construction of the monument has not been transparent – failing to invite veterans to the table.
Some residents and Southern California veterans groups complain that Freedom Park was never intended to house multiple monuments. Instead, they say, the park should stay focused on its centerpiece, a statue honoring American and South Vietnamese soldiers.
On the other side, Westminster Mayor Tri Ta and Councilman Charlie Nguyen note that the project is already well underway. The Quang Tri Victory Foundation has been busily raising money and, months ago, hired a company to build the memorial.
Ta, who initiated the idea for the monument, serves with Nguyen on the foundation’s board – something detractors call a conflict of interest.
After squabbling over the monument at their regular June 23 meeting, council members approved a special meeting, held two days later, to decide the immediate fate of the monument.
Veterans complain
Dozens of U.S-born veterans – as well as Vietnamese Americans who served in the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) – voiced concern.
“We were totally put in the dark and uninformed of this project,” former ARVN officer Chang Phong said at the special meeting June 25. “We are not against this monument. We just don’t like the current proposed monument. It is just a picture etched on a wall. Please stop this project and get together with us to resolve these differences.”
Bob Harrison, who is active in the local chapter of Vietnam Veterans of America, said a fourth monument should go somewhere other than Freedom Park.
“Freedom Park is a sanctuary for American and Vietnamese veterans of the war,” Harrison said. “Politicians keep promoting these monuments at the park and tearing up the landscape for their own aggrandizement.”
However, many Vietnamese Americans around California support the monument. “There is no legitimate reason to delay,” said Son Do. “There’s a lot of room in the park. It (the monument) will increase tourism in the city.”
Do and Ho said they OKed the monument seven months ago under the assumption that veterans would play a larger role in its conception. Elected in November, Manzo had not yet been sworn in on the council.
Now Ho feels the Quang Tri Victory Foundation has “moved forward too quickly.”
Organizers submitted a timeline to city staff on June 17. According to the schedule, installation of the monument would have begun July 6. An unveiling ceremony would take place mid-September to commemorate the 49th anniversary of the victory.
“What is the rush?” Manzo wondered. “We don’t celebrate 49th wedding anniversaries.”
Ho concurred: “It’s important we get this message right before it is set in stone, literally. I want to make sure (the monument) honors the people to whom the honor is due – not just the politicians and donors.”
Plaques for the council
As planned, the monument would include plaques listing the names of current city council members and foundation donors.
Do, Ho and Manzo have all said that they are ambivalent about seeing their names on a marker. “The purpose of this monument is to memorialize the veterans and the Quang Tri people who made the ultimate sacrifice,” Ho said, adding that Nguyen and Ta were children during the Vietnam War.
However, Ta said there is “nothing unusual” about the now-disputed plaques. “One can go to any city in California and look at numerous public work projects to find the names of responsible officials engraved on brass commemorative plaques,” he wrote in an email.
Also, proponents argue that donors deserve recognition for financing the memorial. Quang Tri Victory Foundation board President Van Tran, a former California assemblyman, said the nonprofit raised more than $200,000 – well over the estimated cost of $125,000 – from donors around the country.
“This project has massive support,” Tran said.
The biggest donors were two Northern California businesses that each chipped in $50,000. Surplus money, Tran said, will go to other charities such as scholarships.
But Ho said that regardless of who pays for the monument up front, “the city will be responsible for maintaining it.”
“The fact that a nonprofit offered to pay doesn’t give them the right to control our city park,” she said.
Possible lawsuit
At the July 2 meeting, Do pushed Nguyen and Ta to recuse themselves from votes about the monument because they sit on the board of the Quang Tri Victory Foundation.
“The answer is ‘no,’” Nguyen responded, reiterating that his participation in the nonprofit does not present an impropriety. “I have no financial interest in this.”
Despite that, Do argued, Nguyen and Ta could use the monument “as a campaign tool to get votes (and) that in itself is a profit.”
Asked by Do to weigh in, City Attorney Christian Bettenhausen said he saw no legal problem because the councilmen are unpaid volunteers with the nonprofit.
But Bettenhausen then prompted another heated exchange by mentioning an email the city had just received in which foundation officials threatened to sue. Should that happen, he said, “the organization would be at odds with the city,” raising “additional questions” about the councilmen’s affiliation.
Foundation board president Tran, who is an attorney, said in an interview that “legal action is not our first option.”
“We hope council members will listen to the community and reverse their decision,” Tran said. “If not, we’ll have to do it the old-fashioned way and let the courts handle it. Who’s going to pay for it if we breach our contract with the contractor, who is building the monument as we speak?”
Supporters speak out
As the council prepared to vote on whether to postpone construction, Nguyen requested the inclusion of a time frame. “Four weeks is good enough – a reasonable deadline,” he said, expressing concern that the foundation and its vendors need to “properly plan.”
But the majority disagreed. “You’re suggesting you just want to go through the motions,” Manzo said. “It doesn’t sound authentic.”
Their decision to pause construction did nothing to pause the rancor.
Do, Ho and Manzo blamed the foundation for the public campaign against them. In addition to the billboard-plastered truck last weekend, ads ran in local Vietnamese-language newspapers that claimed the monument “was destroyed by three council members.”
The ads also suggested that Communist authorities in Vietnam are closely watching what happens in Westminster.
“Hanoi portrays the South Vietnamese military as a bunch of deserters fighting for imperialists,” board president Tran said. “The monument goes against everything Communists have propagandized about the entire war.”
Do called the print ads and the truck “a political terrorist tactic.” And Ho suggested the campaign is “preying on those who don’t understand English.”
“Instead of spending their time working with the vets, they opted to spend time spreading false information in the media,” Ho said via email.
Why Quang Tri?
Historians describe the Battle of Quang Tri as of particular importance to those people who eventually fled Vietnam at the end of the war.
Author and retired professor James Willbanks served in the United States Army as infantry adviser to a South Vietnamese regiment during the 1972 North Vietnamese Easter Offensive – a series of battles that ended in the town of Quang Tri.
In May of that year, Quang Tri fell to the North Vietnamese. But on Sept. 16, in the battle to be memorialized, South Vietnamese fighters won it back – against what Willbanks described as “unbelievable odds.”
The United States supplied air support, but South Vietnamese soldiers comprised the “boots on the ground.” That military independence remains a source of great pride to this day.
At the time, President Richard Nixon was pulling U.S. troops out Vietnam and wanted to show that the South Vietnamese could hold their own.
“When Nixon announced that the South Vietnamese had been victorious, he didn’t say anything about the massive amount of U.S. air power,” Willbrooks said. “Nixon was looking for a rationale to withdraw.”
Over the next two years, Willbrooks said, “the North Vietnamese built their forces back up and rolled through Quang Tri without any opposition whatsoever.”
But the Quang Tri victory remains revered by Vietnamese Americans who later crossed the ocean as refugees. “They lost their country,” Willbanks said, “and that still hurts.”
Culture changes
Meanwhile, time has marched forward.
“Second- and third-generation Vietnamese Americans are integrated into mainstream society,” said C.N. Le, director of the Asian studies program at University of Massachusetts, Amherst. “The distance between them and what their grandparents experienced is getting larger each year.”
The Quang Tri victory gave refugees “something to rally around,” Le said. “Now, they see society around them changing. It becomes a self-fulfilling cycle: As the older generation makes a conscious and even unconscious attempt to assert itself, the younger generation pulls away – and that results in the older generation coming back with more oomph.”
Chan Phan, a Quang Tri Victory Foundation board member who served in the South Vietnamese Navy, shares that desire to pass down the story of his homeland.
“The memorial will be a living history for future generations,” Phan said. “My grandchildren need to know why their grandparents came here and why they are here.”
Phan lamented that the City Council “shouldn’t put us on hold indefinitely because they didn’t do their homework back in December.”
“We are never going to satisfy everybody,” Phan said. “Even Jesus didn’t make everyone happy.”
The monument controversy follows on the heels of two other major blowups that likewise drew charges of backroom dealings. In April, Do, Ho and Manzo killed a proposed redevelopment of City Hall. And, in May, the same three council members denounced the quiet hiring of former Assemblyman Tyler Diep as a consultant to the city – leading to his resignation.
UMass Professor Le grew up in La Habra. As an adult, he lived in Little Saigon for a few years. There, he said, he witnessed “political rivalries and shifting allegiances.”
“There is always going to be some kind of drama in Little Saigon,” Le said. “If it wasn’t the monument, it would be something else. We’ve seen this movie before.”