San Antonio memorial was a labor of love
Statue, plaza completed thanks to citizens pitching in to honor Vietnam veterans
Dozens of cities and towns across America have raised monuments and memorials paying tribute to the veterans of the Vietnam War, but few can match the honesty, hope and heartbreak depicted in a huge bronze sculpture in the heart of San Antonio at Veterans Memorial Plaza.
It has been more than 30 years since the idea for a local memorial for Vietnam veterans first occurred to John Baines, a veteran of America’s unpopular war. Baines served in the Navy and was in Vietnam in 1968 and 1969 as a member of the Seabees, the construction wing of the Navy. He attended the dedication of the national Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., in 1982, when he first had the idea to build a memorial in San Antonio.
“It had a profound impression on me,” Baines said of his reaction to the national memorial. “I thought, ‘We have finally been welcomed home.’ ”
By November 1986, Baines had successfully pulled together resources from near and far to not only have the San Antonio memorial
in place at East Martin and Jefferson Streets but also to transform an old city-owned parking lot there into Veterans Memorial Plaza.
“There is one reason this ever got done, and it’s him,” said retired Air Force Gen. Andrew Iosue, who once commanded the Air Training Command at Randolph AFB and the Military Training Center at Lackland AFB. Iosue served as the finance committee chairman for the project, which he called a labor of love near and dear to his heart.
Iosue served 3 ½ years in Vietnam and was the first Air Force pilot to land in Hanoi at war’s end to retrieve American prisoners of war.
‘A different’ approach
While Baines acknowledges that he served as the driving force behind the project in the 1980s, he says he is most proud of how many people supported the effort. There were more than 85 fundraisers held over three years, everything from a Bob Hope USO show to neighborhood bake sales to a world championship boxing match and a football game between the San
Antonio police and fire departments.
“The major corporations in the city didn’t pay for this,” Baines said. “The philanthropists that always get their picture in the paper didn’t pay for this. We took a completely different fundraising approach. We felt like, let’s invite the people to the party that are never invited to the party. And that’s the man on the street.”
Though the memorial was unveiled to the public in November 1986, it wasn’t paid for until November 1988. In the end, there were 130,000 contributors, with the average contribution being $5.
“It came in dribbles,” Iosue said. “I think of all the monuments we have in the United States, I bet this is one of the few that was funded by small donations. Others had the city, the government or a big donor pay for them. This was done by many small contributions.”
While it sits at one end of the plaza, the sculpture from artist Austin Deuel of Scottsdale, Ariz., is the centerpiece of Veterans Memorial Plaza. The sculpture depicts an actual event Deuel witnessed during a battle in the war in April 1967 in the hills above Khe Sanh.
Deuel was a Marine Corps combat artist, and at Hill 881, he
saw a Marine radio operator tending to a wounded soldier while looking toward the sky in anticipation of a medevac helicopter. After returning from the war, Deuel continued to work as an artist, and he made a sculpture of his memory of that scene.
Baines later came across the table-top-sized sculpture and purchased it from Deuel. Not long after, he asked the artist if he was capable of re-creating the bronze sculpture on a much larger scale for the memorial. Deuel agreed to take on the project at a cost of $200,000. He produced a 10-ton replica of his original, which Baines still owns.
The entire cost of the memorial and the plaza was $650,000, though many of the contractors who worked on it did all or part of their work for free — so the estimated cost of the project was north of $1 million.
Getting ‘a real sense’
More than 60,000 names, serial numbers, branches of the military and dates of service of men and women from the San Antonio area who served in Vietnam are permanently encased in an airtight compartment inside the memorial.
When designing the plaza, Baines had the idea to place a large pentagonal flagpole in the middle, with each side representing
a branch of the military, just like the granite base of the sculpture. The flagpole was made by Alamo Iron Works.
While Deuel originally saw a Marine looking toward the sky for help from a helicopter at Hill 881, visitors to the memorial see a Marine radio operator looking up at a giant American flag flying above the Texas red oak and crepe myrtle trees outlining the plaza.
“We wanted to suppress the statue into the ground so that people could see what happens on the top of it,” said retired architect Randy Ramseur, who designed the plaza with help from Baines. “As they overlooked the radio man, they could see all the gear he carried. The idea was to suppress it into the ground and build up a berm so that people could walk around the bottom of it and read the inscriptions on the pentagonal base, and then you could go up to the berm and look down upon the two men and all the gear and equipment they carried into battle. It’s really a moving sight.
“You can look at the radio man’s face and see his anxiety, and you got a real sense of how soldiers felt about the situation they were in. It has some emotion to it. I’ve seen people cry in front of the statue. I’ve shed tears myself.”