News-Info-Alerts

To: ALL

From: Andi Wolos & Bob Necci

(POW-MIA InterNetwork)

Re: Memorial To Versace

Date: April 17, 2001

"A Meditation on Heroism
By Gordon Livingston Special to The Washington Post Sunday, April 15, 2001


The Alexandria City Council voted unanimously yesterday to erect a privately financed $250,000 memorial to Vietnam prisoner of war Humbert Roque "Rocky" Versace, despite opposition to locating it in front of a busy recreation center.

There's always an echo in my mind when I'm confronted with memorials to our war dead. I never can shake the image of combat as a lottery where people are killed in a more or less random fashion unrelated to any display of courage or caution. It's rare that those who die faced danger through any choice of their own. Most people who have seen battle understand this, but persist nonetheless in the rituals of honoring the dead in a way that reflects well on them, the survivors. I am no different, but I admit to creeping cynicism about the desire to attach a mantle of heroism to all who are killed in war.

Nevertheless, when I received an e-mail last fall announcing a Veterans Day ceremony in Arlington to honor Rocky Versace, I knew I had to go. (That's ver-SAIS; he wasn't a fashion designer.) Rocky was in my company at West Point. He lived just down the hall for a couple of years. I liked him. He was a big, muscular guy with a sweet disposition. This meant a lot when I first met him because I was a lowly plebe and he was an upperclassman with a license to make my life miserable. I always appreciated the fact that he didn't.

In fact, Rocky was a little uneasy about himself. In an environment that put a premium on aggressive, self-confident behavior, Rocky was a modest person. Neither supremely intelligent nor gifted with what West Point saw as outstanding leadership qualities, he sticks in my memory as straightforward and determined, with a strong Catholic faith and a knack for saying odd things.

In 1958, our company was picked to come to Washington to participate in the interment in Arlington National Cemetery of the Unknown Soldier from the Korean War. The parade, of course, would cross Memorial Bridge. When we were being briefed on the route, Rocky raised his hand to ask, "Should we break step crossing the bridge?" (He was referring to the practice of troops not marching in step across small wooden bridges to avoid damaging them with the vibration.) Naturally, the question was greeted with hoots and guffaws and was seen as typically Rocky, earnest and a little out of it. That's how I remember him.

Rocky's life after West Point was brief. In 1962 he was assigned as a Special Forces adviser to a South Vietnamese unit in the Mekong Delta. They were ambushed; he was shot and captured. He was imprisoned by the Viet Cong in the Ho Bo woods, a huge swamp. He immediately tried to escape, dragging himself along because of his wounds. They recaptured and tortured him, but he tried again, and again.

The VC, evangelical communists, attempted to indoctrinate him in their philosophy. The incentives for cooperation were obvious, but Rocky would have none of it and just argued and argued with them. We know this because my classmate Nick Rowe was captured about this time and held in the same area. He escaped after five years' imprisonment and wrote a book. He said Rocky was obstinate and suffered mightily for it. After two years the VC executed him. I remember first hearing this story after Nick's escape and thinking, "Yep. That's Rocky. Stubborn."

Some of his friends from long ago felt that, in a culture that accords heroic stature to people who play games, Rocky's sacrifice deserved more recognition than it had received. So they lobbied to have him awarded the congressional Medal of Honor, and recently got what they wanted.

They also asked the city of Alexandria, where he had lived as a boy, to memorialize him in some other way. The first attempt was to get the school board to name an elementary school after him. He lost out for this honor to the late civil rights attorney Samuel Wilbert Tucker. Finally, the City Council was persuaded to give space for a privately funded memorial at the Mount Vernon Recreation Center. A design competition was held and a sculptor selected. Then, last November, a Veterans Day ceremony was scheduled at the center to honor Rocky and look at the memorial plan.

When I showed up, the place was being picketed by a half-dozen people from the surrounding neighborhood. Now there's a prescription for discomfort: a bunch of aging white soldiers coming to establish a memorial to one of their own in front of a recreation center in a black neighborhood. Nobody wanted to make a racial thing out of it. The picketers (and later speakers in front of the City Council) talked about the "lack of community involvement in the review process." The white guys with the Bush-Cheney bumper stickers invoked patriotism and the dubious hope that the children using the center would find the statue of Rocky with a couple of Vietnamese kids ennobling.

Pete Dawkins -- Heisman Trophy winner, Rhodes scholar, brigadier general -- the most famous undergraduate of my generation, was there to give the keynote. It's hard to believe he's 63. He still looks fit enough to win that Heisman all over again. I played a little hockey with Pete a long time ago, but he didn't remember me (he was good; I wasn't). He got out of the Army to become one of Tom Wolfe's masters of the universe on Wall Street. He made a run for the Senate from New Jersey and lost. Now, here he was, speaking about his classmate Rocky. He called him "hugely courageous and indomitably spirited," which Rocky certainly was, though I wondered if he and Pete had been close; I just couldn't see them moving in the same circles at West Point. But it was a memorial service and you make allowances.

Other highlights of the ceremony included a couple of choral numbers by some kids who actually use the center, and an agile dance on the political tightrope by Kerry Donley, the photogenic mayor of Alexandria, who declared that he had "objected to that war" though not, he hastened to add, to "the participants." I could almost see the road sign: Vietnam Participants Memorial Highway.

Into this curious patriotic mix came Heather Renee French, Miss America 2000, who led us in "God Bless America," the anthem that Rocky is reported to have loudly sung when he was isolated as "incorrigible" by his captors. Improbable, in my skeptical mind, but it does sound like something Rocky might do -- both to keep up his spirits and annoy the VC.

The ceremony concluded with a passable rendition of taps -- always risky for a bugler in front of an audience that has heard that mournful call played well and poorly on so many evenings in so many distant places. We adjourned to the vestibule to see a model of the memorial, then departed into the cool fall sunshine, passing the demonstrators who looked at us across a gulf of race and time and memory. They wondered, no doubt, as we did, "What are those people thinking?""