For a motorist, driving by the corner of 192nd Street and Burnham Avenue, the effect is startling. A helicopter, tilted awkwardly in the air, is landing on a tree-fringed knoll to rescue a wounded soldier. The scene is straight out of Vietnam. The place, the southern suburb of Lansing.
During the last five years, backed by private contributions and considerable community energy, a small group of veterans has developed the Lansing Veterans Memorial, which now includes flags, pathways, markers, replicas of battlefield insignia and a memorial wall, into a major attraction in the area.
Searching for further funding, the backers are going nationwide, as Thomas Luberda explained the other day over lunch at Shannon`s Landing, a restaurant at Lansing Airport, the site of the memorial.
To raise funds, Luberda said, memorial backers are selling flight-crew helmets from Operation Desert Storm for $200 apiece. They have printed a brochure to help obtain corporate and individual donations.
They are selling bricks in the walk and spaces for names on the wall. They are collecting airplanes for what will become, its backers hope, an air museum and summer camp for young people interested in military aviation.
The project was started in 1987, in conversations between Luberda, who works in equipment services for an airline at Midway Airport; Craig Greenhill, a route salesman for a bread company; Tom DeBold, a route salesman for another bread company; DeBold`s wife, Norine, who works for Amvets; and Ed Misczak, a railroad engineer, who wound up handling public relations.
”What do you think if I get a helicopter and get the mayor to give us a spot, with a flagpole and a plaque?” Luberda told DeBold, who thought it was a fine idea.
So did Lansing`s mayor, William Balthis. Backed by the Vietnam Veterans of America Post 153 and the Chicago Southeast Side Vietnam Veterans, the not- for-profit Lansing Veterans Memorial Foundation was set up.
The group turned to former U.S. Rep. Jack Davis, who helped in negotiations to obtain a Vietnam-era UH1B helicopter stored at Glenview Naval Air Base. The Huey, looking like a trash heap, was full of spare tires, plastic bags of dried leaves and mounds of loose wires. Volunteers put it back in shape, painted it, patched bullet holes and carted it to Lansing.
Other volunteers, totaling nearly 100, pitched in to design and landscape the quarter-acre site, which now includes a small hill, planted with scrub trees and bamboo-like shoots, 80 feet of pathways and a wall inscribed with names of residents of Lansing who have died while serving their country.
The memorial, Luberda and others make clear, is designed to honor all fallen veterans. ”Although the scene is from the Vietnam War,” the brochure notes, ”it depicts the patriotism and sacrifice exhibited by all veterans.” List of the dead
Its wall will list all residents of Lansing (about 40) who have been killed in wartime since the founding of the village in 1846. In addition, names of fallen veterans from outside Lansing will be engraved, for a $250 donation from those wishing to pay tribute to them. Donors of $500 or more to the foundation will have their names engraved on a contributors wall.
”The way this memorial has developed is that people have been coming out of the woodwork, volunteering to do different things,” Luberda said.
So far, $100,000 for the project has been raised at veterans appreciation days and from supporters who have dug into their pockets to defray many expenses. Local companies donated cement, gravel, electrical materials and granite. Volunteer workers restored the helicopter, helped with landscaping, built a 15-foot-high mountain and laid the walkways.
One of the walks leads to the POW/MIA Meditation Area, ”an area that was purposely separated to symbolize the separation of our POWs from their loved ones and country,” Luberda said.
Other pathways, up the hill to a clearing, give visitors a sense of what it was like in Vietnam, at a time of artillery barrages, firefights and chopper evacuations in similar terrain.
Copter carries a message
The memorial`s planners chose a Huey, said Luberda, who spent 13 months with the Marine Corps at Danang, because that helicopter ”served multiple roles. It wasn`t just death and destruction. It was a gunship, but it was also a medical evacuation aircraft.”
As the fundraising brochure notes, ”The helicopter was used over and over to exhibit the best of man`s humanity to man as depicted in the memorial by the saving of a comrade`s life.”
A multifaceted memorial, Luberda believes, would help him, and many other veterans, sort out their feelings about patriotism, military service and, in his case, Vietnam, a place that often jolts into his consciousness.
”Greenhouses remind me of Vietnam,” he said, remembering a climate where going outside was ”like getting hit in the face with a hot towel.”
It`s the same with smoldering wood fires, the patter of rain on a roof, many airplane sounds and certain tunes from the `60s. Bushes at the base of the memorial look like those in Vietnam.
Vietnam was a war without a front, ”like a street fight,” Luberda said. It also had sounds of its own, for example, the sound of a Huey. ”It was unmistakable,” he said. ”You heard one before you ever saw it.”
”That `whup, whup` sound, it always brings back Vietnam,” added Craig Greenhill, who served in Vietnam in the Army in the early `70s.
Luberda and the other backers hope the Lansing Veterans Memorial will help heal wounds left by memories of that unpopular war, both for Vietnam veterans, who often have felt estranged from the American mainstream, and for veterans of other conflicts who felt left out during ceremonies at other memorials honoring Vietnam War dead, such as the famous Vietnam Veterans Memorial that has become a Washington landmark.
”Ours is a national veterans memorial, built by a small community, just outside Chicago,” Luberda said of the Lansing memorial. ”We`re all brothers, especially when we talk about war and what happened to us.”
Later, a museum
The initial phase of the project, backers say, needs another $150,000, as well as substantial donations of volunteer time and materials, for statuary and completion of the marble memorial wall.
The long-term aims in Lansing, Luberda said, include establishing ”a museum and a weekend summer camp for young aviators, with lectures and films, giving a history of search and rescue, its role in Korea and Vietnam, plus lectures on aeronautical skills.”
That would depend on obtaining funding from private and corporate sources.
”A lot of corporations made a lot of money supplying materials in times of war,” Luberda said. ”Now, we`re looking for some who are willing to help veterans honoring their brethren. Few corporations are interested in memorials, but there is grant money available for museums.”
The federal government, which has no interest in starting its own military museum, is discarding militarily obsolete material from the Vietnam era, which means that the pool of historic items is drying up.
Luberda and other backers of the Lansing memorial have collected uniforms, machine guns, grenade launchers, flak jackets, radios and three planes-and would like more.
”This is a Cessna O2A,” Luberda said, pointing out a disheveled aircraft during a tour of back garages at Lansing Airport.
”It was used for forward air patrol in Vietnam. They flew low and slow, calling in air strikes, spotting downed pilots.” Another Cessna parked nearby, he added, ”flew over the Ho Chi Minh Trail.”
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For information, write to Lansing Veterans Memorial Fund, Lansing Airport, Lansing, Ill. 60438.
