Jan Scruggs keeps up the fight to build education center at Vietnam Veterans Memorial

May 28, 1969. Xuan Loc, South Vietnam.

Two companies of the Army’s 199th Light Infantry Brigade are slogging along a trail leading out of the forest where they have just had a bloody encounter with the enemy the day before.

About 9:30 a.m., they run into the North Vietnamese again, and more fighting breaks out. Among the American soldiers is Pfc. Jan C. Scruggs, a shy, skinny 19-year-old from Bowie, the son of a milkman and a waitress. He has been out of high school less than a year.

Scruggs hits the ground looking for something to shoot at. He moves behind a tree. In an instant, a rocket-propelled grenade explodes in the place he has just vacated.

More grenades land. Scruggs is riddled with shrapnel. He has a folded poncho tucked inside the back of his pistol belt to protect his spine, where he feared he might be shot. Now, he has holes in a dozen places. He touches a spot near his right armpit, and his hand comes away bloody.

Bullets are flying. People are screaming. A buddy with part of his shoulder blown off drops his rifle and runs. The platoon sergeant dashes to bring him back. Scruggs is alone. I’m going to die, he thinks. In this stupid little battle, in this hellhole patch of Vietnam, at age 19. He says the Lord’s Prayer and passes out.

***

On a sunny day in Orlando earlier this year, Jan Scruggs, now 62, ambled up to Vietnam War veterans hanging around an old “deuce and a half” Army truck on display, and introduced himself.

The men were gathered in a park where Scruggs was scheduled to speak the next day, and a half-scale aluminum model of the famous Vietnam Wall in Washington was set up nearby.

Scruggs looked a little formal in his navy blazer, jeans and loafers with tassels.

The vets, in T-shirts, greeted him.

“I’m Jimmy Cregan,” said a 63-year-old Chicago retiree who was a helicopter gunner in Vietnam in ’68 and ’69. “What can we help you with?”

“Well, I’m here with the Vietnam Memorial,” Scruggs said.

“Oh, are you?” Cregan said. “You in charge of this whole thing?”

“Yeah,” Scruggs said. “I’m the guy from D.C., the Vietnam Wall guy.”

It’s not clear whether the vets realized he is the Vietnam Wall guy, the guy who 30 years ago, as a gawky-looking ex-grunt in jeans and flannel shirts, got the idea that the names of all those who gave up their lives in that war might be etched in the city that sent them to their fate.

Back then, nobody even knew exactly how many Americans the war had devoured. All most people knew was that it was over and best forgotten. Now here came this naive, unsophisticated young man striding into the jungle of the Washington bureaucracy with a notion.

Who was this guy from nowhere to intrude on the sanctity and protocols of the hallowed Mall?

He turned out to be a stubborn guy who persevered through all the jokes and the politics and the funding, and the doubts and anger and the aesthetic battles to get the shiny black granite wall bearing all those names.

In a way, he’s the guy responsible for all the war memorials built on the Mall since. The Wall is considered a precedent, an inspiration, for the Korean and World War II memorials that followed.