Dennis Miner was driven to honor fallen Vietnam vets from Mendocino County – but also to make things right with his former neighbor, Helen Butler.|
Kenneth Butler was a passable rodeo cowboy and a kicker on the Willits High School football team. A handsome and confident young man, he graduated in 1966 and was drafted into the Army soon after.
Deployed to Vietnam in January 1968, he joined the C Troop 1/1 Armored Cavalry “Dragoons,” based northwest of Tam Ky, in the I Corps Tactical Zone.
On July 23 of that year, Butler was the track commander on an armored personnel carrier leading a convoy when it struck a land mine. He was the lone soldier killed.
The names of Butler and 21 others are engraved on a memorial of polished black granite, which stands beside the Mendocino County Museum in Willits.
That stark wall honors soldiers, sailors and airmen from Mendocino County who died in Vietnam. It was spearheaded and paid for by Dennis Miner, Butler’s former next-door neighbor.
“He was about four years older than me,” recalled Miner, now 72. And, while they weren’t close friends, “I did look up to him and listened to what he had to say about girls, cars and the military.”
Miner enlisted in the Army in 1971. He retired as a major 20 years later.
He didn’t deploy to Vietnam — he joined the service too late for that. But he has spent years in retirement working to honor those who did.
As a kind of follow-up and companion piece to that granite memorial in Willits, Miner compiled “Our Gallant Men,” a 60-page booklet providing detailed accounts of how and where each of those 22 Mendocino County service members died. He spent five years researching and writing it.
His “guiding principle” in chronicling those deaths, said Miner, was to share the following:
“Where they were. What their specific job was. What their unit was doing as it contributed to the war effort. And what happened to them while they were doing that job that made them a casualty.”
He undertook both projects to “honor the sacrifice” of the fallen, he said. In a narrower sense, Miner needed to make things right with Helen Butler.
Not long after Miner joined the Army, Kenny Butler’s mother, Helen, sent word that the next time he was home on leave, she would like to speak with him. But Miner never made it over to talk to her.
Condolences and catharsis
He was a professional warrior. But Miner was also afraid — that he lacked the words to properly console her.
Like Kenny Butler, Miner had specialized in armored cavalry.
“I couldn’t tell her that I’d been over in Germany, learning how to drive tanks, knocking down trees, having fun,” he recalled. “It wouldn’t have been appropriate.”
A half-century later, he found the words. Responding to a 2015 call for letters to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., he wrote to Helen — who’d been dead for two decades by then.
Still, Miner found it cathartic to compose these sentences:
“Kenny died so young and he missed so much. He missed not having children, birthdays, weddings, and reunions. He missed growing old with his wife and friends. Other classmates of his have died way too soon as well: a motorcycle accident by following too close, untreated cancer, drinking and driving, a drug addiction, etc. While those losses are tragic, they are without Honor. Kenny died while serving his country, doing what he thought was the right thing to do, like so many who have gone on before him, answering the Nation’s call … His name is etched in stone for future generations to see on The Wall and pay tribute. He is with good company.”
That was the year Miner executed his vision for a smaller “wall,” dedicated to fallen Vietnam vets from Mendocino County. The project was speedily approved, permitted and constructed — thanks in large part, Miner recalls, to the invaluable assistance of Linda Williams, a highly regarded reporter with the now-defunct Willits News.
“She’d been with the community paper all those years, went to all these meetings — she just knew how things worked, how to get things done,” says Miner.
Williams’ father was an Army veteran who’d served in Vietnam. She was happy to assist Miner, whom she recalls as “an interesting guy.”
“A lot of people don’t know how to approach government, or what you have to do to make things happen,” said Williams. She advised Miner to team up with the local American Legion chapter, and coached him on how to approach the county’s Board of Supervisors.
Conceived in May of 2015, the Fallen Vietnam War Veterans Memorial was unveiled less than six months later, on Veterans Day. Noting to the assembled crowd of 300 people that half of all American veterans feel disconnected from their communities, Miner described the new memorial as “a bridge” to help close the divide.
