`SOMEONE HAD TO DO THIS ...'; AND STEVE KLEIN PUT VIETNAM MEMORIAL INTO 40-FOOT BOOK.

Byline: Heesun Wee Daily News Staff Writer

When United States troops were penetrating the jungles of South Vietnam three decades ago, Steve Klein told his father, a World War II veteran, that he refused to support American involvement in the war.

``You're crazy for objecting,'' Klein's father said.

``These are different times,'' replied Klein, then in his 20s.

But Klein's internal struggle with a war that would become the United States' longest and would leave more than 58,000 Americans dead did not end there. He and the Vietnam War would meet again.

Six years ago, while visiting family in Washington, D.C., he toured the Vietnam Veterans Memorial wall for the first time. He watched visitors stretch out arms and caress names - each letter sandblasted into the black granite - of those who died in the war or are still missing. Klein noticed something else, too.

``Everybody takes pictures,'' said Klein, now 55. ``That's when I decided it needed to be put together as a whole.''

The inspiration turned into an obsession.

Six years and $40,000 later, Klein has re-created the memorial in book form. It's believed to be the only one of its kind - a print replica of the entire wall, all 58,214 names of Americans visible to the unaided eye.

The challenge lay in capturing the memorial's names minus the images of visitors, trees and cumulus clouds mirrored in the stubbornly reflective black granite. It's a feat that eluded professional photographers from around the world. But not Klein, an amateur.

He overcame obstacles through trial and error. He relied on his inventiveness, compassion and patience - the same traits he had used to survive three wars in the Middle East.

Klein stuck by his book because, a generation after the Vietnam War, its goals, conduct and lessons still confuse and divide many Americans.

In 1995, former Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara, credited as the Vietnam War's chief architect, revealed the United States ``could and should have withdrawn from South Vietnam'' as early as 1963. Veterans felt betrayed.

Conflicting emotions about the war resurfaced earlier this month when current Defense Secretary William S. Cohen cautiously ordered reopening the Tomb of the Unknowns so scientists could conduct genetic tests on remains of unknown Vietnam War servicemen. They had been interred alongside other unidentified servicemen from World War I, World War II and the Korean War.

Klein, who was never called to serve, knows his lack of service in Vietnam will annoy some Americans. But he says his book isn't about atoning for a war he protested and did not fight. The book instead focuses on healing a country whose Vietnam wounds remain gaping and exposed. It's about reconciling a war for a generation, his generation, and educating his children and their children about war Klein's way - through his book, ``The Living Wall.''

You could say the monument had been sizing up photographers since its dedication in 1982, patiently waiting for an eligible suitor and finally settling on the one who was willing to linger despite the quirks.

``Someone had to do this some time,'' Klein said. ``This issue is still alive.''

Klein wasn't the first to envision reproducing the monument on paper. Four years ago, the nonprofit Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund in Washington, D.C. - the group that conceived the idea for the monument and raised nearly $9 million from Americans to build it - paid professional photographers $47,000 to take pictures without reflections.

``They couldn't do it,'' said Libby Hatch, director of the fund's special projects. Fund employees recently learned about ``The Living Wall'' and ordered 100 copies. Even the National Park Service that oversees the monument doesn't have a set of photographs documenting the memorial.

But Klein didn't let botched attempts dissuade him. He tried photographing the wall from various angles. He used combinations of flashes. He shot at high noon when the sun hung directly overhead, at 3 a.m. when the park is dark and nearly empty. He donned black clothes in a futile attempt to camouflage his reflection in his photos.

Klein declined to spill the details about how he got clean photos of the

monument. Although not a computer technology expert, he knows enough to conclude that someone could copy his work with directions, post results on the Internet and render his book obsolete.

But anxieties and intricacies involving the book's production faded into the background in April when Klein expanded his 40-foot-long book accordion-style across a Russell Senate Office Building room in Washington, D.C. Congressmen, including former Vietnam combat veterans, stared.

Klein then handed a book to Kim Phuc in whose honor the group had gathered. Thirty years ago, a photographer captured a young Phuc fleeing her Vietnamese village during a bombing raid. The image won a 1972 Pulitzer Prize.

``I'm going to cry,'' she said to Klein.

And so they stood, side-by-side, two people who know firsthand of war.

Klein confessed he was surprised how much the memorial affected him and others like him - people not directly connected to Vietnam.

``It overwhelms you. You're not only looking at the names but you're looking at yourself. You're looking at your reactions,'' he said. ``It's a very live wall.''

But after you get to know Klein - come to comprehend his ingenuity, generosity and perseverance - you realize no one else but Klein could have documented the memorial through 500 pictures and compiled them into a book.

For starters, Klein is a thinker, an idea man. He has a knack for studying an object or situation that he says ``speaks to him,'' propelling him to tinker with his fingers the size of beefy breakfast sausages, pushing him to engage his mind that earned him the position of high school valedictorian.

It was this inventive side of Klein that two years ago began fashioning wine bottles as small as a pinkie finger from life-size flasks, complete with tiny shards of original corks, to pay the bills.

Klein also is a giver and a doer. He's compassionate when there's no immediate, personal gain - at least to the extent his pocketbook will allow. Klein's father made sure his son - born in the Bronx and raised in the San Fernando Valley - knew about right and wrong, the Holocaust, acting and speaking against racism and other injustices when they're not directed at you, because one day, without warning, they can be about you.

That's why for 35 years, the former marriage and family counselor gave kindness to people who had never known it, to children who killed and to children who survived near killings by their parents until, Klein says, the HMOs killed his career.

But perhaps above all, Klein is a man of patience - the deep kind a parent affords a child. He exudes an almost unnerving equilibrium and calmness that don't leave him, no matter how harrowing the circumstance. Israeli military leaders recognized this and promoted him to captain during the War of Attrition with Egypt from 1968 to 1970. They knew - and hoped - Klein would use his fortitude to supervise a volatile group of Russian and Israeli soldiers who didn't get along. Men who would put his life in danger.

But he would endure, just as he would decades later, visiting the memorial six times for his book.

At 23, Klein decided if he was going to war, it would be for a cause that seemed clearer than Vietnam. Jewish, he would fight for Israel in three wars, including the Six-Day and Yom Kippur wars. Years later, however, his youthful resolve would make him pause the way big life decisions invariably do with hindsight. Life, Klein says, is not so black and white after all.

One night in the Sinai Desert during the War of Attrition, he and his troops fired across the Suez Canal at Egyptians. Everytime a shell landed remotely nearby, the ground shook.

That night, one of Klein's men screwed up and didn't fill the cannons with flashless powder. They fired and lit themselves up like daylight.

Egyptians' shells grew louder and closer, until one whizzed by Klein with an unforgettable, screeching sound. It landed about a dozen feet from him. No explosion. It was a dud. He couldn't hear for four days.

Three decades later, Klein carries a picture of himself standing on a tank in the searing heat of that same desert that forced him to travel by night and dig foxholes by day for sleep. He tucks the picture in his worn black wallet, next to photos of his grandchildren. It reminds him of life, he said. The fact that he is alive.

And while he's here, Klein says, he might as well do something useful, something original, something like ``The Living Wall.''

``If I'm doing something someone else has done, there isn't any reason for me to be on the planet.''

CAPTION(S):

2 Photos

Photo: (1--Cover--Color) TO HEAL HIS NATION

An Encino grandfather's quest to document the Vietnam Veterans Memorial

(2) Steve Klein shows off ``The Living Wall,'' his book that reproduces all of the names on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.

Tom Mendoza/Daily News