TALE OF TWO HEROES: DISTANCE RUNNER MAINTAINS VIETNAM VET’S MEMORIAL BEHIND PRADO DAM

District Public Affairs Chief Fred-Otto Egeler, himself a decorated Vietnam War veteran, polishes a comrade-in-arm's marker

One, Navy 1LT Dennis Cook, died April 6, 1966. His A4E jet accidentally fell from an aircraft carrier into the South China Sea offshore South Vietnam. His body was never recovered. He was 29, a husband and father to two young daughters.

The other, Tim Barden, is a Rhode Island-born insurance underwriting manager from Costa Mesa, Calif. Now 45 and the father of a teenaged son and daughter, Barden is a dedicated distance runner, averaging 35 miles a week. He has never been in the military.

Their paths improbably crossed in the wilderness behind the Corps’ massive Prado Dam east of Los Angeles. It’s countryside long familiar to District archaeologist Steve Dibble, himself now drawn into the saga of the Navy pilot and the patriotic runner. For years, Dibble has walked through the tall grasses and past brooding eucalyptus trees behind the giant earthen dam, finding and preserving archaeological artifacts.

He was also used his forensic skills on three MIA recovery missions to Vietnam and Laos in 1996, 1997 and 1999 with the Central Identification Laboratory. That experience would affect his response this fall when an unexpected e-mail landed in his queue.

Barden likes to run in wooded areas, and began exploring trails in the Cleveland National Forest north of his suburban Orange County home. In 1994, Barden was running in the alluvial basin behind the dam when he saw something strange. Curious, he jogged closer. “I was meandering down the trail, off the beaten path,” he recalls. “I saw a little clearing and a flagpole, then came across this plaque.”

It was a grave marker inscribed: “Lt. Dennis Cook, Killed in Action, April 6, 1966.”

Most people would have sighed and moved on. Most people would have forgotten about the lonely memorial. Most people wouldn’t have bothered to find out who Dennis Cook was.

Tim Barden wasn’t most people.

The memorial is surrounded by eucalyptus trees and a protective fence

Ever since, whenever he was jogging in the area, Barden would stop by for a few moments to pay his respects. So it was with some concern that he recently saw signs of the District’s massive project to elevate Prado Dam by 28.4 feet and its spillway by 20 feet. Dozens of workers and huge machines were passing within a few meters of the memorial, now behind a wooden fence built as a noise barrier to protect wildlife.

Barden wrote the District, asking: “Why isn’t anyone maintaining this memorial for this serviceman?” The message was forwarded to Dibble.

The runner also posted a note on a Vietnam War Memorial Web site and soon heard from Lt. Cook’s 62-year-old widow, Barbara (“Bobbi”) Cook Klein, and the officer’s sister, Claudia Cook Tamblin. Klein, recently widowed again, lives in Los Altos, Calif., and Tamblin works in Santa Cruz, Calif.

In June 2004 Tamblin wrote the following for a database page about Lt. Cook:

My brother Dennis was killed in 1966 in an aircraft carrier accident while he was aboard the USS Hancock in the South China Sea. He and his plane were not recovered. The catapult malfunctioned and gave him some power but not enough and he was not able to eject. He was a father of two baby girls, Laura and Christa, who were only 3 and 2 years old at the time. It was a tragedy that they never knew him as he was a wonderful loving man and would have been a terrific father for them. Now they are married and have babies so I am excited to be invited to the birthdays as a reminder that Dennis would be there too. Dennis had so many friends wherever he went. The 20-30 Club in Corona, Calif., had a plaque and flagpole memorial built for him at a Boy Scout camp in 1967. He was a great brother and I really miss him.

Moved by that passage, Barden began a quiet campaign to make sure the memorial was preserved, either at Prado or elsewhere. He was encouraged in the effort by archaeologist Dibble. “I am particularly pleased that someone is showing an interest in the memorial,” Dibble wrote him. “Although I am not a veteran I have a particular interest and feeling for such things,” citing his MIA work in Indochina.

And after Tamblin contacted her former sister-in-law, Bobbi wrote back too, calling her first husband “a remarkable young man”:

I don’t know exactly what is in store for the marker….Since Dennis was born and raised in Santa Barbara and was an active Boy Scout and Eagle Scout, we would love it to continue to be in a Boy Scout arena—in the Corona area or possibly in the Santa Barbara areas.

Why Prado? Cook’s Scout Troop 11 was in Santa Barbara, but Corona-area Boy Scout troops were planning a camp near the Corps dam. Moreover, the young officer was stationed at the Naval Ordnance Laboratory in Corona 1962-65, and he and Bobbi lived there then. Afterwards, he was assigned to Lemoore Naval Air Station near Fresno before joining his squadron aboard the Hancock in December 1965.

Dr. Augustine Ramirez, principal of Corona’s Norco Junior High School in the 1960s, was a friend and neighbor of the Cooks. After Dennis’s death, he organized the effort to memorialize him behind Prado. Enlisting the aid of Corona’s 20-30 Club, of which Dennis was once president, Ramirez received donations from more than 70 individuals and groups. “It was a labor of love,” says Ramirez, who later became superintendent of the Norco-Corona School District. “We thought the world of him, and my wife and kids were very close to his. He’d do anything for you.”

The words Augie Ramirez wrote for his friend

Ralph Moore, Cook’s cousin in Santa Barbara, was a few years ahead of him in scouting. After the South China Sea accident, Moore says truckloads of rocks from the Rancho Allegra Scout Camp near Lake Cachuma, where the cousins had camped as Scouts, were taken to Prado. “They put it in the memorial as backfill,” he remembers.

As a boy, Cook was also hooked on flying. His sister Claudia recalls that their parents had a friend who was a Navy pilot and once took them to see the Blue Angels in San Diego. “From that time on my brother had model airplane mobiles hanging in his room from the ceiling,” she says. “He went to Cal Poly to major in architecture but ended up changing to aeronautical engineering.” Before completing his degree, he signed up in Pensacola, Fla., to become a Navy pilot. “I think after he had his family he may have wanted to come home and fly commercial,” she adds.

That was not to be.

Instead, 38 years later, a man he never met is helping to preserve Dennis Cook’s memory. After he learned about the man behind the monument, Barden took photos of it, scanned them and e-mailed them to Cook’s widow and sister. “I wanted her to have them for a photo album for their kids,” he explains.

Barden’s own kids figure into his actions. Jason is 17, Alyssa 15, “and I told them they’ve got to do some things for other people, like supporting veterans, not always doing things just for yourself. Maybe it was passing the baton. Maybe they’ll take it on themselves.”

Though he was never in uniform, his father was in the Air Force, an older brother in the Army, and he had older friends who’d served in Vietnam. “I saw how they came back,” he remembers, “and I wondered why they were being treated like that. I had a soft spot for Vietnam vets. They never talked about it.” One buddy in particular, Mike Bell, had been in Vietnam for two tours. “That’s all he ever said about it,” Barden says. “He lives life on the edge.”

So when he discovered Dennis Cook’s plaque amid the eucalyptus trees, the distance runner reacted. “Here’s this thing out in the middle of nowhere,” he explains. “Someone obviously had put in some effort, and it was getting overgrown, neglected. I just felt an obligation.

“These folks (Vietnam vets) had been passed over when they came back. There’s still probably a bunch out there who deserve more than they got.”

Cook and Barden. Barden and Cook. They never knew each other. But through a destiny that cannot be explained—only accepted—they now share the mantra engraved in marble at the memorial:

By your life only can you prove

Your principles to the world

And show to all

There a life worth living….