BATAVIA, Ohio — Heroes rarely materialize out of thin air. When one appeared a year ago in the barrel-chested figure of Donald R. Nicholson, the Vietnam War veterans of this hill county took to him like love-struck suitors. He was everything they were not.
A retired small-town police chief, Nick Nicholson, 62, walked into the Clermont County Vietnam Veterans of America post with a soldier's stride uneroded by three decades of civilian life. The men of VVA Chapter No. 649 sagged in the throes of middle age. Nicholson, who recounted tales of a harrowing stint as a prisoner of war, owned medals for battlefield valor. They had yellowing discharge papers.
The vets came along as an honor guard when Nicholson spoke to school assemblies. In February, they saluted him after he was pinned with a Distinguished Service Cross, the Army's second-highest award for bravery in combat.
"Here we were, rubbing elbows with a bona fide hero," said David Murrell, leader of the VVA chapter that welcomed Nicholson into its ranks. "We couldn't believe he wanted to join us."
When the Clermont County vets met a month later, they voted to expel Nicholson. He had never fought in Vietnam. His storied Army career was an invention, his medals bought from a memorabilia dealer. An ex-Navy sailor, Nicholson had been living in Florida in the late 1960s when he claimed to have fought and been captured by the Viet Cong. He was a prisoner only of his fertile imagination.
As the Vietnam War recedes into history, the collective experience of its veterans has become grist for a wave of counterfeit heroes. Their usurping of aging soldiers' honors is a peculiar mutation of war and remembrance, a phenomenon detonating like buried land mines in places like Batavia, communities where the exploits of Vietnam vets long have been cherished.
The homecomings that followed American wars almost always have produced sporadic outbreaks of fakery. Pretenders abounded among elderly veterans who claimed to be the last living survivors of the Civil War. Bogus World War II heroes still occasionally come to light.
But nearly three decades after the end of the Vietnam War, the surge of impostors has come as evidence, some observers say, that middle-age charlatans are making their last-chance run at glory now that the nation has renewed its respect for its warrior culture.
