*TC FALLBROOK, Calif. -- Just west of this quiet farming community -- a continent away from the stark, black wall in Washington that commemorates Americans killed in Vietnam -- are three weedy and rocky fields that are host to an equally chilling, if less dignified, memorial to the same war.
The fields, part of the sprawling Fallbrook Naval Weapons Station, contain an enduring symbol of that divisive conflict: more than 35,000 canisters filled with 23 million pounds of napalm, a deadly brew of benzene, gasoline and polystyrene plastic that turns into a flaming syrupy mass when ignited by white phosphorous.
Twenty years have passed since the fall of Saigon, but the best and brightest have yet to find a way to dispose of the Vietnam War's final cache of liquid fire.
Like chemical combatants ready for inspection, the cigar-shaped, olive drab canisters are arranged in neat rows with military precision, each 10-foot-long canister encased in its own open-sided wood crate, row after row, acre after acre, exposed for two decades to the wind and sun and rain.
An eerie stillness envelops the napalm fields of Fallbrook, broken only by the muffled sounds of heavy artillery being used miles away by Marines training at Camp Pendleton.
Some of the napalm canisters are still stamped with the manufacturer's 30-day warranty attesting to the contents' killing power. A few are leaking a gooey residue. Those that cannot be patched are taken to a toxic waste incinerator in Arkansas.
The specter of napalm bombs being dropped by American jets once aroused passionate debate, but the fate of this forgotten stockpile has now become a low-key battle of attrition, a bureaucratic mix of environmental concerns, budgetary restraints and governmental red tape.
The residents of Fallbrook, a rural and politically conservative community in northern San Diego County, have learned to live with the napalm -- which is said to be nonflammable without its detonators -- and with the occasional promise that there is light at the end of the hazardous waste tunnel.
Technicians and environmentalists, mindful that benzene is a car cinogen and that the crates are soaked with a toxic wood preserver, periodically check for leakage and air pollution. But mostly the canisters just serve as a staging area for jack rabbits, rattlesnakes and field rats.
After keeping the news media at bay for years, the Navy has decided to try to rehabilitate the weapon's image by allowing journalists to visit the napalm fields. Fallbrook residents have been offered tours.
"We're trying to demystify napalm," said Richard Williamson, spokesman for the Naval Ordnance Center in Seal Beach.
Despite its horrific image among many Americans, troops in the field said napalm saved innumerable American lives by repelling advances by the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese Army.
And scholar Guenter Lewy, in his book "America in Vietnam," argued that anti-war activists overstated their claims.
Still, Mr. Lewy doubted military assertions that napalm was used with surgical precision and only as a last resort. In truth, commanders enjoyed wide latitude to call for air strikes on civilians when they felt the enemy was hiding among them.
Whatever the statistical truth about the number of civilian casualties from napalm, it cannot be denied that its use became a rallying point for those opposed to the war.
In one of the angriest of his anti-war poems, Allen Ginsberg wrote: "Under the world there's pain, fractured thighs, napalm burning in black hair, phosphorous eating elbows to the bone."
Today, the United States has eliminated napalm from its arsenal.
In 1978, the Air Force declared the Fallbrook napalm to be surplus and ordered it demilitarized. Three plans by the Navy and environmental agencies in the intervening years to have it carted off and buried or recycled have failed for economic or regulatory reasons. Now, the Navy is planning to pay a company to extract it from the aluminum canisters and send it by rail across the country for use as fuel in high-temperature kilns at cement plants.
"It doesn't scare me anymore," said Jennifer Gaggero, who can see some of the canisters on the horizon from the back of the Good Earth nursery she runs with her parents. "I used to be worried about lightning striking it, but you can only worry about something for so long and then you have to stop."
Navy and civilian officials insist that, for all its fiery legacy, the napalm poses no danger to Fallbrook and that only the ultra-hot temperatures induced by burning white phosphorous can ignite napalm. Even the heat of a blowtorch would not be sufficient to ignite the stored napalm, officials say.
"It's an unusual problem, but it doesn't present any immediate health hazards to anyone," said Rich Varenchik, spokesman for the state Department of Toxic Substance Control. "We could give them a deadline to have the stuff out, but we're not inclined to do that."