Charlie Waters, tireless advocate for Fresno veterans, dies

Charlie Waters, the Korean War combat veteran who battled in peace to secure a solid roof over the heads of his fellow veterans in Fresno, died Thursday. He was 82.

Mr. Waters made Fresno his home for the past two decades.

“Charlie Waters was not just a great man, he was a shining example of selflessness and service to others,” Mayor Ashley Swearengin said. “His tireless work on behalf of Fresno and its veterans is a testament to his unwavering love for his home and his country.”

Rep. Jim Costa, the Fresno Democrat, called Waters “a great champion of veterans throughout the Valley and our nation.”

Assemblyman Jim Patterson, the 23rd District Republican from Fresno, said “There is no doubt that Charlie was a hard-charging Marine who fought for our veterans. His many accomplishments were prompted by a deep-down and genuine love for people. We will all miss him, and will continue to be inspired by his refusal to give up.”

Thomas J. Fitzgerald III, acting director of the Veterans Administration Central California Health Care System, said VA officials and residents alike were “blessed to have known him and have been touched by his will, his leadership and his vision.

“He will be missed, but his legacy will live on through the many lives that he has touched.”

In an interview with The Bee last year, Mr. Waters reviewed a life that began Sept. 17, 1932 when he was born in a neighborhood that is now part of Norfolk, Virginia.

His father was a career naval officer who was wounded several times in World War II. His mother died of pneumonia when he was 3.

“I don’t know what a mother is,” Mr. Waters said. “I’ve often wondered.”

His father soon remarried, creating a blended family of five that included two stepbrothers. Mr. Waters said his stepmother had firm ideas about the new order.

“She didn’t need another woman’s child,” he said.

Mr. Waters was hustled across the continent to Tomales in Northern California. He lived on a dairy farm belonging to paternal relatives. He said he became in short order “a country boy.”

Mr. Waters was 17, his junior year of high school out of the way, when 75,000 North Korean fighters poured across the 38th parallel. The Korean War was still red-hot a year later when Mr. Waters, high school diploma in hand, joined some friends for a low-level council of war.

“We flipped a coin,” Mr. Waters said. “We were going to join something. We farm boys were going to fight. The Marines won.”

The Marines took all those Tomales men. The next few months consisted of “my romance with boot camp,” Mr. Waters said. He was on the Korean Peninsula by early 1952, fighting with a mortar company in the 1st Marine Division.

Mr. Waters said he was a spotter, treading into no-man’s land to locate the enemy and sending details by radio to others in his mortar company.

The North Koreans were in front of him. A lot of empty space was behind him. Perfect.

“As a crazy country boy, I relished the excitement,” Mr. Waters said. “I felt more comfortable out there.”

Mr. Waters served 13 months in Korea.

“So many of my friends got hurt or killed,” Mr. Waters said. “You’re talking with them one minute, and the the next minute there’s nothing left of them. Some would be wounded and dying, and they wanted to talk.

“That affects you. I have a great affinity for anyone who would go into service and volunteer their life. So, whatever I can do for my comrades, I do.”

But much would happen before Mr. Waters settled into his role as veterans advocate.

There was another four-year hitch in the Marines, this one inspired less by a fighting spirit and more by the promise of overseas duty in a U.S. embassy. Mr. Waters said his time at the American embassy in Montevideo, Uruguay, did much to broaden a country boy’s perspective.

All told, Mr. Waters served from 1951 to 1958.

The decades flew by.

Mr. Waters said he worked nine years as an aide for H.L. Hunt Jr., the Texas oil billionaire whose private eccentricities were said to be an inspiration for the nighttime soap opera “Dallas.”

“I traveled to every country he went looking for oil,” Mr. Waters said.

Mr. Waters earned a couple of degrees from Southern Methodist University. He learned how to fight oil-field fires. He married. He and his wife moved from Dallas to Fresno in the 1990s to be near her parents.

It was then, as he entered his mid-60s and lure of monthly Social Security checks loomed, that Mr. Waters hit his stride. He would champion the needs and interests of veterans.

There wasn’t much mystery to his style.

“When I see something that’s not right, I raise all kinds of hell,” Mr. Waters said.

Mr. Waters grilled political candidates, probing their sincerity to flag and warrior. He raged against demonstrators who insisted that free speech includes obscenity-laced protests near military funerals. He joined veterans and friends of the Hmong community at a public vigil to remember the late Gen. Vang Pao.

But Mr. Waters never forgot that the main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing, in civilian as well as military life. And the main thing for him was veterans housing and health care.

For example, Gov. Jerry Brown and the Legislature in mid-2012 came under fire from Mr. Waters for cutting funds for the Fresno veterans home. This delayed the arrival of the first residents.

“The doors aren’t open,” Mr. Waters said at the time. “We will celebrate only when wounded veterans have a room in the home.”

The place would open and the veterans would come. About 150 people gathered around Mr. Waters in early September 2014 as a bronze bust of the country boy from Tomales was unveiled at the home in southwest Fresno.

That unveiling occurred on Sept. 3, 2014 – exactly one year before his death.

Besides his involvement with the veterans home, Mr. Waters was on the Fresno Marine Corps League, the Fresno Veterans Day Parade committee, the American Legion and Toys for Tots.

Mr. Waters’ final years were marked by a race.

There was so much still to do, he said. The local veterans hospital needed to be expanded and modernized. A single veterans home in this part of the Valley wasn’t enough. Fresno had to have its own memorial district.

Mr. Waters said he couldn’t put enough irons in the fire.

“I thrive on it,” he said.

But cancer was beating him. Mr. Waters said doctors in 2013 “cut me open and took out everything inside of my face on the right side.”

Mr. Waters knew how he looked.

“I didn’t know where to put food — there was a hole in there somewhere,” he said.

But Mr. Waters stayed at his post, be it in front of a microphone, camera or battery of timid politicians.

“I just know I have to do what I have to do,” Mr. Waters said. “Till I’m Frankenstein, I’ll be doing it.”

Mr. Waters leaves in his wake considerable sweat deposited on a distant dairy farm, brave service rendered in harm’s way for his country, wild sights viewed from the shadow of the world’s richest man and restored faith among aging veterans who owe their “three hots and a cot” in part to a man who never knew the woman who brought him into the world.

Mr. Waters in the October interview was asked if he thought his mother, surely looking down from heaven, was proud of her son.

“No,” Mr. Waters said. “I’ve got many things to do yet.”

This story was originally published September 3, 2015 at 2:53 PM with the headline "Charlie Waters, tireless advocate for Fresno veterans, dies."