MEDALS OF VALOR ARE GIVEN BACK IN PROTEST

A small band of American war veterans, including four who are on a hunger strike for peace, gently dropped 88 war medals, sent from around the country, at the base of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial yesterday to protest U.S. aid to the rebels fighting the Nicaraguan government.

The four fasters, two of whom had gone without food for 39 days, and 73-year-old Barbara Graves, the first civilian woman to receive the Bronze Star, paused in silence at the memorial. When they walked away, the base of the memorial was littered with a profusion of Bronze Stars, Purple Hearts and other military honors.

Graves, in a brief speech before the return of the medals, said she was "proud" to add her Bronze Star to the collection of medals "to renounce publicly any identification whatever with my government's murderous acts of death and destruction in Nicaragua and elsewhere throughout Central America."

She asserted that the current fight by the contras or counterrevolutionaries against the Nicaraguan government "is being born and bred of the mounting lies" of the administration, and she likened that fight to the war in Vietnam.

A Vietnam veteran from Clear Springs, Md., who returned his Silver Star, said he had accepted the medal "with pride" and renounced it now "with sadness. It is my small gesture in my wish to push back the forces of destruction, war and death in Central America."

One of the fasters, Charles Liteky, a Catholic chaplain in Vietnam who won the Medal of Honor for saving 20 men in a jungle firefight, turned in that medal on July 29. Yesterday, a second faster, George Mizo, followed him in that gesture, laying his Purple Heart on top of a camouflage jacket at the memorial's base.

The ceremony was part of a continuing protest that began after the Senate approved $100 million in aid to the contras last August. Liteky and Mizo, who have been fasting since Sept. 1, and Brian Willson and Duncan Murphy, who joined them Sept. 15, have said they hope to galvanize the country against contra aid. Each evening they hold a prayer vigil on the east steps of the U.S. Capitol.

Yesterday, they took their protest to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial and were joined by about 50 friends and supporters.

The protest was halted briefly when the demonstrators, marching from the Lincoln Memorial, were stopped by U.S. Park Police and told that demonstrations are prohibited at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. The protesters agreed to approach the memorial in a single line to lay their medals down.

When the protest was over, Park Police scooped up the medals to take them to a storage center.

The medals had come from places such as Portland, Maine, and Dayton, Ohio. One widow sent her husband's World War II medal from San Francisco, writing to protesters that he had believed in peace and she thought this would have been his wish.

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