Veterans Unfurl War Memories, Hopes for Future

Honor.

It showed Monday in the crisp American flags that old soldiers and sailors unfurled on Ojai Avenue in memory of Veterans Day.

It hung in the hot air with the tang of gun smoke, as the last sharp burst of a rifle squad’s 21-gun salute gave way to a bugler blowing taps at Conejo Creek Park.

It crackled like electricity between old war comrades at Veterans Day ceremonies across Ventura County as they joshed, traded war stories and somberly remembered fallen friends.

And as they paid tribute to the battles they fought and the comrades who fell in Belgium, Korea, Vietnam and Kuwait, the county’s veterans mourned honor as an American value that is on the skids.

Some complained about the government’s late acknowledgment of Gulf War syndrome, others about the lack of care for ill and aging veterans, and still others about the decline in quality of life for the nation’s youth.

Army Lt. Gen. Herbert Temple told nearly 100 veterans and their families at Conejo Creek Park in Thousand Oaks that American life has decayed into gang violence, drug use, disintegrating families and teenage promiscuity.

“Our wartime heroes wanted something better as payment for their sacrifice,” said Temple, a veteran who served in the Vietnam and Korean war eras. “So far, we have failed to pay our debt to those servicemen. . . . We can do better, and we must do better.”

Some Ventura County vets echoed his concern.

“A lot of it rings so true,” said Coast Guard veteran Tom Baker, 38, who served in Saudi Arabia during the Gulf War. “We’ve got a lot of problems, but we can take care of them.”

“This is why I brought my daughter here today, and this is what I tell her, whether she gets involved with military service or some other kind of service,” said Baker, a Moorpark High School math teacher, standing tall in tan camouflage fatigues with 10-year-old Noel by his side. “You give back what you were given by taking part.”

World War II Army paratrooper Emmett “Rosie” Nolan remembered the flood of gratitude he felt when he returned home to a V-E Day parade in New York City 50 years ago, a year after the war ended.

“If you were in uniform, you couldn’t walk into a restaurant or a bar and buy a drink. They wouldn’t let you pay,” recalled Nolan, 72, of Thousand Oaks. “The gratitude . . . we lost all of that, and we never gained it back until after the Iranian hostage crisis.”

Nolan added, “We throw away billions of dollars for drunks and dope addicts and people standing around with their hand out, and we don’t do anything for the vets.”

But some vets are continuing to give to the country, and to their own.

Veterans in Ojai last summer rescued a monument to World War I veterans that sat at the edge of a parking lot overgrown by bushes.

The members of American Legion Post 482 moved the small boulder and bronze plaque into Libbey Park. And they set it into a landscaped site to become the centerpiece of a new monument to all of Ojai’s casualties of war, said Jim Rodgers, the post’s adjutant commander.

The post is preparing a design concept contest and hopes to build the new monument within the next two years, Rodgers said.

On Monday, Ojai American Legion post members marked Veterans Day by unfurling more than a dozen American flags along Ojai Avenue.

And Ventura architect LeRoy Anderson spoke of plans he is pushing to have a 400-bed home for elderly veterans built in a citrus orchard in east Ventura.

Developers have donated the land, and the city is ready to proceed, he said.

Now, after five years of heavy lobbying, the veterans home plan will go next week to a hearing in San Diego before a governor’s commission. The commission is to choose the last of four sites for such homes--the first is open in Barstow, and two others are slated for Chula Vista and Lancaster.

Anderson said that Ventura’s climate and proximity to the beach make it a strong candidate as the site for the home, to be built with federal and state funding.

“There are several million veterans living in California,” said Anderson, 75, who served as a USO musician with the Army during World War II. “We have an obligation to provide health facilities and get help for them.”

That would suit vets such as retired Air Force Capt. Bob Bembrooks, 69, of Westlake Village just fine.

“I know money’s scarce, but you can’t spend it any better way than on veterans and their needs,” said Bembrooks, who has two sons and a daughter in the services and a son-in-law who fought in Vietnam.

“There were so few people here today,” he lamented. “Everyone’s concerned with themselves and their own needs these days. They don’t think about their freedom and the people that fought for it.”