Vanishing Vets

The guys down at the VFW hall in Costa Mesa were talking about baseball, poker and why they don’t have a ladies auxiliary here at Post 3536 any more.

“They’re getting up so far in age there just isn’t anyone” around, said John McNett.

Not that the men themselves are youngsters.

At 57, McNett was the next-to-youngest vet at one recent meeting. His lodge mates ranged on up to 72. Their spirits were more than willing, but for a few, the flesh wasn’t what it once was. This one limped; that one shuffled. They escaped the Japanese and the Germans, but they couldn’t dodge time.

As the VFW prepares for Memorial Day, when the poppies get sold, the graves get decorated and the members remind themselves why they joined, the image is one of age: the many, the proud, the old.

The VFW limits membership to those who served in a theater of war and have the campaign or expeditionary medal to prove it. The American Legion takes those who served stateside during time of war as well.

The VFW now counts as eligible for membership troops who took part in the invasions of Grenada in 1983 and Panama last December, and the American Legion is considered likely to follow suit at its national convention this summer.

The expansion of eligibility increases the chances of getting younger members. But as they look at communism’s swoon in Eastern Europe, at perestroika and glasnost in the Soviet Union, at reductions in tensions worldwide, they see that the odds of getting new members keep dwindling. Eventually, no new wars will mean no new members.

The American Legion puts its membership at 2.9 million and says its numbers increased in 1989 for the eighth year in a row. The VFW counts just over 2 million and says it has 35 years of consecutive growth. Both groups have men and women as members, and they also have auxiliaries for women who weren’t in the service. Proving there is strength in numbers, pictures of candidates wearing the groups’ caps and surrounded by flags are a staple of presidential election campaigns.

The American Legion figures its Orange County membership at about 8,700 in 25 posts, while the VFW estimates that it has about 3,600 members in the county in 23 posts, according to state headquarters of both organizations.

But officers of both groups in Orange County say that many members belong to both the VFW and the American Legion, and that while the high numbers look fine on paper, the active membership is far less.

Costa Mesa’s VFW Post 3536, for instance, has 165 members, but fewer than a dozen turn out for most meetings. Things are much the same for the American Legion post that meets in the Costa Mesa building, and for other chapters of veterans’ groups around the county.

“Years ago, in the ‘30s, most of the legionnaires, they attended the meetings because there wasn’t a lot of outside activity going on,” said Glen Bender of American Legion Post 181 in Brea. Turnouts are still large in the East, he said, where the posts are often integral parts of a community, especially in small towns.

“But you take out here in California . . . you got your ballgames, you got your mountains, you got your oceans, all kind of theaters, golf tournaments, you got so much going on you just can’t take part in all of it.”

What most of the posts don’t have are Vietnam veterans.

Ted Marinos, commander of VFW Post 3536, said he doesn’t know why the group hasn’t been able to get anyone younger than the late 50s. But he says he has heard “rumors” that the Vietnam vets feel “that they weren’t treated well when they came back” from overseas service.

“They didn’t have a confetti parade or anything. But I didn’t have a parade either. I was in two wars, World War II and Korea.”

Jack Smith, known as “Old Sarge” to just about everyone who walks through the doors of VFW Post 3173 in Anaheim, figures that 25% of the members of his post are World War II veterans, with the remainder split between Korea and Vietnam.

He says the Vietnam veterans “are just realizing we’re not as bad as they thought we were, so they’re starting to join.” And before this? “They just got to the point where they thought the world owed them a living, I guess. They were mad at themselves and everyone else.

“And they thought the old-timers didn’t want them. But we did want them. That’s what we’re trying to do, is get people in here to take our place.”

The replacement by younger men is working at the county’s newest post, in one of the county’s newest cities--Mission Viejo.

Edward Kearns, commander of VFW Post 6024, says the post has 201 dues-paying members, with just over half of them Vietnam veterans.

Kearns said the founders of the post advertised for members in a local newspaper, spread the word through other community groups, got friends to enlist other friends, and in general just ran an aggressive recruiting campaign.

“We go out and talk to them, let these Vietnam veterans know they’re part of our organization,” Kearns said. “A lot are, I don’t know how to put it, well, hurt that maybe they didn’t get treated like they should have. We go out and tell them, ‘Hey, you’re a veteran. We’re all veterans.’ ”

The pitch worked in the case of Tom Ferran.

Ferran, 43, said that VFW membership was a tradition in his family but that when his father bought him his first membership after Ferran got back from Vietnam, he didn’t like the group at all.

“It was full of old guys,” was the reason. “And now, of course, we are the old guys.”

Ferran, a corporate safety manager for Taco Bell, said he thinks one reason for the success of the new post may be its proximity to the U.S. Marine Corps base at El Toro. Ferran was stationed there before leaving the Marines in 1981 after a 12-year career, and he thinks people who settle down near the base after retirement are more likely to join the new post.

He joined, he says, for the camaraderie, in addition to the family tradition.

“It’s a forum for veterans,” Ferran said. “The forum is, we come together as a unit again as we did in the past. And there’s a common denominator, camaraderie, a strong bond between the veterans.”

“Plus, we can really have some great parties,” he laughed.

In fact, the party image is one that has long been a staple of the images of veterans’ clubs. The Newport Beach American Legion post, for instance, has its own marina. The Brea post sports a long bar that hugs the right side of the building on Brea Boulevard. Beer costs a bit more than a buck, booze less than two bucks--a good buy in today’s world.

But the socializing at the bar, at the pool table and at the video poker game doesn’t get in the way of post business.

The veterans’ groups raise funds to buy clothing, toiletries and the like for patients at the Veterans’ Affairs Medical Center in Long Beach. They sponsor baseball teams and oratorical and essay competitions in school. They lobby for veterans’ causes.

And on Memorial Day and Veterans Day, they go all-out to remember the vets.

On the Saturday before Memorial Day, the Brea veterans put crosses and flags on the graves of veterans at Memory Garden Memorial Park and Mortuary in Brea. Women from the VFW and Legion auxiliaries follow up by putting poppies on the crosses.

“It takes about seven hours,” said Glen Bender. The decorators pore over plot maps of the graves, searching for those bearing remains of vets and decorating them with the crosses and small flags.

Soon after dawn on Memorial Day, the VFW and Legion members begin running up the large flags along the roads inside the cemetery.

“These are the casket flags that drape the casket at the service of a veteran, which is presented to the next of kin,” Bender said. Families can turn the flag over to the cemetery, which stores the banners and provides the poles used to fly the flags on Memorial Day and Veterans Day.

The practice started in the late 1950s, Bender said, and “the first year we had six flags. Now we’ve got over 900.” Anywhere from a dozen to three dozen more flags are added each year, as veterans die, are laid to rest, and are removed from the rolls of the VFW and Legion.