When Boys Were Men : War: Like other WWII veterans, those who landed on Guadalcanal 48 years ago see it as their duty to keep alive the achievements of their war, despite growing obscurity and shadows of time.

The setting at Jeremiah Collins’ little Costa Mesa outpost couldn’t have been more military gung-ho, more rousingly patriotic, more evocative of a battle-forged camaraderie.

The five World War II Marine Corps veterans were meeting in Collins’ garage, converted into a retired Leatherneck den overflowing with all sorts of banners, posters and other wartime memorabilia.

Overhead, fluttering in the breeze and visible to the whole street, was Old Glory itself, raised dutifully by Collins daily for the last 28 years.

And the men themselves were there to remember once again that day--exactly 48 years today--when they landed on a Godforsaken, Japanese-held Pacific island named Guadalcanal.

Guadalcanal?

It may be forgotten by most in today’s younger generations, but history books tell us that the U.S. victory at Guadalcanal was a World War II turning of the tide, coming eight months after the debacle at Pearl Harbor and two months after the epic defeat of the Japanese fleet off Midway.

But that was too many yesterdays ago.

“Our grandchildren barely know about World War II, let alone a Guadalcanal. I don’t think they’re even being taught about it in the schools,” said Norton Henninger, 68, of Villa Park, who was 20 when he landed at Guadalcanal with thousands of other Marines on Aug. 7, 1942.

But Henninger and the other Orange County veterans--including Ed LeBlanc, 67, and Frank Aiello, 72, both of Costa Mesa, and Norris Cole, 66, of San Juan Capistrano--have learned to live with this type of obscurity.

After all, since 1942 two other wars have come and gone--one of them, Korea, now just as obscure, the other, Vietnam, still shrouded by divisive debate.

So, they said, why get worked up when people ignore a war fought more than four decades ago?

“No big deal. Hell, Guadalcanal was a long time ago, and people have short memories,” said Collins, 67, who was a 22-year career Marine who also served in China in 1946 and in Korea in 1950, where he earned a Silver Star.

Then, before anyone gets the idea that these Marines are getting too soft--or too mellowed with age--Collins, in a barracks-booming voice, added: “But we remember! You can count on that!”

Like other World War II veterans, Collins, Cole, LeBlanc, Henninger and Aiello see it as their duty to keep alive the achievements--and significance--of their war, despite growing obscurity and the shadows of time.

Although they belong to the 3,000-strong Guadalcanal Campaign Veterans Assn.--which includes Army, Navy and Coast Guard members--they seldom make the association’s national or regional reunions.

Most of the time, they gather to shoot the breeze in impromptu mini-reunions at local Veterans of Foreign Wars halls or at their homes, like the visit last week to Collins’ garage museum.

“Look,” Cole said, “most of us aren’t sitting around swapping old war stories. We talk about our families, about trips.

“When it’s about war, it’s about the good times, or what now seem like the funny incidents to us,” said Cole, who retired in 1961 as a gunnery sergeant after 20 years in the Marines.

“We don’t get into the sadder stuff, the grisly memories, unless someone asks us,” added LeBlanc, a businessman ever since his World War II service. “It’s not something you bring up on your own.”

Although all five men were with the 1st Marine Division at Guadalcanal, they didn’t know each other during the war. That does not matter. Their lives are marked by an historic common denominator, an unspoken comradeship. They have Guadalcanal to remember.

“It’s with you all your lives, a wound mentally if not always physically,” said LeBlanc, who, like the four other men, escaped serious injuries in the Guadalcanal and later Pacific campaigns. “You can’t forget--even if, sometimes, you wished you could.”

On the morning of Aug. 7, 1942, flanked by a Navy armada, a 19,000-member Marine force landed--the first units on four small nearby island strongholds, the main force on the 90-mile-long Guadalcanal itself, where the Japanese were completing a key airfield.

To the U.S. high command in Washington and the Pacific, the taking of the Guadalcanal sector was absolutely essential in halting Japan’s seemingly invincible push toward Allied-held Pacific bases and Australia itself.

But that was the big picture.

To the U.S. troops at ground zero, in the oppressively hot Guadalcanal sector, where thousands of Japanese soldiers were holed up in the jungle and ridges, the immediate concern was starkly more simple.

“It was no tropical paradise, believe me,” said Collins, who was with an engineer battalion. “It was a hellhole, a stinking, jungle-rotting island.”

“We were scared the day we landed until the day we left,” recalled Cole, member of an intelligence patrol unit. “We didn’t have enough to eat--except tons of Japanese rice, crawling with vermin. We were short on vital equipment. We were left on our own for months.”

What happened was that the U.S. armada--with much of the troops’ supplies still unloaded--had left after the first landings in the face of a powerful Japanese counterattack by sea. Also, as the Marines moved inland, they met fierce resistance from the Japanese, who were pouring in large numbers of reinforcements.

LeBlanc, a member of a rifle company, said: “We were pinned down by snipers or subjected to those wild, incredible banzai attacks. They kept charging, even though we kept cutting them down.”

LeBlanc remembers this especially horrendous sight: “We were moving forward behind our tanks. The tanks had to go over an area littered with Japanese bodies by the hundreds. The tanks chewed them up, like a meat grinder.”

Nevertheless, the day-and-night bombardment from Japanese ships, artillery and planes seemed ceaseless.

“You couldn’t sleep,” said Henninger, who was a gun-placement crew member protecting the airstrip. “You felt helpless. All you could do was crawl into your dugout or foxhole and just pray.”

When the fighting ended in early 1943, more than 2,100 U.S. troops, including members of Army units, had been killed, according to the Guadalcanal veterans group. Another 4,000 Navy personnel were killed in the sea fighting. The number of Japanese troops killed was estimated at 23,000.

But this was only the beginning for the members of the 1st Marine Division. They went on to other bloody Pacific island campaigns: Cape Gloucester on New Britain in 1943, then Peleliu, an island east of the Philippines, in 1944.

When the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945, and the surrender ceremonies were held Sept. 2 in Tokyo Bay, the five of them--Aiello, Cole, Collins, Henninger and LeBlanc--were back in the United States with units being readied for the expected invasion of Japan.

Except for Henninger, who remembers a big parade and a key-to-the-city ceremony in 1944 in Chicago, there were no big homecomings. However, like all the other military from the World War II campaigns, they were treated as heroes.

“America had been in mortal danger,” Henninger said. “Everyone believed in the struggle, in what we were fighting for.

“America was unified behind us . . . at least, back then.”

To their dismay and disgust, America as a society seemed to fall into disarray in the “shooting wars” that followed: Korea and Vietnam.

“They wouldn’t let us win it,” said Collins, who fought in late 1950 with the 1st Marine Division at the Chosin Reservoir in North Korea, near the China border. “They (civilian authorities) stopped us at the Yalu (River). They didn’t want us to get into China.”

It was far worse when it came to Vietnam in 1960s and 1970s.

“We should have stayed out of Vietnam,” Cole said, “if we didn’t have the stomach to go all the way and win. Instead, in that war it was political bull all the way.”

The way returning Vietnam veterans were treated was “shabby and a disgrace,” LeBlanc said. “People spat on them, tossed tomatoes at them. You had people running around the campuses, stirring up all those protests. Patriotism in this country really went down the drain in the ‘60s.”

However, LeBlanc and the others believe that much of the protests and the “anti-military” attitude had subsided by the late 1980s. Vietnam veterans are now, very belatedly, getting hero treatment.

“Patriotism is now back in style,” said Henninger, another career sergeant, who also served in Korea with the 1st Marine Division. “Well, OK, except for the flag burners. I don’t even mind the flag burners . . . as long as it’s wrapped around them when they burn it!”

Some World War II veterans still feel an unrelenting enmity toward the Japanese.

Henninger said: “We have every right to be so bitter. I was for a long time. We saw a lot of buddies killed--my own brother was lost at Peleliu.

“But you can’t go on hating forever. After all these years, you have to live and let live.”

To Collins and the others, the image of their role in World War II has not changed in the 48 years since Guadalcanal.

They say it has nothing to do with being heroes or wrapped with Hollywood-hyped glory.

“It was our job--as professional fighting men,” said Aiello, looking at the other men seated around him. “It was what we were trained for, and we did it.”

“We were there,” LeBlanc added, “to stop the Japanese, to help save the world and America, and to protect our loved ones. But it was supposed to be the last shooting war, the last time Americans had to go through something like this.”

Of course, it wasn’t.

“We had Korea. We had Vietnam,” LeBlanc added. “Our grandchildren’s generation may have forgotten Guadalcanal, but we hope they’re going to be OK. We hope they won’t have to go and fight another war.”