Parade Brings Out Red, White, Blue and Green : St. Patrick’s Day: Support for troops home from the Gulf makes the celebration more American than Irish.

The crowd lining Ventura’s Main Street on Saturday wore more red, white and blue than the traditional emerald green at a distinctly American St. Patrick’s Day parade.

Vendors hawked American flags, and heads were covered with military caps, not green felt hats.

Among the 75 parade entries were two battalions of Seabees who served in the Persian Gulf, riding in Navy trucks and a “duck”--an amphibious truck with a front end like a boat. The crowd of about 10,000 people cheered wildly as they drove by, and the men waved and beamed.

This year’s crowd was twice as big as last year’s, parade organizer Jim Monahan said. “Of course, the troops have a lot to do with it,” he said.

“It gives you a tingle down your back,” said Petty Officer Jack Englehard, a member of Naval Construction Battalion 4, which recently returned from Saudi Arabia. The deluge of letters and packages that Americans sent to the troops kept their spirits up and improved their performance, he said. “If we hadn’t had the support we did, I don’t think a lot of us would have come back.”

Aguilar’s Hacienda on Main Street served free drinks all day to uniformed military personnel, bartender Peter Bohnstingl said.

Along with American flags, vendors sold banners pledging support to the troops. “The flags sold really well,” Dwayne Honer said. He sold large flags for $4 and small ones for $2. Another vendor sold $3 flags.

Vietnam veteran Jeff Parker was pleased with the crowd’s reception of the returning military. “It’s too bad it took them one more war to figure out what went wrong,” said Parker, a Seabee who was recalled to active duty from the reserves.

But patriotism didn’t completely overpower the traditional flavor of the day. A flatbed truck carried a group of young students from the Claddagh School of Irish Dancing, who were thumping out sprightly jigs. Shauna and Stephanie Serwe, 9 and 6 respectively, hopped and danced in their traditional embroidered dresses as their parents, Kate and Stephen Serwe of Camarillo, hotfooted after the float to watch them.

And the parade almost had a giant green pig.

Last year, parade organizers had wanted a live pig covered with green food coloring, like the pigs in Irish parades. But animal-rights activists protested, so the grand marshal carried a green toy pig.

This year, the parade committee raised $2,500 to buy a 25-foot inflatable green pig. But the generator that blows up the balloon stopped working as the parade began to move, and the air went out of the idea, committee member Ralph Noll said.

Noll and the other committee members, wearing green satin jackets with shamrocks stitched on the back, said the pig could always be used next year.

The parade included a rumbling line of low-rider cars and trucks, the bass turned way up in many of their stereos. Several of the vehicles had hydraulic shocks, allowing the cars to rock forward and backward to the beat.

A collection of restored Volkswagen Bugs followed, many of them also low-riders.

Gypsy Boots, a rowdy 80-year-old man who dances through parades from Los Angeles to San Francisco, shook a tambourine and a cowbell and skipped along the parade route. “I threw a football 500 feet, I stood on my head, the whole bit,” Gypsy said. And he changed his name for the day to Gypsy O’Reilly.